From ISIS women at Al-Hol Refugee Camp to extensive online propaganda, terrorist groups are promoting the deadly coronavirus as the will of God and hailing the calamity of the disease as divine retribution.
In an interview in which a reporter interviewed ISIS women at the Al-Hol refugee camp in Syria, one of the women who was closely surrounded by other women and by young boys, said that coronavirus has not infected them because they fast, pray, are pious, fear Allah, and follow Islam in the path of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. She emphatically stated that coronavirus does not infect true Muslims, that it infects only infidels and oppressors, and that any Muslims who have died from coronavirus had been infected because they weren’t true Muslims.
In propaganda communiques, ISIS has each claimed that the highly contagious and deadly coronavirus is God’s wrath upon the West, and the disease itself is a “soldier of Allah,” as one ISIS supporter recently said in an online chatroom. Terrorism experts point out that we have heard all of this before. Jihadi groups have a propensity for calling any natural disaster the will of God exacting vengeance on western powers who have been waging war on them for more than two decades. “This is apocalyptic fervor. It plays into their end-of-times rhetoric,” Col. Chris Costa, a retired Army intelligence officer whose career focused on jihadist adversaries, told ABC News. “They are opportunistic and taking advantage of a pandemic by suggesting this is divine retribution. If they can’t beat us on the battlefield they can beat us through God’s vengeance, they believe.”
