More needs to be done to rein in Daesh

Even the great Napoleon warned that it was dangerous to try and fight two battles at the same time. He stirred up a British-assisted hornet’s nest when he invaded Spain and then Portugal. But then he went on to ignore his own advice. He invaded Russia in 1812, by which time his battle in Spain was actually being lost. It brought about his ruin.
Nevertheless, the fanatical leadership of Daesh seems to have no qualms about fighting multiple battles at the same time. Daesh groups have sprung up throughout the Middle East and North Africa with surprising speed. Some analysts have insisted that these were no more than wannabe terrorists appropriating the Daesh brand name. The analysts’ argument went that there was no central intelligence directing them. Daesh leader Abu Bakr Baghdadi in his Raqaa HQ simply cannot control such a new and disparate network. Had not Osama Bin Laden been tracked down to Pakistan despite his refusal to use telecommunications to run his empire of hatred? In the end his couriers were followed.
Therefore, Daesh in Syria simply could not exert control over its far-flung franchisees. But then we saw a week ago ,on Friday, five bloody attacks in five different countries. The Kuwait mosque bombing killed 27 worshippers and seriously injured dozens more. On a resort beach in Sousse, Tunisia, 39 holidaymakers were gunned down by a local man who had been trained by Daesh in neighboring Libya. In France a man was beheaded and an attempt made to blow up an industrial gas plant in Lyon. In Somalia, 70 African Union troops perished in a Daesh attack. In Syria, terrorists advanced unexpectedly toward the Kurdish town of Kobane. In a nearby village 223 locals were rounded up and executed. Some 23 Kurdish militiamen died fighting the terrorists off. Nearly 400 innocent deaths in a single day. Not bad for an organization supposedly spread too widely to be able to coordinate its operations.
It is in fact clear that Daesh actually keeps an extremely tight control over its brand. And that control can only be exerted through some form of digital communications. No one can seriously claim that couriers set out with memorized messages to trigger last week’s horrific attacks.
Now vast sums of money are spent by the Americans, Russians, Chinese and Europeans on monitoring global communications. Of course there are the challenges of encryption and one-time-only codes. But signals intelligence also monitors patterns and frequencies of messages. In the past, spymasters have warned of the likelihood of an attack, because of increased “chatter” on terrorist networks.
But there has been an unusual silence from the intelligence community this week. Perhaps this reticence is to do with embarrassment. All those billions of dollars-worth of the most sophisticated hardware and software — and they missed all the clues. But perhaps there is another less fathomable explanation.
The attack on the Shiite mosque in Kuwait can now be fitted into a schema. As with the two murderous assaults on two other Shiite mosques in the Eastern Province, stoking tension is the clear aim. The target is not simply the social cohesion in the Kingdom and Kuwait. It is also the unity and prosperity of all Gulf Cooperation Council states.
Who would most benefit from GCC disarray? This week Daesh has announced that it will challenge Hamas in Gaza. A typically sinister video heralded the opening of yet another concurrent battle the terrorists want to fight. Reference was made to the fate of the Palestinians in the once heavily-populated Yarmouk camp on the edge of Damascus.
Daesh grew and flourished within the rotting corpse of Bashar Assad's Syrian dictatorship. The regime actually fostered this through deals with it. As per the agreement, the terrorists were supposed to attack the Free Syrian Army and Assad’s troops would not attack them. Damascus must now be realizing the consequences of this immoral pact with the forces of evil.
But once again,who benefits from the renewal of Palestinian disunity? Who is pleased to watch proud Iraq torn asunder? Who will smile to see Egypt descend into a terrorist bloodbath?
Moreover, there is that crucial issue of the signals intelligence. Who was listening in the days and weeks before last Friday's five horror attacks? Who was listening and why did they say nothing? Why were there no warnings? The lives of 400 ordinary, decent people were snuffed out a week ago today. Their murders were as callous as they were brutally efficient. People other than the demented bigots in Raqaa had to know at least something of what was coming. So why was nothing said?