The father-and-son gunmen who killed 15 people on Sydney’s Bondi Beach had homemade Islamic State group flags and traveled to a Philippines region known as a hotspot for extremist groups.
IS is a shadow of its mid-2010s heyday, when it controlled much of Iraq and Syria, but remains a threat, The Telegraph reported.
Islamist attackers in Canada and the UK this year both pledged allegiance to IS, and there are signs that affiliated groups are exploiting a post-Assad vacuum in Syria: The organization claimed responsibility for the killing of two US soldiers and a civilian interpreter on Saturday. There is little overall coordination, but IS leadership can claim incidents like Bondi as a “block in the rebuilding of the caliphate.”