In the span of two weeks, Daesh[i] claimed the lives of nearly 400 unarmed civilians of over a dozen nationalities on two continents. The series of assaults in Paris, Beirut, and in the sky over the Sinai desert ran counter to recent assessments and conventional wisdom about the organization. The day when two suicide bombers killed almost fifty in Lebanon, and the day before three teams of terrorists killed almost two hundred in Paris, President Barak Obama assured the world that the threat posed by Daesh had been contained.[ii] Indeed, even a week ago US and British intelligence agencies were only cautiously accepting the claim of responsibility by Daesh for the downing of Russian charter Metrojet Flight 9268 as “possible.”[iii] The core leadership in Syria and Iraq only loosely governed its affiliated “province” in Sinai, and Daesh seemed to be focused on securing and expanding its self-proclaimed “caliphate.”
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