Islamic State urged its followers yesterday to attack citizens of the US, France and other countries which have joined a coalition to destroy the ultra-radical group.
Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani also taunted US President Barack Obama and other Western “crusaders” in a statement carried by the SITE monitoring website, saying their forces faced inevitable defeat at the insurgents’ hands.
The US is building an international coalition to combat the extremist Sunni Muslim force, which has seized large expanses of territory in Iraq and Syria and proclaimed a caliphate erasing borders in the heart of the Middle East. Adnani said the intervention by the US-led coalition would be the “final campaign of the crusaders”.
“It will be broken and defeated, just as all your previous campaigns were broken and defeated,” Adnani said, according to the recording, which urged followers to attack US, French, Canadian, Australian and other nationals.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the group’s call showed once again, “if it needed to be shown, the barbarity of these terrorists, and shows why we must fight them relentlessly...”
US and French warplanes have struck Islamic State targets in Iraq. Washington has also committed $500 million to arm and train Syrian rebels and to send 1,600 US military advisers to Iraq to help fight Islamic State, while stressing the US personnel would not engage in combat.
Adnani mocked Western leaders over their deepening military engagement in the region and said Obama was repeating the mistakes of his predecessor, George W. Bush.
Addressing Obama directly, Adnani added: “O mule of the Jews, you claimed today that America would not be drawn into a war on the ground. No, it will be drawn and dragged... to its death, grave and destruction.”
Obama, who has spent much of his tenure since 2009 extracting the US from Iraq after its 2003 invasion and occupation, is sensitive to charges that he is being drawn into another long campaign that risks the lives of US soldiers.