An undated video featuring Islamic State “sappers” instructing sympathizers around the world how to build explosive devices was shared by the organization’s propaganda service on Saturday.
The French-language video (with English and Arabic subtitles), shot in IS’s Syrian capital of Reqqa, lauds the panic that the attacks spread among Europeans. It was removed from YouTube.
“Don’t spare women, children and the elderly,” the narrator says. “With a simple weapon, like a pocket commando knife, you can carry out an attack. It doesn’t have to be big or small. Medium-size. But it has to be sharp.”
The instructor, named as Abu Suliman, shows how to use the knife, advising potential attackers to hit the victim’s neck. He then demonstrated the moves on an “agent of the Crusader coalition,” seen tied up next to him, eventually killing him, while explaining which spots on the human body are most sensitive.
“This is how you should attack your enemy,” he said,” preferably in more than one place.”
Abu Alnur Alshami, another IS militant, demonstrated how “everybody can make an explosive device at home using simple materials.”
A Palestinian jihadi told Breitbart Jerusalem that the release of the video may attest to a “certain difficulty in reaching IS sympathizers in the West, but videos have become a legitimate tool in exercising jihad and recruiting mujahideen. To hit the Crusaders you need more than just warriors from Syria, Iraq, Libya or Yemen.”
The man, whose brother has been fighting with IS in Syria, said:
The organization has been focused on moving the crux of the fighting to the countries of the infidels, where there are thousands of sympathizers, if not more, waiting for an order to take part in jihad. And this video is part of the effort to reach them. Naturally it doesn’t mean that the organization had given up on recruiting mujahideen in Europe, the US and the West, but there are priorities, and our priority at the moment is to dedicate ourselves to the war that’s unfolding in the Caliphate’s territory, but I wouldn’t necessarily assume that the video means that there aren’t sleeper cells that are ready to carry out a large-scale attack. The brothers in the leadership understand more than anybody why they release it and what they try to achieve.