US warns law enforcement partners of spreading Daesh threat

A picture taken on Nov. 25, 2017, shows the Rawda mosque, roughly 40 kilometers west of the North Sinai capital of El-Arish, after a gun and bombing attack. (AFP)

WASHINGTON:The United States warned judicial and law enforcement officials from around the world of the dangers posed by an increasingly de-centralized Daesh group spreading to new regions.
At a two-day conference in Washington that concluded Wednesday, the US State Department designated seven Daesh-linked groups as terrorist threats -- underlining the reach of the network.
Daesh's former stronghold in its so-called "caliphate" in eastern Syria and northern Iraq has been all but destroyed by US-backed military operations, but the jihadists are adapting.
And, with overt military targets harder to find, the next stage in the fight against the extremists will lean more heavily on law enforcement and civilian prosecution of suspected militants.
"I think what we're seeing is ISIS becoming increasingly decentralized," said the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, Nathan Sales, who addressed the meeting.
"ISIS is evolving and adapting," he said, explaining the decision to blacklist the IS regional groups under separate designations.
"You're seeing groups from all corners of the world motivated by the same bloody and deadly ISIS ideology, using the same sort of techniques targeting innocent men, women and children."
In Nigeria and the Lake Chad region a group that split from the local Boko Haram armed group and led by Boko Haram founder Mohammed Yusuf's son Abu Musab al-Barnawi is now designed as Daesh-West Africa.
In the Philippines, the list now includes Daesh-Philippines and its ally the Maute Group, which triggered the siege of the city of Marawi in May 2017 and has attempted to bomb the US embassy in Manila.
The Daesh-Somalia group began as a small 20-strong splinter from the Al-Shabaab movement under Abdiqadr Mumin and his deputy Mahad Moalim, but has grown in strength and imported arms from Yemen.
Washington is also concerned about the group's growing foothold in the Indian subcontinent, where the now designated Daesh-Bangladesh launched its campaign by killing an Italian aid worker in 2015.
In Egypt, the US terror designations now list Daesh-Egypt as a separate group from Daesh-Sinai province, with both having carried out attacks and the former claiming responsibility for a deadly 2016 church bombing.
The new designations also include Jund al-Khilafa, a Tunisian armed group that has pledged allegiance to Daesh leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The conference was hosted jointly by the State Department, INTERPOL and the International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law.
Washington is also urging reluctant partners such as Britain and France to take custody of their citizens who joined Daesh and were captured in Iraq or Syria and bring them up for prosecution.