The Islamic State is promoting a forthcoming sequel to its most infamous movie that threatened America at the beginning of the caliphate, with the new trailer showing fire raining down on several U.S. cities before America is engulfed in a fireball.
ISIS’ official al-Hayat Media Foundation didn’t give a release date for “Flames of War II: Until the Final Hour,” but distributed the trailer extensively across many open media platforms including YouTube and Google Drive.
The teaser begins with a rapid-fire montage of fiery battle scenes that appear to be from Iraq or Syria.
The focus then shifts to the United States, with columns of fire raining down on Los Angeles, Florida, New York, Texas and Nevada, labeled on a U.S. map.
ISIS appeared to be referring to the San Bernardino Christmas party attack in 2015, the 2015 attempted attack at a “Draw Muhammad” event in Garland, Texas, the 2016 Orlando nightclub attack, this Halloween’s Manhattan bike path attack, and the Las Vegas mass shooting at the beginning of October. The terror group continues to claim gunman Stephen Paddock as their own Abu Abdul Bar al-Amriki, yet have not released evidence to back up the claim; authorities have maintained they have discovered no terrorist links as a motive remains elusive.
The video then switches to grainy security camera footage of a 2011 attack on the Minsk Metro, which was erroneously circulated after the 2016 Brussels attack as film from that subway bombing.
A local Fox affiliate clip from the Las Vegas attack is then briefly shown before the U.S. map explodes in a ball of flames.
“Flames of War II” trailer (ISIS video)
The September 2014 ISIS movie “Flames of War,” which was nearly an hour long, concluded with a mass execution: alleged soldiers of the Syrian regime forced to dig their own graves before being killed on camera.
A masked man with a North American accent spoke perfect English, yet also seamlessly transitioned to standard Arabic. At the end, he warned, “The fighting has just begun.”
A month after the video’s release, the FBI issued a bulletin seeking information from the public about the man’s identity. An FBI spokesman noted at the time “that people outside the FBI who have watched the video have observed that he possibly sounds Canadian.”
ISIS has frequently referenced the movie title, including while vowing in the June issue of their English-language Rumiyah magazine (which hasn’t published a new issue since September) that the Manchester concert attack was a teaser of what’s to come as Islamic State territory falls in Iraq and Syria and the terror group continues to “shift its focus towards carrying out attacks on Crusader soil.”
“What many of these analysts failed to admit, however, is that losing territory was nothing new for the Islamic State. The loss of most of its territory in the wake of the Sahwah initiative in Iraq did not lead to its defeat,” stated an article. “Rather, it only led to the Islamic State regrouping, redoubling its efforts, rekindling the flames of war, recapturing every inch of territory it had lost, and expanding into Sham, Sinai, Khurasan, and multiple other regions around the world, regions where no one would have expected that the mujahidin would take control and establish the rule of Allah.”
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