A new, highly produced video released by ISIS’ Al-Furat media features a French-speaking jihadist equipped with a suicide belt warning that the worst is yet to come.
The video begins with the televised address of King Philippe of Belgium talking about last Tuesday’s attacks at the Brussels airport and a metro station.
It transitions to shady scenes of an airport with an English-language boarding call to Gate A03 — the only English in the French-and-Arabic video. That’s a gate number used, for one, at the Berlin airport by Air Berlin.
A video released by ISIS supporters last week, with a lower production quality than the al-Furat video, threatened to “invade London, Brussels and Berlin, like we did in Paris before.”
The latest video, titled “Eye for an Eye,” transitions to a press conference with Belgian prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw, then three masked, camouflaged fighters. The one in the middle displays a suicide belt; the camera zooms in on the trigger.
The speaker justifies the terrorist attacks in Europe by claiming that citizens of countries that are involved in the coalition against the Islamic State are responsible for their governments’ actions.
The terrorist vows that ISIS can strike whenever, whomever they wish, and — a recurrent theme in the rash of ISIS videos since Brussels — vows the worst is yet to come.
Footage is also included of late French fighter Abu Tasnim aka Abu Miqdam Al-Faransi. Abu Tasnim, of Haitian origin, appeared in a November video after the Paris attacks, encouraging jihadists to “each one of us keep in mind that martyrdom-seeking operations and operations involving plunging into enemy lines are the optimal actions for Allah…. And to all those weak Muslims who believe that the power of America or France is still meaningful, we tell them that they may have drones, planes and missiles, but we have faith. And it encompasses all, and it destroys it all.”
In the new video, the film then segues to a shadowy man at a computer clicking on a map of Brussels. The shadowy man then suits up for attack, images interspersed with a departures sign and armed airport security.
The departures sign shown — with the date of the Brussels attacks, but at 1:39 p.m. (the Brussels airport attack occurred just before 8 a.m.) — is from Rome’s airport.
Rome is a key target in ISIS’ apocalyptic vision of conquest.
The video then shows a montage of news footage from the Brussels attacks.
“It is you who have attacked us first and he who starts is certainly most unfair,” an Arabic narrator says over the footage with French subtitles. “Rather, you pay the price when you walk in your streets, turning you from fear of Muslims, and you will not be at the same security in your rooms.”
“You pay the price when your present crusade campaign will break and we will attack the heart of your land…. You’ll pay the price and we prepare you, by the permission of Allah, for what will make you very ill.”
(ISIS video screenshot)
(ISIS video screenshot)
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