An ISIS commander in Afghanistan said the terror group is expecting a recruitment boom after the election of Donald Trump.
“This guy is a complete maniac. His utter hate towards Muslims will make our job much easier because we can recruit thousands,” Abu Omar Khorasani told Reuters.
ISIS has not issued any official statements on the election. Trump was not mentioned in the Islamic State’s weekly newspaper last week, al-Naba, nor in the new issue of their monthly magazine, Rumiyah.
They did issue a pre-election voters guide that said both candidates were unacceptable and justified killing anyone, but especially Muslims, who cast a ballot because they were participating in democracy.
Some prominent ISIS supporters on Twitter have hailed the results, with one whose account has been suspended saying “the dog Trump’s victory in the U.S. elections is a gold mine for Muslims not a setback if they know how to use it.”
Another suspended Algerian ISIS supporter named Mohamed Aljazairie tweeted, “Congratulations to the Muslim nation over the infidel Trump’s victory. His stupid statements alone serve us.”
The first official statements about Trump’s victory did come from an Afghan terror group: the Taliban.
“Our message is that he should give U.S. government a policy of not depriving freedom of other nations of the world and should not seek American interests in the destruction and conviction of other nations, so to make the world safer and end the ongoing crisis,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement a week ago.
“Most importantly, he should withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, and unlike other former U.S. rulers, he should neither seek any more titles of ignominy for his self and American generals, nor worsen the American prestige, economy and military by engaging in this futile war,” Mujahid added.
The U.S. military recently said its strikes in Afghanistan target ISIS two-thirds to three-quarters of the time and al-Qaeda the rest. The terror groups had been killing each other but forged a summer truce to focus on the common enemy.
Al-Qaeda also issued a new Inspire magazine over the weekend but did not mention Trump.
The Pakistani Taliban last week called on Trump to “abandon the anti-Islam policy in the name of terrorism” and release “all the Muslim prisoners” especially a U.S.-educated Pakistani neuroscientist dubbed “Lady al-Qaeda.”
The attacks of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have included the failed Times Square car bomb attempt in 2010, the attempted assassination of student activist Malala Yousafzai in 2012, and the 2014 Peshawar school attack in which 132 children and nine staff were murdered. They have also sent fighters to Syria.
“Our war is not against Pakistan or people of Pakistan but against its government and army who has forsaken us from our religious right that is Islamic law,” said TPP spokesman Muhammad Khurasani in the message to Trump. “They are killing us massively and destroying our properties in return for this demand. We are not terrorists but we are fighting our religious war.”
“Pakistan came into being in the name of Islam therefore we want Islamic law in it, which is our very right from every dimension,” Khurasani continued. “America should stop military assistance of Pakistan against us in the name of terrorism.”
Many ISIS members in Afghanistan are former TTP. U.S. officials have said the number of ISIS fighters in the country is difficult to ascertain, but can range from a thousand to a few thousand.
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