The Islamic State prominently featured the Ohio State terrorist in their weekly newspaper today along with a call for others to continue jihad on America, highlighting the Orlando nightclub attacker as their ultimate guide.
ISIS released Al-Naba with Abdul Razak Ali Artan on page 3 of the 16-page issue. They used the photo from the Ohio State student newspaper, The Lantern, which accompanied an interview Artan gave as a new student in August.
The photo caption in Al-Naba called Artan a “brother” who was “accepted by Allah.”
The article began by calling the first-year student “one of the Mujahideen of the Islamic State” who “attacked a gathering” at the school, causing “serious injuries.”
Artan drove up onto the curb and struck students and faculty who had exited a building due to a fire alarm. He then got out of his car and started stabbing people with a butcher knife before a campus police officer already near the scene because of the alarm shot him to death. Artan wounded 11 people; none of the injuries were life-threatening.
Al-Naba emphasized that Artan “had been living in America for years” — he moved to the U.S. with his mother and six siblings in 2014, when he started at Columbus State Community College — and said the student’s attack “was carried out in response to calls from the Islamic State to target non-Muslims everywhere.”
The article referenced online postings made by Artan — he reportedly posted a screed against the United States on his Facebook page, decrying the treatment of Muslims around the world and praising late American al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki as a “hero” — and underscored that he “warned of the continuation of mujahideen attacks on America.”
The article concluded by noting “several attacks by state soldiers aimed at American crusaders” over the past several months, “most notably” the attack on “sodomites” at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando by “brother” Omar Mateen.
Most of the issue was dedicated to Mosul battle coverage. There was also an article on understanding how wireless signals are tracked “so as not to be easy prey.”
ISIS originally posted a one-sentence claim of responsibility a day after the Ohio State attack on their Amaq news agency website.
NBC reported that Artan purchased a knife at a Home Depot in Washington, D.C., last week and another knife at a Walmart in Columbus the morning of his Monday attack. In the October issue of ISIS’ Rumiyah, a magazine published in several languages including English, lone jihadists were instructed to conduct random knife attacks and warned to pick a suitable blade: “It is explicitly advised not to use kitchen knives, as their basic structure is not designed to handle the kind of vigorous application used for assassinations and slaughter,” the article stated, further advising “to avoid troublesome knives, those that can cause harm to the user because of poor manufacturing.”
Rumiyah is geared toward cultivating global jihadists, while al-Naba focuses on activities in ISIS provinces for members living within the region. Al-Naba is also distributed online in PDF form.
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