What Isis wants

It has become commonplace to describe terror attacks as ‘senseless’. The horrific Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka, which cost the lives of more than 350 people, several British citizens among them, make little sense. The only way to understand them is as a symptom of the growing globalisation of terror.

The tactics — synchronised bombs on a Christian holy day — are grotesquely familiar. And it was not surprising to learn that one of the attackers was partly educated in London. The attacks, on three Catholic churches and three hotels favoured by westerners, clearly targeted Christians. The culprits have been identified as local Islamic extremists. The purpose of the attacks, therefore, was to increase tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Sri Lanka used to be well-known for violence. A civil war divided the country bitterly and cost the lives of between 70,000 and 80,000 people. But it was an ethnic conflict between a rebel group of Tamils demanding independence from the majority Singhalese. There was no role for either Muslims or Christians: they are both small minorities in a country which is nearly three quarters Buddhist. The civil war wasn’t about faith; it was about ethnicity.

While Sri Lanka does have a radical Islamic group — National Thowheeth Jamaath, which has been blamed by the Sri Lankan government for the attacks — until now it has limited itself to minor acts such as defacing Buddhist statues. Buddhist targets would in fact make a more natural target for the group’s ire. Last year, a number of Muslim homes and businesses were burned in a spate of attacks by radical Buddhist mobs.

At first, the scale of the Sri Lankan bombings seemed surprising: how could a band of vandals suddenly acquire the means to perpetrate one of the most deadly terrorist attacks of recent years, with nine suicide bombers taking more than 350 lives? The picture became clearer when Isis claimed responsibility for aiding the attacks.