iWar by Bill Gertz

Author:Bill Gertz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Threshold Editions

6

ISLAMIC TERROR

When Jihad Johnny Comes Marching Home

The struggle with revolutionary Islam will only be won when the West begins to methodically analyze the ideological religion that empowers it and forms its basis.

—STEPHEN P. LAMBERT, “THE SOURCES OF ISLAMIC REVOLUTIONARY CONDUCT,” 2005

Pakistan-born Tashfeen Malik opened the top of her laptop computer inside the Redlands, California, home where she and her husband lived. It was December 2, 2015, another typically warm and sunny day in Southern California. Around 8:46 a.m. she began searching social media for documents and videos posted by the Islamic State terrorist group. Less than two hours later, around 11:15, Malik posted this message on her Facebook page: “We pledge allegiance Khalifa bu bkr al bhaghdadi al quraishi.” It was a public declaration of jihad—or holy war—in support of the Syrian-based Islamic State terror group leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Minutes earlier Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, a specialist with the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, had opened fire on a group of some eighty people who had gathered for a training event and Christmas Party for employees of the San Bernardino County Environmental Health Department at a state-run nonprofit center. Farook earlier had stopped by the meeting and left a backpack containing several pipe bombs that he had planned to set off during his attack.

Around 11 a.m., Malik and Farook, dressed in all black to hide their identities, burst through the door of the center firing AR-15 semiautomatic rifles. After more than one hundred rounds were fired, fourteen people were dead and twenty-two others wounded.

Several people ran for a door in the large room and another person screamed “Get down!” while others, frozen in terror, just stood there. Survivors initially thought the attack was a training exercise but then realized what was happening and fled the scene.

According to a Justice Department report issued months after the attack, “As the chaos unfolded, a round hit a fire sprinkler pipe causing water to pour out of the ceiling. The water and smoke that filled the room made it difficult for people to see. The shooters walked between tables. If someone moved or made a sound, the shooters fired one or multiple shots into their body.”

Many of the high-velocity .223-caliber bullets passed through the conference room walls, striking one woman, and another woman was shot as she tried to escape through a glass door. The bodies of two people were lying outside the room—the first people killed as the terrorists arrived at the building.

“It was the worst thing imaginable,” one police officer who arrived at the scene recalled. “Some people were quiet, hiding, others were screaming or dying, grabbing at your legs because they wanted us to get them out, but our job at the moment was to keep going. That was the hardest part, stepping over them.”

The first official response was a tweet by the San Bernardino County sheriff at 11:51 a.m.: “ACTIVE SHOOTER: Area of Orange Show Rd/Waterman Ave near Park Center, & surrounding area remains VERY ACTIVE.

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