The causes of violence are complex, and reducing them to talking points only adds to the problem, scholars say. But if you want to rally troops to your side, few tools are more powerful than religion, said Michael Jerryson, co-editor of “The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence.”
“If you can turn a battle into good versus evil, or doing God’s will, you will get so much more devotion,” he told CNN. “It’s a calling that invokes more than the mundane; it raises the stakes.”
Experts in religious violence say it’s too soon to tell whether last week witnessed more terrorist attacks than usual. It often takes several months, if not longer, to tally all of the assaults in a given period of time.
Even so, the brazenness of the attacks — a gunman shooting up a cafe and a synagogue in a European capital, ISIS decapitating 21 Christians — makes the past seven days stand out as particularly brutal.
Here are just some of the assaults carried out since last Monday.
Monday
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Sunday
In a new video released Sunday by ISIS, the militant group claims to have beheaded over a dozen members of Egypt’s Christian minority on a Libyan beach.
The video shows jihadists in black standing behind each of the victims, who are dressed in orange jumpsuits with their hands cuffed behind them.
The five-minute video, released by the terror group’s propaganda wing al-Hayat Media, includes a masked English-speaking jihadi who says, “The sea you have hidden Sheikh Osama bin Laden’s body in, we swear to Allah, we will mix it with your blood.”
All the victims are then shoved to the ground and beheaded.
CNN’s Holly Yan, Susanne Gargiulo. Laura Smith-Spark and Aminu Abubakar contributed to this report.
