Just weeks after fleeing its strongholds of Ramadi and Fallujah, Islamic State (IS) was striking back in Iraq's capital. Two bombs on Sunday claimed more than 143 lives, a reminder scarcely needed that although the organisation may be losing territory – recently it has lost half the ground it controlled in Iraq – its killing capacity endures. Its reach too, as the massacre of 20 in a restaurant in the diplomatic quarter of Dhaka over the weekend testified.
In both cases the militants were, as usual, undiscriminating between civilian and military targets, carefully chosen to raise sectarian tensions or cause economic damage. In Bagdad where many children were among the casualties, IS boasted that it was targeting members of the Shia community as Iraqis joyously marked the end of fasting. The community is already deeply suspicious of what it sees as the government’s failure to protect it.
In Dhaka, IS selected foreign non-Muslims, “crusaders”, as their victims, systematically executing those who could not recite a verse from the Koran and sparing Bangladeshis. Whether this was IS itself or a local group claiming to act in its name, as the government insisted, scarcely matters. In the last two years, 30 have died in a series of killings of those deemed enemies of Islam, a reflection of the growing tensions between secularists and Islamists in a society not long ago seen as a model, moderate Muslim democracy.
It has been a bloody month of Ramadan, supposed to be a time of spiritual renewal, prayer and fasting for the vast majority of Muslims; a time when the faithful are specially rewarded for acts of generosity or charity. A month, however, which IS claims to be particularly propitious for killing enemies of Islam. A spokesman for the Islamic State said in late May that jihadis should "make it, with God's permission, a month of pain for infidels everywhere". "Infidels" broadly defined. And so hundreds have died at their hands in Orlando, Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon, Istanbul and now, during Ramadan's culmination in the Eid holiday, in Baghdad and Dhaka.