The Holy Month of Ramadan

"We were in a pool when we heard automatic gunfire. People ran past saying there was an armed man on the beach."
"He was laughing and joking around, like a normal guy. He was choosing who to shoot."

"Some people, he was saying to them, ‘You go away,'. He was choosing tourists, British, French."

British tourist, Tunisia

That was on the beach at the Imperial Harhaba Hotel in Sousse where a gunman dressed as a tourist withdrew a Kalashnikov rifle from an umbrella he had unfurled for the beach, and opened fire on tourists he obviously identified as foreign. Among the dead were tourists from Ireland, Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom. The gunman was quite particular about who was to be shot.

Bodies are covered on a Tunisian beach, in Sousse, Friday June 26, 2015. A young man unfurled an 

umbrella and pulled out a Kalashnikov, opening fire on European sunbathers in an attack that killed 

at least 28 people. (Jawhara FM via AP)

Sunbathers were seen to be desperately running to safety only to be cut down in death. One man vacationing from Wales with his fiance, deliberately screened her as he himself took the shots meant for them both. "He was covered in blood from the shots but he just told me to run away", she later said. What better way to prove one's love before the nuptials? Of a certainty the marriage will now proceed.

"This is worse than terrible" Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi lamented. Tunisia cannot stand up to the Islamic threat on its own, but "we are determined to take the most painful measures to deal with an even more painful scourge", he said. As a symbolic target, it isn't surprising that Tunisia was chosen, the most cosmopolitan of Muslim countries whose 'Arab Spring' was the first and the only success in changing government for the people by the people.

At the Imam Sadiq Mosque in Kuwait City, another atrocity underlining propaganda from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in its promise that the sacred fasting month of Ramadan would be a calamitous one for the world's non-Muslims. In this instance, the 'non-Muslims' targeted were Shiite Muslims, held by the majority Sunnis not to represent true Islam, their mosques a "temple of the apostates".

As they stood in group prayer at the Imam Sadiz Mosque, a man screamed "Allahu Akbar" repeatedly, tripping an explosive that ripped through the rear of the building. "We couldn't see anything, so we went straight to the wounded and tried to carry them out. We left the dead", said 21-year-old Hassan al-Haddad, among the first rescuers to arrive on the bloody scene. "This is a wake-up call to fight harder" against the terrorists said Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sheikh Jaber al-Mubarak al-Sabah.

And in France, Prime Minister Manuel Valls stated his despair: "It’s difficult for a society to live for years under the threat of attack. The question is not… if there will be another attack, but when." Which on the face of it is rather puckishly ironic, given France's insistence among others within the European Union that Israel be more accommodating in its defensive responses, a society that has truly lived for decades under threat of attack, and which has had to cope with the reality of those attacks in a way no other country has ever been threatened.

Still reeling from the Charlie Hebdo attack and the succeeding one on the Kosher Supermarket in Paris, France must now deal with its own Islamic State atrocity. Yassin Salhi, 35, beheaded his 54-year-old boss in the operation of a delivery firm. The decapitated head was pinned to a fence. Islamic flags and Arabic inscriptions were scrawled on the body.

Special forces of France’s Research and Intervention Brigades (BRI) leave the building housing the apartment of a man suspected of carrying out an attack in Saint-Priest near Lyon on June 26, 2015. (AFP PHOTO / PHILIPPE DESMAZES)

The jihadist is being held by French police for causing an explosion at the U.S.-owned Air Products factory in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, 25 miles from Lyon. He drove a delivery van into a warehouse full of gas and chemicals. According to Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, the man had been known for years to security services, but had no criminal record though he had been investigated for links to radical Salafists. 

On the other hand, a co-worker had spoken of him as "a wolf in sheep's clothing", stating that Salhi had discussed Islamic State with him, "not to try to recruit me for anything but simply to ask my opinion." What his own opinion is about ISIL appears obvious enough. France has supplied more would-be jihadis to Islamic State than any other European country. And, despite Tunisia's western face and outlook it too has supplied greater numbers of Tunisian jihadis than any other Muslim country.

The Islamic State released a picture online it says is of the Tunisian gunman who mowed down at least 37 people, most of them tourists, on June 26, 2015 at a beach resort in Sousse, Tunisia. He was named as Seifeddine Yacoubi, 23, from Kairouan, also known as Abu Yahya Qayrawani by IS.