July 1, 2015
Brian Fishman, a researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington who previously taught counterinsurgency strategy at West Point, said that the coordination illustrated by the assailants — suicide bombers backed up by direct and indirect fire, well-aimed mortars used in combination with small arms, and simultaneous assaults in many places — was the strongest evidence yet of strategies used by Islamic State jihadists in Syria and Iraq.
“People need to get training or to have a lot of practice to pull that kind of thing off successfully; it is a lot easier said than done,” he added. “The more we see these kind of sophisticated attacks, the more you have to conclude that there is actual learning going on, and potentially direct knowledge transfer by people moving around and providing training in this kind of thing.”