The New Yorker

Does the Manchester Attack Show the Islamic State’s Strength or Weakness?By Robin WrightTen hours after Salman Abedi blew himself up outside the Manchester Arena, where the American pop star Ariana Grande was performing, ISIS claimed a grisly attack that killed twenty-two people and injured dozens more. “With Allah’s grace and support, a soldier of the Khilafah (caliphate) managed to place explosive devices in the midst of the gatherings of the Crusaders in the British city of Manchester,” the group boasted on social messaging apps, in multiple languages. The odd thing—for a group that has usually been judicious about its claims and accurate in its facts—is that it got key details wrong.
The discrepancies were conspicuous—and clumsy. In one early claim, the message referred to a “security detachment,” as if there were multiple operatives. It implied that the attack involved multiple bombs left on site. It missed the fact that a lone bomb had been detonated in a single suicide operation. It did not refer to a “martyr,” as it usually does when perpetrators are killed. It did not name or claim Abedi.

“It looks like the work of ISIS,” a U.S. counterterrorism official told me on Monday, although the British investigation was ongoing. Yet the mistakes also spurred speculation about ISIS’s command of foreign operations, its communications with operatives or sympathizers, and even its access to news, which had already reported the basics of the attack. Just how much has ISIS been disrupted?Read on....http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/does-the-manchester-attack-show-the-islamic-states-strength-or-weakness