Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday Massacre: Lessons for the International Community

A major terrorist attack does not just kill innocent people in large numbers, it sends out a message through its medium of violence. For instance, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) purposely chose to target the 2019 Easter Sunday festivities in Sri Lanka as if to announce its own ‘resurrection’ after being declared defunct a month earlier by US-led forces, as they captured its last outpost of Baghouz in Syria. The immensity and scale of devastation unleashed by the Easter attacks—one of the worst by ISIS outside Iraq and Syria—claimed nearly 270 lives and injured over 500 people.