Al Qaeda, certainly, played a kind of a coordinating role for organizations of this nature. I believe the consensus view of security experts is that Daesh or ISIL has sought basically to take over al-Qaeda's leadership role as a coordinating intelligence, if you will, with these various streams of jihadist violence.
For example, just this past week, Boko Haram, the vicious jihadist terror organization operating in northern Nigeria that has become notorious for having kidnapped several hundred Christian girls and selling them into sexual slavery, and for bombing dozens of churches and murdering tens of thousands of individuals, issued a statement indicating its affiliation with Daesh, with ISIL.
Similarly, you will recall the grotesque beheading of 21 Coptic Christians on a beach in Libya. When you talk about being close to Europe, that's frankly a day sail from Italy.
We don't believe that the people who committed that act are moving necessarily from Syria into Iraq to Libya, but rather these were jihadists already in Libya, by and large, who essentially are affiliating themselves.
This was the point I made in the answer to the very first question. Daesh, or ISIL, by promoting this idea of the caliphate, has become a very seductive idea to movements and individuals who share these distorted ideas. That's why some of them are seeking to affiliate themselves with ISIL, with Daesh.
In the southern Philippines, in Mindanao, where there has been a long-time insurgency by Islamist groups who, for example, bombed a school bus last December, even some of those Islamist groups have declared their affinity to Daesh.
That's why the fight against this organization in the Middle East has hugely important symbolic and, therefore, strategic implications across all of those countries.