Silence is golden, particularly when it involves the Islamic State. But silence can also be deceptive. Its true, the militant group that once threatened to establish a caliphate across Syria and Iraq has lost almost all of its territory. Thousands of IS fighters have been killed, as have many of its leaders.
But the Islamist militancy is a cancer thats hard to stop.
The New York Times recently reported that French and German authorities thwarted terrorist plots to carry out attacks using ricin, the poison made from castor beans. Islamic State militants are also relying on encrypted communications and bitcoin to evade intelligence agencies. And, the Times reported, Islamic extremists are appearing in places that up until now were not known as terrorist havens, like Mozambique and Congo.