From The Rise and Fall of the Baghdadid Caliphate, by Lolo Long, and Sword of Jesus: The Rise of Christian Extremism in the United States, by Edith Janko:
…The 11 July 2015 Yorba Linda bombing made the Caliphate suddenly aware of the existence of the Crusade of God, an organization the existence of which they had not previously been aware of. The immediate reaction in the upper echelons of the Caliphate was of shock and anger that an organization with an ideology diametrically opposed to theirs had managed to create nearly as much damage and disruption and garner just as much attention as all the Caliphate’s efforts in North America thus far, despite both being considerably smaller than the Caliphate and being destined, in the Caliphate’s eyes, to burn in hell for all eternity…
...Baghdadi resolved almost immediately to crush this group of “infidel idol-worshippers born of the Devil’s loins”, as he called them (though in Arabic, of course, not English), and examination of captured accounting and inventory rolls show that large numbers of fighters and a considerable quantity of weaponry (mostly small arms and unarmed explosives but also containing scattered examples of heavier weapons) were transferred into the United States through the late summer of 2015…
…The Crusade, meanwhile, was enduring a heavy crackdown by U.S., Canadian, and Mexican police; the police departments involved in the Battle of East L.A. (the police nickname for local law enforcement’s attempts to engage the Crusaders fleeing after the Yorba Linda bombing despite bringing insufficient force to bear, resulting in the deaths of 32 police officers and 6 Border Patrol agents; the fugitives managed to escape into Mexico before being finally hunted down and killed by units of the Mexican Army) had been subjected to a thorough housecleaning as a result of their botching of the whole affair, and were now becoming considerably more effective in their engagements with Crusader cells, while even departments uninvolved in the fiasco took notice and set to work making sure none of their men would be massacred in such a way. Five cells were raided and destroyed in the month following the Yorba Linda bombing, one of them (this one in Tacoma, Washington) while attempting to carry out its own attack (a neighbor observed them loading explosives into a truck and gave the license plate number to police, allowing them to corner it on the highway and open fire from a distance, resulting in the deaths of the perpetrators and the disarming of the bomb, while the rest of the cell was taken into custody soon afterwards). Another Crusader bomb, in San Francisco, was disarmed before it could detonate. While two successful attacks did occur in late July and early August (a strip club in Covington, Kentucky was attacked by two masked men who forced their way in and then machine-gunned the employees and patrons, and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brainerd, Minnesota was bombed by a woman who left a handbag in the reception area stuffed to the gills with gelignite), police departments around the country believed that they were putting the squeeze to the Crusade and sending them scurrying for cover - and they were right about this, given that on 22 August, leader Patrick Mellitone ordered the remaining attack cells to go to ground…
…Baghdadi did not know and could not possibly have known about Mellitone’s dormancy order, and even if he had, he would still undoubtedly have pressed the attack, given the complete and utter incompatibility of their ideology with his own. It did pose problems for the Caliphate’s North American units, however, as though his forces did not know about the dormancy order, they could hardly have not noticed that the Crusader cells were quite hard to crack open. Had they been working with the American police, they would have known about the latter’s correct inferences that Mellitone had issued some kind of order to go to ground, but this obviously did not take place, and, therefore, as the Caliphate had not switched over from moving men into the continent wholesale to actually finding and targeting the cells until after the dormancy order was issued, they knew only that they would have to rely on what was already out there in order to find the Crusader cells…
…Had the Caliphate not counted among its ranks more than a few experienced software engineers and skilled crackers, they might never have successfully attacked the Crusade whilst it still remained dormant, but as it was, on 15 September, they pinpointed the location of the Tampa Bay cell of the Crusade, and sent two attack teams into the area to prepare to strike…
...On the last day of September, the Caliphate’s men were in place and ready, and communicated this fact directly to Baghdadi via pirate shortwave radio on an unused channel. He responded quickly and simply: “Aldhhab” (“Go”). The next day, after a quick breakfast and presumably morning prayers, the two teams rendezvoused, proceeded to outside the rented house where the Crusader cell had their base, and kicked in the door. The battle was short, brutal, and one-sided; in under three minutes, eight of the ten Crusaders, caught completely by surprise and several still eating breakfast, had been shot dead by the eighteen Caliphate men. Only two Crusaders had even had time to attempt to fight back; they had been exercising in the basement, and ran to the guns stashed underneath the basement stairway. By the time they had grabbed weapons, Caliphate men were already at the top of the stairwell, and they shot one of the two dead as he attempted to load. The other grabbed three magazines and clicked one into his rifle as he ran for cover, and actually succeeded in getting off a few shots, one of which hit and wounded a Caliphate fighter. Unfortunately, his choice of cover turned out to be the house’s furnace, and within seconds a Caliphate bullet ripped open a stem line and parboiled the Crusader in scalding-hot steam. After pumping a few bullets into his corpse just to make sure, the fighters withdrew, taking the two remaining Crusaders with them as hostages, and none too soon, either; under a minute after they fled out the back door, the police turned up in front, sirens wailing, only to find a house filled with corpses…
...Late that night, the Tampa fire department responded to a report of a vacant building burning; by the time they got there, it was fully engulfed. Vacant buildings are not typically given as much attention by fire crews as occupied buildings, due to their usual lack of people inside in need of rescue, but when they picked through the wreckage of the burnt-out building on the morning of 2 October, they found, to their horror, two charred corpses in fairly close proximity. Examination of dental records would eventually prove their identity beyond any doubt, but long before then, a videotape was delivered anonymously to CNN, who showed it in a special breaking-news segment; it showed the masked Caliphate fighters taunting the Crusade of God and physically and verbally abusing their two Crusader hostages before dousing them both in gasoline and setting them alight…
…Mellitone was enraged, and immediately issued new orders which in essence declared an open season on the Caliphate. Soon, a Crusader cell attacked Caliphate fighters in Richmond, giving them something of a taste of their own medicine when they shot down all but one of them, castrating the last Caliphate fighter and cutting his throat before stuffing his genitalia into his mouth, taking a picture of the corpse, and mailing it to ABC with the words Bow before the wrath of God, Caliphate heathens scrawled across the top in red Sharpie…
…From this point onwards, the conflict took on the character of your typical gang war, and its newfound overtness made it that much easier for the police to track down and eliminate both sides’ cells, though it remained quite tricky in absolute terms. Nevertheless, by May 2016, Mellitone was caught between a rock and a hard place; if he continued to fight, the Crusade would be whittled down to nothing before very long, especially since recruitment had all but stopped once the police were onto them (although several attacks by sympathizers of the Crusade did occur, these copycats were not under Mellitone’s control and as such could not be relied on to play the parts he would have needed them to play in his grand strategy; only one of these sympathizer cells had actually managed to establish contact with him and integrate into the Crusader command structure, a far cry from the numbers he was losing in the ongoing fight), but if he went to ground again, he ran the risk of his cells still being found and destroyed by the Caliphate, who knew their approximate locations by now and would have much less trouble finding them than they had had originally. After some hard thinking, he finally came up with a third option: the cells would cease attacks, but instead of simply going to ground and retreating into their shells, they would uproot en masse and migrate to areas where the Caliphate was thin on the ground. Only then would attacks resume. The plan worked, and both the police and the Caliphate suddenly ran into much more trouble trying to find the cells…
…After three months of silence, Mellitone cautiously gave three of the remaining 32 cells the order to reactivate. One was in Toronto and left a backpack bomb on a busy street corner downtown, killling 5 and wounding 58, one had relocated to Sinaloa in Mexico and become integrated with the drug cartels there (they would eventually take over the Sinaloa drug trade from the inside) and as such did not respond to Mellitone’s orders, and the third had transplanted itself to London. The last of these would become more infamous by far than either of the other two, for on 30 July 2016, they crashed a truck bomb through the roadblocks protecting the U.S. Embassy and detonated it, heavily damaging the front of the Embassy and killing 32 people immediately. The death toll was soon to grow immensely, as over six hundred British civilians in the surrounding area sickened and died over the coming days, bringing the final death toll to 685. Strangely, only two of the people staffing the embassy itself succumbed to the illness, both of them having weakened immune systems (one of them was infected with the HIV virus, while the other was taking immunosuppressants to prevent the rejection of a kidney transplant). The cause of the mysterious illness was finally identified in mid-August, when samples of the victims’ lung tissue, as well as samples taken from the scene itself, tested positive for the extremely potent toxin ricin, found in the pulp of castor beans; the reason why only two embassy personnel had died from it, as compared to over six hundred Britons, was that the United States had instituted mandatory vaccination against ricin and the related abrin three years prior, as required by the Lynch-Baca-Wilson Act, as soon as the first safe and effective vaccines against them finished Phase III clinical trials, and Acambis’s ricin vaccine, trade name Ricinix, proved extremely effective indeed...
…The 11 July 2015 Yorba Linda bombing made the Caliphate suddenly aware of the existence of the Crusade of God, an organization the existence of which they had not previously been aware of. The immediate reaction in the upper echelons of the Caliphate was of shock and anger that an organization with an ideology diametrically opposed to theirs had managed to create nearly as much damage and disruption and garner just as much attention as all the Caliphate’s efforts in North America thus far, despite both being considerably smaller than the Caliphate and being destined, in the Caliphate’s eyes, to burn in hell for all eternity…
...Baghdadi resolved almost immediately to crush this group of “infidel idol-worshippers born of the Devil’s loins”, as he called them (though in Arabic, of course, not English), and examination of captured accounting and inventory rolls show that large numbers of fighters and a considerable quantity of weaponry (mostly small arms and unarmed explosives but also containing scattered examples of heavier weapons) were transferred into the United States through the late summer of 2015…
…The Crusade, meanwhile, was enduring a heavy crackdown by U.S., Canadian, and Mexican police; the police departments involved in the Battle of East L.A. (the police nickname for local law enforcement’s attempts to engage the Crusaders fleeing after the Yorba Linda bombing despite bringing insufficient force to bear, resulting in the deaths of 32 police officers and 6 Border Patrol agents; the fugitives managed to escape into Mexico before being finally hunted down and killed by units of the Mexican Army) had been subjected to a thorough housecleaning as a result of their botching of the whole affair, and were now becoming considerably more effective in their engagements with Crusader cells, while even departments uninvolved in the fiasco took notice and set to work making sure none of their men would be massacred in such a way. Five cells were raided and destroyed in the month following the Yorba Linda bombing, one of them (this one in Tacoma, Washington) while attempting to carry out its own attack (a neighbor observed them loading explosives into a truck and gave the license plate number to police, allowing them to corner it on the highway and open fire from a distance, resulting in the deaths of the perpetrators and the disarming of the bomb, while the rest of the cell was taken into custody soon afterwards). Another Crusader bomb, in San Francisco, was disarmed before it could detonate. While two successful attacks did occur in late July and early August (a strip club in Covington, Kentucky was attacked by two masked men who forced their way in and then machine-gunned the employees and patrons, and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brainerd, Minnesota was bombed by a woman who left a handbag in the reception area stuffed to the gills with gelignite), police departments around the country believed that they were putting the squeeze to the Crusade and sending them scurrying for cover - and they were right about this, given that on 22 August, leader Patrick Mellitone ordered the remaining attack cells to go to ground…
…Baghdadi did not know and could not possibly have known about Mellitone’s dormancy order, and even if he had, he would still undoubtedly have pressed the attack, given the complete and utter incompatibility of their ideology with his own. It did pose problems for the Caliphate’s North American units, however, as though his forces did not know about the dormancy order, they could hardly have not noticed that the Crusader cells were quite hard to crack open. Had they been working with the American police, they would have known about the latter’s correct inferences that Mellitone had issued some kind of order to go to ground, but this obviously did not take place, and, therefore, as the Caliphate had not switched over from moving men into the continent wholesale to actually finding and targeting the cells until after the dormancy order was issued, they knew only that they would have to rely on what was already out there in order to find the Crusader cells…
…Had the Caliphate not counted among its ranks more than a few experienced software engineers and skilled crackers, they might never have successfully attacked the Crusade whilst it still remained dormant, but as it was, on 15 September, they pinpointed the location of the Tampa Bay cell of the Crusade, and sent two attack teams into the area to prepare to strike…
...On the last day of September, the Caliphate’s men were in place and ready, and communicated this fact directly to Baghdadi via pirate shortwave radio on an unused channel. He responded quickly and simply: “Aldhhab” (“Go”). The next day, after a quick breakfast and presumably morning prayers, the two teams rendezvoused, proceeded to outside the rented house where the Crusader cell had their base, and kicked in the door. The battle was short, brutal, and one-sided; in under three minutes, eight of the ten Crusaders, caught completely by surprise and several still eating breakfast, had been shot dead by the eighteen Caliphate men. Only two Crusaders had even had time to attempt to fight back; they had been exercising in the basement, and ran to the guns stashed underneath the basement stairway. By the time they had grabbed weapons, Caliphate men were already at the top of the stairwell, and they shot one of the two dead as he attempted to load. The other grabbed three magazines and clicked one into his rifle as he ran for cover, and actually succeeded in getting off a few shots, one of which hit and wounded a Caliphate fighter. Unfortunately, his choice of cover turned out to be the house’s furnace, and within seconds a Caliphate bullet ripped open a stem line and parboiled the Crusader in scalding-hot steam. After pumping a few bullets into his corpse just to make sure, the fighters withdrew, taking the two remaining Crusaders with them as hostages, and none too soon, either; under a minute after they fled out the back door, the police turned up in front, sirens wailing, only to find a house filled with corpses…
...Late that night, the Tampa fire department responded to a report of a vacant building burning; by the time they got there, it was fully engulfed. Vacant buildings are not typically given as much attention by fire crews as occupied buildings, due to their usual lack of people inside in need of rescue, but when they picked through the wreckage of the burnt-out building on the morning of 2 October, they found, to their horror, two charred corpses in fairly close proximity. Examination of dental records would eventually prove their identity beyond any doubt, but long before then, a videotape was delivered anonymously to CNN, who showed it in a special breaking-news segment; it showed the masked Caliphate fighters taunting the Crusade of God and physically and verbally abusing their two Crusader hostages before dousing them both in gasoline and setting them alight…
…Mellitone was enraged, and immediately issued new orders which in essence declared an open season on the Caliphate. Soon, a Crusader cell attacked Caliphate fighters in Richmond, giving them something of a taste of their own medicine when they shot down all but one of them, castrating the last Caliphate fighter and cutting his throat before stuffing his genitalia into his mouth, taking a picture of the corpse, and mailing it to ABC with the words Bow before the wrath of God, Caliphate heathens scrawled across the top in red Sharpie…
…From this point onwards, the conflict took on the character of your typical gang war, and its newfound overtness made it that much easier for the police to track down and eliminate both sides’ cells, though it remained quite tricky in absolute terms. Nevertheless, by May 2016, Mellitone was caught between a rock and a hard place; if he continued to fight, the Crusade would be whittled down to nothing before very long, especially since recruitment had all but stopped once the police were onto them (although several attacks by sympathizers of the Crusade did occur, these copycats were not under Mellitone’s control and as such could not be relied on to play the parts he would have needed them to play in his grand strategy; only one of these sympathizer cells had actually managed to establish contact with him and integrate into the Crusader command structure, a far cry from the numbers he was losing in the ongoing fight), but if he went to ground again, he ran the risk of his cells still being found and destroyed by the Caliphate, who knew their approximate locations by now and would have much less trouble finding them than they had had originally. After some hard thinking, he finally came up with a third option: the cells would cease attacks, but instead of simply going to ground and retreating into their shells, they would uproot en masse and migrate to areas where the Caliphate was thin on the ground. Only then would attacks resume. The plan worked, and both the police and the Caliphate suddenly ran into much more trouble trying to find the cells…
…After three months of silence, Mellitone cautiously gave three of the remaining 32 cells the order to reactivate. One was in Toronto and left a backpack bomb on a busy street corner downtown, killling 5 and wounding 58, one had relocated to Sinaloa in Mexico and become integrated with the drug cartels there (they would eventually take over the Sinaloa drug trade from the inside) and as such did not respond to Mellitone’s orders, and the third had transplanted itself to London. The last of these would become more infamous by far than either of the other two, for on 30 July 2016, they crashed a truck bomb through the roadblocks protecting the U.S. Embassy and detonated it, heavily damaging the front of the Embassy and killing 32 people immediately. The death toll was soon to grow immensely, as over six hundred British civilians in the surrounding area sickened and died over the coming days, bringing the final death toll to 685. Strangely, only two of the people staffing the embassy itself succumbed to the illness, both of them having weakened immune systems (one of them was infected with the HIV virus, while the other was taking immunosuppressants to prevent the rejection of a kidney transplant). The cause of the mysterious illness was finally identified in mid-August, when samples of the victims’ lung tissue, as well as samples taken from the scene itself, tested positive for the extremely potent toxin ricin, found in the pulp of castor beans; the reason why only two embassy personnel had died from it, as compared to over six hundred Britons, was that the United States had instituted mandatory vaccination against ricin and the related abrin three years prior, as required by the Lynch-Baca-Wilson Act, as soon as the first safe and effective vaccines against them finished Phase III clinical trials, and Acambis’s ricin vaccine, trade name Ricinix, proved extremely effective indeed...
