The 15 people killed, including six children in Sri Lanka on Friday when suspected Islamist militants blew themselves up in a police raid, shows that the country is far from out of the woods following last week's bomb attacks that killed at least 250 people. Security forces have carried out raids across the country since the attacks, detaining 80 so far and hunting for 70 others but officials say there are 130 suspects linked to Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) still at large in the country. Authorities have warned there could be more attacks targeting religious centers. Meanwhile, Sri Lankan authorities have been attempting to root out "sleeper" cells that could initiate another round of attacks. This puts paid to Donald Trump's assertion that Daesh has been defeated. They might have fallen in Syria and Iraq but the remainder have fled and they still boast recruits and sympathizers all over the world, in this case striking a country ill-prepared to safeguard their Christian minority and foreigners and taken completely by surprise. Or perhaps the attacks were not that surprising after all. Sri Lanka's national leadership has come under heavy criticism for failing to heed warnings from Indian intelligence services - at least three in April alone - that an attack was pending. Sri Lanka's Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said that crucial intelligence warnings had not been passed on to him. If that was not bad enough, President Maithripala Sirisena said that top defense and police chiefs had not shared information with him about the impending attacks. Sirisena blamed Wickremesinghe's government for weakening the intelligence system by focusing on prosecution of military officers over alleged war crimes during a decades-long civil war with Tamil separatists that ended in 2009. Whatever the reason, there has been a colossal breakdown in communications between the two top people in the Sri Lankan government, who both make the extraordinary claim they were told nothing about the impending attack. The pair are apparently not even on speaking terms after Sirisena fired Wickremesinghe in October over political differences, only to reinstate him weeks later under pressure from the Supreme Court. This is not to say that even if there were good coordination within the Lankan government that the attacks would not have happened. Sri Lanka's police chief and top Defense Ministry official both resigned over the bombings but higher heads should roll as well. One of the unfortunate fallouts from the attacks in Sri Lanka has befallen the Muslim community. Muslims were urged to pray at home on Friday after the State Intelligence Services warned of possible car bomb attacks, and many mosques were closed amid fears of retaliatory violence. Many have fled their homes amid bomb scares and security sweeps. Some 600 Muslims fled the area as the most recent raid unfolded and took shelter in a school under guard by security forces. It is unacceptable that Muslims fearing revenge attacks are unable to go to a mosque for Friday prayers. It is also unacceptable that an entire religion is once again being besmirched by a few renegades who have a completely wrong understanding of Islam. Countries that have experienced terrorist attacks like Sri Lanka move on quickly once the shock and the headlines fade. Not so Lanka. The government says to expect a house-to-house search for terrorists. In a country of 22 million, that task, with all its upcoming revelations, will take months. The defeat of the Tamil Tigers which ended a 25-year civil war probably led Sri Lanka to assume that the terrorist threat had receded. No one thought about the possibility of terrorism coming from other sources. That has changed dramatically.
