As protests spill across the United States, Islamic State and Indonesian militants are celebrating what they describe as “God’s punishment” for a country they view as an enemy, a former militant says. For nearly two weeks, the US has been engulfed in demonstrations, looting and arson following the death of black American George Floyd , who died on May 25 after a white policeman knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. US President Donald Trump has threatened to deploy the military to quell the nationwide unrest. America’s rage evokes chaos of Hong Kong protests, but how do they compare? “[The militants] are very pleased … the chaos and losses in the US make them very happy,” said Sofyan Tsauri, a former senior figure in al-Qaeda’s Southeast Asian network. “The US is their enemy and they see their enemy as being destroyed. Secondly, discrimination is not part of the teachings of Islam,” said Sofyan, who spent five years in jail for helping to arm terror groups. He was released in 2015 and now supports Indonesia’s counterterrorism effort by sharing his knowledge at seminars. On Facebook posts seen by This Week in Asia , an alleged member of Jemaah Ansharut Daulah, the Indonesian affiliate of Isis, shared videos of the US protests with the captions “Good job bro” and “Good news. The ‘Trumpet’ family flees”. “Any incidents that bring about losses for America will make them happy,” said Yudi Zulfahri, a former militant jailed for taking part in a paramilitary training camp. He is now director of a deradicalisation organisation called Establish Peace. Second-degree murder charge added against officer in Floyd death Isis, in the latest edition of its weekly Naba magazine published on Thursday, said the US protests were like a “natural disaster” brought about by the injustices it had committed against its citizens. It also said the coronavirus pandemic showed the US was not invincible. “The USA thinks it is invincible but the coronavirus has hit them the hardest. God serves USA with punishment,” said Naba. According to Nico Prucha, an Isis expert and private consultant, the terror group sees the events as weakening the US, but it will not take advantage of the chaos to strike the country. The US is not a core target for Isis, Prucha said. Rather, it focuses on Iraq, Syria, Yemen, the Sahel, Yemen, West Africa and Southeast Asia. “That is the core of its operations. Any attack in the US, China, Russia and Europe is a bonus and a big win,” said Prucha, but most commentators focus on these areas and “completely miss the point of Isis targeting the core areas”. Terror attacks feared as Chinese workers return to Indonesia In April, Philippine troops clashed with some 40 militants from the pro-Isis Abu Sayyaf Group in the country’s southern island of Mindanao, leaving 11 soldiers dead and 14 others wounded. It was one of the fiercest gunfights in recent months and raged for almost an hour in the forested mountains in Sulu province before the fighters withdrew. In May, CNN reported that Isis had increased its attacks after Iraq diverted its security forces to enforce curfews aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus. Zachary Abuza, a professor at the Washington DC-based National War College, said Islamist militants around the world were “delighting” in the conflagration that the US was seeing right now. “With the highest Covid-19 rates in the world, nationwide protests condemning police brutality, and an appalling lack of mature leadership that has any interest in uniting the country, enemies of the United States are delighting in this moment,” said Abuza, who specialises in terrorism and Southeast Asia studies. As of Friday, the US had 1.87 million coronavirus infections and more than 108,000 deaths. However, there was no evidence of any heightened threat of a foreign terrorist attack, Abuza said, with US national security efforts still doing their jobs and international travel restricted amid the pandemic. “Besides, what good would an attack serve them? It would only unify Americans, at a point when we’ve never been so divided,” said Abuza. Why K-pop artists are supporting the Black Lives Matter movement Abuza said the “real threat of terrorism” in US came from the very large and radical extremist right wing and there was “a real concern” they would stage an attack in an attempt to “false flag”, meaning to attribute it to anti-government and anti-police protesters. “There is a far right-wing movement that has been on the margins of many of the protests whose goal is to incite the next Civil War. There have already been arrests of this nature,” said Abuza. “Domestic, not foreign terrorism, is the most immediate threat to the US.”