Although details about Syed Rizwan Farook emerged in fairly short order after he and his wife stormed a San Bernardino employee holiday party with assault rifles, murdering 14 and injuring nearly two dozen, information about Tashfeen Malik remained scarce.
All anyone seemed to know was that she was a native of Pakistan and that Farook married her in Saudi Arabia where she apparently lived with family.
The first picture of Malik surfaced on Friday evening.
Initially, Pakistani intelligence wasn’t much help, as Islamabad said the Americans simply hadn’t given them anything to go on and even if they had, their technology was “not sophisticated” enough to do much with it (US taxpayer counter-terrorism dollars hard at work), but on Saturday, the first details began to emerge.
As Reuters reports [4], Malik “was from Karor Lal Esan, a city on the west coast of the Indus River in southern Punjab province.” She had been living in Saudi Arabia with her father for 25 years. Pakistani officials note that “the area in Punjab where she spent her early years and later went to university is a 'recruitment ground' and stronghold of Islamist groups with ties to al Qaeda.”
The LA Times calls [5] Malik's family "educated [and] politically influential." "Residents said the Aulakh family is known to have connections to militant Islam," the paper continues before citing a local as saying that "the family has some extremist credentials," whatever that means.
In any event, when her father moved to Saudi Arabia, “he changed a lot,” Malik's uncle, Javed Rabbani, says. "When relatives visited him, they would come back and tell us how conservative and hardline he had become.” Reuters goes on to say that the Saudi government had no information linking her to terrorist organizations.
On Friday, authorities claimed that Malik posted her allegiance to ISIS leader Bakr al-Baghdadi on Facebook during the course of the attack and while ISIS has stopped short of claiming direct responsibility, they did mention the shooting spree in al-Bayan’s daily news bulletin (which is kind of like a market wrap for terrorists):
[6]
While some news outlets seem to be caught up on the difference between the English language version which calls Malik and Farook “soldiers” and the Arabic version which calls them “followers,” it seems clear that Islamic State is not attempting to take credit for directing or otherwise facilitating the shootings (well, other than encouraging followers to murder people in thousands of propaganda videos). Of course that could change the more we learn about Farook’s alleged communication with “tangential” terrorist suspects.
Whatever the case, it's mission accomplished for the media when it comes to establishing a connection with Islamic fundamentalism and between that and the fact that the two assault rifles were obtained legally, this one checks all the boxes when it comes to sparking a political firestorm. Immigration debate? Check. Gun control debate? Check. War on terror debate? Check.
And that's just what America needs - another tragedy to politicize.
