By Madeleline Longwell
Staff Writer

Since Thursday, ISIS has been identified as the cause of three gruesome attacks.

In Beirut, Lebanon, dozens were killed in a double suicide bombing on Thursday. ISIS, which controls parts of neighboring Syria, claimed responsibility for the deaths of 43 and injuries to more than 200 others.

The attacks in Beirut came less than two weeks after ISIS claimed responsibility for the bombing of a Russian plane flying out of Egypt on Oct. 31.

The third of the three recent attacks came on Friday when coordinated explosions and shootings occurred in Paris. In the Paris attacks alone, 129 were killed. The attacks on France’s capital city came just months after shootings at a kosher supermarket and the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo which sparked debate over counter-terrorism and islamophobia in France.

Since ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attacks that killed more than 350 people in the last month, France and Russia have begun airstrikes on Syria, a large portion of which is now controlled by ISIS.

The attacks on all three nations have raised important questions about the future of ISIS and the countries combatting it.

The Islamic state has been gaining both power and land in recent months it has declared provinces in ten countries since its beginning.

This week, the New York Times reported that since January of 2015, ISIS has likely been responsible for more than 1000 deaths outside of its main areas of control—Iraq and Syria.

As attacks attributed to the Islamic State have increased over recent months, so has a discussion of anti-terrorism policy across western nations.

Specifically in the U. S., presidential candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, have addressed the issue of foreign policy once again. On Friday, after new of the attacks in Paris broke, executives at CBS decided to change the focus of the next day’s Democratic debate to focus more on foreign policy and anti-terrorism efforts.

Early this week, world leaders met in Turkey for the G-20 summit where they addressed international counterterrorism efforts and intelligence information as well as the refugee crisis, which has been affected by recent attacks and the ISIS presence in Syria.