ISIS, the jihadist group declared terrorists Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik are martyrs

“We pray to God to accept them as martyrs,” ISIS said in a broadcast on al-Bayan Radio, stopping short of claiming responsibility for the attack.
Officials revealed Friday that Malik posted a “bayat,” or pledge of allegiance, to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi just before the attack. No actual back-end-forth communication between the jihadist group and the hate-filled couple has been disclosed.

Malik’s post, since being removed by Facebook, went up at 11am. Wednesday local time — about the same time the duo opened fire at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, killing 14.

The hubby, Farook, had contact with people from at least two jihadist groups overseas, according to a report.
Farook communicated with the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front in Syria and with al-Shabaab in Somalia, sources said, confirming accounts in the LA Times.
Federal investigators are probing Farook’s phone and social-media activity for terrorism-related communications and have found contacts with at least one person under investigation for terrorism connections, CNN reported. “These appear to be soft connections,” meaning infrequent contacts, an official told CNN.
Farook’s last terrorism-related communication was months ago, the network reported.
“We don’t know yet what they mean,” an official told CNN.

The disclosures offered deepening proof that Farook, 28, and his wife and partner in terror, Tashfeen Malik, 29, were at least inspired by foreign militant groups.
Nerves remained jittery in the Redlands, Calif., neighbourhood where the couple lived with their 6-month-old daughter.
On Friday night, bomb technicians were deployed to inspect a package that was delivered by UPS to the couple’s town house. On Saturday, local police tweeted that the box turned out to be a delivery of clothes from Sears for Farook’s mother.
Neighbours displayed American flags in the fronts of their houses, and passers-by waved still more flags outside their car windows as they drove by the couple’s boarded-up home, reports the New York Post.

A changed woman
In the final few years of Tashfeen Malik’s life, the people around the young woman saw her dress ever more conservatively and urge people ever more ardently to live a devout life.
For an aunt in Malik’s old hometown of Pakistan, Malik’s growing religious focus was one of the last things the aunt heard about her 29-year-old niece — before last week, when the relative learned that her niece and her niece’s husband had donned face masks, hoisted assault rifles and killed 14 people in a rampage in Southern California in the United States.
“I recently heard it from relatives that she has become a religious person, and she often tells people to live according to the teachings of Islam,” recalled aunt Hifza Batool.
Batool spoke in the town of Karor Lal Esan, the home of Malik’s family, 450km southwest of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

Malik’s path from Pakistan to the bloody events of this past week — when she and her husband slaughtered people gathered for a holiday work party — remains a mystery.