Report: ISIS Praising Trump Travel Order as 'Blessed Ban'

President Donald Trump's executive order banning travel from seven countries because of their ties to terrorism has plenty of critics in the United States and abroad, but it has at least one unwanted ally: The Islamic State.

Though the terror group itself has issued no official public statement on the Jan. 27 action, its members have been praising it, The New York Times correspondent Rukmini Callimachi reported.

Callimachi is in Iraq, one of the seven majority Muslim countries affected by the ban, and writes on Twitter that regular citizens who helped the United States are being hurt by the restriction, which currently is on hold as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals makes a decision.

ISIS members, however, are calling it "The Blessed Ban," she tweeted, saying it proves their argument "America really does 'hate' Islam."

8. The resident said ISIS has been openly celebrating the ban. They've even coined a phrase for it: الحظر المبارك

Or "The Blessed Ban"

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) February 8, 2017

"Why are they calling it a 'Blessed Ban?' Because ISIS sees this as *their* doing. They succeeded in scaring the daylight out of America," Callimachi quoted a Mosul resident as telling her. "ISIS, according to this resident of Western Mosul, thinks their terror tactic worked. They frightened the most powerful man in the world."

The phrase has a familiar ring, Callimachi noted, pointing out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the spiritual founder of ISIS, called the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies, "The Blessed Invasion."

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