The terrorist threat against Europe is more dangerous than it has ever been.
As I write this article, young jihadis hell-bent on killing innocent civilians are plotting more attacks from inside Europe’s Muslim communities.
But who are they and where will they strike next?
Security agencies across Europe are engaged in a desperate race against time as they struggle to answer both these questions.
The terrible attacks in Brussels last month and Paris last year show how much is at stake.
Remember, the terrorist only has to be lucky once whereas the security services have to be lucky every time.
In Britain, senior spy chiefs have been bracing themselves for the inevitable – an Islamic State cell which has evaded the attentions of MI5 and the police and is free to carry out a terror atrocity on British soil. Last week British counter-terrorism units swooped on five men, all suspected of having links to the Brussels attackers.
The arrests were part of a four-month long investigation into terrorism being directed by IS deep inside Syria. In the last 18 months the security services have thwarted at least seven plots to carry out Syria-linked terrorism in the UK.
In my book “Jihadi John: The Making of a Terrorist” I have tried to explain the enormous challenge facing Britain. Between 2008 and 2010 I met many young Muslim men who were being investigated by MI5 and counter-terrorism police.
One of them was Mohammed Emwazi, named in the media as Jihadi John, who went on to carry out a series of sickening beheadings of Western hostages in the summer of 2014.
When I knew him he was typical of the young men I met who had complained of problems with the state, including alleged harassment by the security services.
I would say that at this time in their lives these men did not pose a terrorist threat to this country.
However, they may have expressed extremist views or had links to terrorist suspects that made them of interest to the security services.
This at least put them on MI5’s radar.
But the recent terror attacks in Europe have proved that many more young Muslim men who end up travelling to Syria and Iraq and returning as terrorists are not known to the security services.
And it is this intelligence gap which is of greatest concern to Western spy chiefs.
Security agencies across Europe are at full capacity as they try to neutralise the terrorist threat posed by jihadist cells sent by the Islamic State to wreak carnage in our cities.
Yet the reassuring presence of thousands of policemen and soldiers guarding transport systems and tourist attractions belies a worrying intelligence gap at heart of the West’s counter-terrorism response.
A failure to uncover the links between the Paris terror network and the jihadists who carried out the suicide bombings in Brussels last month is evidence that the French and Belgian security services are one step behind the jihadists.
And the investigation blunders that followed have raised serious questions about whether these agencies are capable of protecting Europe’s civilian populations from further atrocities.
France has some of the toughest counter-terrorism powers in Europe. But its intelligence gathering was shown to have been woefully inadequate in the wake of the slaughter of the staff working for the Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 and the mass casualties sustained in the November attacks.
While the politicians enacted tough laws to ban the burka and secularise civil life scant attention has been paid to the festering disaffection in Parisian suburbs, or “banlieues,” as they are known, home to a disproportionately high number of immigrants from France’s former colonies. Here unemployment can be four times the national rate and resentment and radicalisation make a happy hunting ground for terrorist recruiters.
November’s attacks, less than a year after the Charlie Hebdo atrocity, caught the French security service completely by surprise, underlining its failure to secure any significant intelligence penetration among these neglected neighbourhoods.
The tragic ramifications of this failure were played out in Brussels when jihadists suspected of belonging to the same terror network took part in the bombings of the city airport and metro.
Several members of the group may remain at large presenting Europe with its greatest terror crisis for many years.
All this proves is that an historic under-investment in intelligence gathering cannot be restored overnight. It is a lesson well learnt in Britain where after the 7.7 terror attacks mounted by home-grown terrorists special efforts have been made to mount very effect intelligence-gathering operations inside Muslim communities.
The threat facing Britain has so far been matched by the British security services but the numbers of individuals who require monitoring is growing all the time. The latest number is around 3,000, a tenth of whom require close surveillance.
MI5 knows that one slip-up in an investigation or one failure to act on a piece of intelligence could lead to catastrophic consequences.
In today’s threat from Islamist terrorists their job has never been more vital.
- Robert Verkaik is the author of Jihadi John: The Making of a Terrorist (Oneworld Publications)
