THE series of terrorist attacks in Paris last night, which appear to have claimed the lives of up to 140 people, was the nightmare scenario that Western intelligence and security agencies have been warning against for years. Ever since a commando-style raid by a jihadist group in Mumbai eight years ago that killed 166 people and lasted for four days, there have been fairly regular instances of similar plots either being uncovered or turning out to be false alarms. But as the IRA once grimly warned: “You have to be lucky every time; we only have to be lucky once.”
What has clearly greatly increased Europe’s vulnerability to such attacks is the continuing civil war on its doorstep in Syria and the emergence of Islamic State (IS) as an even more potent magnet for would-be jihadists than al-Qaeda (AQ). While so-called “core” AQ in the badlands of Pakistan’s tribal areas has withered under assault from America’s drones, IS has gone from strength to strength. With its rampage through Iraq last summer, its pretensions to establish a caliphate and its slick exploitation of social media to publicise its successes and brutalities, IS has...Continue reading
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