• “Enough is enough”: Theresa May

    Prime Minister Theresa May has warned that there has been “far too much tolerance of extremism” in the United Kingdom, and vowed to step up the fight against Islamist terrorism after the London Bridge attack. “Enough is enough,” she said. May said the recent wave of attacks showed the United Kingdom was “experiencing a new trend in the threat we face.” She continued: “As terrorism breeds terrorism and perpetrators are inspired to attack, not only on the basis of carefully constructed plots after years of planning and training, and not even as lone attackers radicalized online, but by copying one another and often using the crudest of means of attack.”

  • Eight minutes on London Bridge: years of training led to lightning police response

    Eight minutes. That is the length of time from the start of the London Bridge attack to the three terrorists being killed by armed police. The Metropolitan Police Service is rightly being heralded for the speed, courage and effectiveness of its members in ending a terrorist atrocity. But the success in their response which prevented more people from being injured and killed is, besides individual bravery, about learning from previous terrorist attacks, training, and resources. The terrorism situation in the United Kingdom is clearly in flux. At the moment, the only pattern when it comes to terrorist attacks is that there is no pattern. Nonetheless, members of the police will continue to prepare to deal with worst-case scenarios, based on previous attacks, that they hope will never materialize.

  • Diplomat: Hezbollah is now more powerful than most NATO members

    The Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah is “now more militarily powerful than most North Atlantic Treaty Organization members,” a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations says. In violation of UN Resolution 1701, which was adopted to end the 2006 Lebanon War, Hezbollah has acquired an estimated 150,000 missiles — more than the combined arsenals of 27 NATO nations — with a range capable of striking “anywhere in Israel” and the ability to “launch 1,500 of them a day,” Ron Prosor wrote.

  • The Islamic State group has weaponized children

    In claiming responsibility for the attack in Manchester at an Ariana Grande concert on 22 May, the Islamic State group has sunk to a new low. As shocking as this attack was, it follows a tradition in which terrorists target children or venues specifically to maximize killing the greatest number of young people. Moreover, the average age for IS suicide bombers and executioners is skewing younger and younger, and they appear to be normalizing the use of children across its affiliates. For example, the terrorist group Boko Haram has used children against soft targets, civilians and marketplaces. IS has gone from using children to inspire adults, to manipulating children and their parents to fight alongside adults, to targeting children instead of adults. They do not consider what they have done to be truly evil, although we know it to be.

  • Terrorism worldwide at all-time high

    Worldwide terrorism is at an all-time high, with the cost of violence to the global economy rising to $14.3 trillion last year. The impact of violence in the United States reached $2.5 trillion. Worldwide, deaths from terrorism increased by 80 percent from last year. The intensity of terrorism also increased, with eleven countries last year losing more than 500 people each to terrorist acts. Only five countries experienced that kind of death toll the year before. The majority of terrorist activity was concentrated in five countries: Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria.

  • Germany failing to use language and dialect recognition tech to ID asylum-seekers, extremists: Critics

    Critics in Germany say that the country’s immigration agency has failed to use a language recognition software which would have helped immigration agents identify the country of origin of asylum-seekers who have no other ID documents. German authorities could have also identified Islamist and far-right terror suspects earlier if available language recognition software was used, these critics say.

  • French units in Iraq hunt down, kill French jihadists to prevent them from returning to France

    France is giving Iraqi forces fighting ISIS specific information about French jihadists in ISIS ranks so the Iraqi military could target and kill them. Small units of French special forces operating in Iraq are looking for these French nationals, and the French have enlisted the help of Iraqi units in this effort. The goal is to make sure that these French nationals do not come back to France to pose a terror threat there.

  • Six reasons why stopping terrorism is so challenging

    Based on my work in the field, six issues stand out to me as major challenges for developing effective policy on countering terrorism: 1) For most places and times, terrorism is an incredibly rare event; 2) While terrorism is rare, mass casualty attacks are even rarer; 3) A growing number of terrorist attacks are being foiled as plots; 4) Terrorist organizations are extremely diverse which makes generalizations even more difficult; 5) Attributing responsibility for a terrorist attack is often ambiguous or impossible; 6) while researchers are making great progress in developing a framework for the scientific study of terrorism, the study of counter terrorism is still in its infancy. In sum, the terrorist threat in the United States is episodic, sporadic and inconsistent. Too often policies react to fear rather than real threat estimates. For example, there is no empirical evidence to support President Trump’s recent decision to ban citizens of six majority-Muslim countries from travel to the U.S. in the name of preventing terrorist infiltration. Successful policy requires collecting the best information possible, honestly accessing it and avoiding over reaction.

  • The rising homegrown terror threat on the right

    Dealing effectively with far-right violence requires that we treat its manifestations as domestic terrorism. I consider domestic terrorism a more significant threat than the foreign-masterminded variety in part because it is more common in terms of the number of attacks on U.S. soil. The number of violent attacks on U.S. soil inspired by far-right ideology has spiked since the beginning of this century, rising from a yearly average of 70 attacks in the 1990s to a yearly average of more than 300 since 2001. I would argue that this trend reflects a deeper social change in American society. The iceberg model of political extremism, initially developed by Israeli political scientist Ehud Shprinzak, can illuminate these dynamics. Murders and other violent attacks perpetrated by U.S. far-right extremists compose the visible tip of an iceberg. The rest of this iceberg is under water and out of sight. It includes hundreds of attacks every year that damage property and intimidate communities. The significant growth in far-right violence in recent years is happening at the base of the iceberg. Changes in societal norms are usually reflected in behavioral changes. It is thus more than reasonable to suspect that extremist individuals engage in such activities because they sense that their views are enjoying growing social legitimacy and acceptance, which is emboldening them to act on their bigotry.

  • FBI warned MI5 that Salman Abedi was planning terror attack in U.K.

    The FBI informed MI5, the British intelligence agency, that Salman Abedi was planning an attack on U.K. soil — three months before he blew himself up a concert hall in Manchester. The FBI told MI5 that Abedi was part of a North African Islamic State cell based in the north west of England, and which was plotting attacks in the United Kingdom. Abedi was placed on a U.S. terrorist watch list in 2016 after U.S. intelligence, while monitoring Islamist groups operating in Libya, noticed his communications with one of the groups.

  • Are we really seeing the rise of a ‘new jihad’?

    Europe is witnessing a worrying surge in acts of violence perpetrated not by “aliens” or foreigners, but by its own citizens — but this is not new. Various Islamist movements over the years have learnt from previous groups’ failures to protect themselves and have survived by aborting centralized hierarchical structures and opting to work in “cells” with little or no direct contact to a central organization. If this is indeed the principal strategy behind the various violent, extremism-motivated actions taking place in Europe, then the continents’ security services should know not to look for centralized command structures which simply won’t exist. As new terrains and individuals emerge to incubate and cause havoc, the concepts they use and the actions they take will keep evolving – as they have done for decades now.

  • Manchester bomber had close connections with Manchester criminal gang

    The Manchester police say that the Manchester Arena suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, had close connections with criminal gangs in the city, as well as an association with a terrorist recruiter. Abedi, 22, was associated with a gang which has for years been waging war with a rival fang in south Manchester. People who knew Abedi say that he was deeply upset when one of his close friends became involved in a violent gangland feud, and some friends said that this trauma may have added to his feeling of disillusionment and anger.

  • What science can reveal about the psychological profiles of terrorists

    What went though the mind of the suicide bomber Salman Abedi just before he blew himself up in Manchester this week, killing twenty-two people? We often dismiss terrorists as non-humans, monsters, at first. But when we learn that they were seemingly normal individuals with families and jobs, it’s hard not to wonder about how their minds really work. The search for a terrorist “personality” or “mindset” dominated psychological research in the 1970s and 1980s and remains a significant area for research today. The idea behind such research is obvious – it’s to identify stable, predictive traits or “markers” of terrorist personalities. If we could do that, we may be able to predict who will become a terrorist – and perhaps prevent it. This type of research should be viewed with extreme caution because it involves many variables over which there is no consensus among experts – but we could agree that the more we find out about terrorists’ quest for significance, the better we can understand the identity and social issues that are fundamental to radicalization. So there’s every reason to be optimistic that psychology can be a powerful tool in the fight against terrorism.

  • U.K. security services missed several opportunities to stop Manchester suicide bomber

    British security services appear to have missed several opportunities to stop Salman Abedi before he carried out the Manchester Arena attack earlier this week. Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber, was repeatedly flagged to the authorities by friends, community leaders, and family members over his extremist views – and was independently noticed by the security services for his association with a known ISIS recruiter — but was not stopped by officers. The British security services have expressed a growing irritation and alarm with the stream of revelations in U.S. newspapers about various aspects of the investigation.

  • Manchester attack: we are in an ‘arms race’ against ever adapting terror networks

    The Manchester attack illustrates how Western society is locked in an arms race with an ever adapting group of terrorists who keep changing their tactics and targets. Winning the battle depends on a number of complex factors and the acceptance that on the morning of 23 June Britain woke up to a new reality. We need to do more to consider the role of intelligence. Often the first person to know or suspect something about someone moving towards, or involved in, acts of terrorism will be those closest to them: their friends, family and community insiders. Their willingness to come forward and share knowledge, suspicions and concerns with authorities is critical because they offer a first line of defense. We are currently finding out more about the barriers and challenges people face in sharing information or cooperating with authorities, as well as what motivates them to surmount these challenges. This would tell us why those with concerns can fail to engage fully with government reporting campaigns. At the moment this is a critical blind spot in current counter-terrorism thinking and strategy.