The London police shot and killed a terrorist who stabbed two people in a store in south London store. The perpetrator was wearing a fake suicide vest. The attacker, identified as 20-year old Sudesh Amman, had been under surveillance by the British counterterrorism unit, and was from prison at the end of January after serving only half of a 3-year and four-month prison sentence for the “possession and distribution of extremist material.”

Islamic State fighters have staged a series of guerilla attacks in Iraq and Syria during a pause in American and British operations, experts have said. David Rose writes that “ISIS sleeper cells have stepped up ambushes and terror attacks in recent weeks, killing and wounding dozens of soldiers and civilians. The attacks have raised fears that the jihadi group could regroup and recover if western forces leave the region.”

Who — or what — is to blame for the xenophobia, political intolerance and radical political parties spreading through Germany and the rest of Europe? A new study shows a major factor is people’s proximity to former Nazi concentration camps.

In a series of bloody campaigns from 2014 to 2019, a multinational military coalition drove the Islamic State group, often known as ISIS, out of much of the Iraqi and Syrian territory that the strict militant theocracy had brutally governed. But the Pentagon and the United Nations both estimate that the group still has as many as 30,000 active insurgents in the region. Thousands more IS-aligned fighters are spread across Africa and Asia, from the scrublands of Mali and Niger to the deserts of Iraq and mountains of Afghanistan, to the island jungles of the Philippines.

The National Institute of Justice recently awarded nearly $1.5 million to START researchers for two new projects examining violent extremists’ radicalization, mobilization, and reintegration. Each project builds off the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) and associated datasets to educate law enforcement and criminal justice professionals, and provide them with strategies and best practices for terrorism prevention and extremist reintegration in their communities. 

In mid-January the leaders of France, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mauritania met to discuss how to bolster counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel region, where Islamist terrorist activity has been steadily increasing. The background for the summit meeting were reports that the United States was considering reducing its contribution to an involvement in that campaign against Islamist terrorism. “. For the people in the Sahel, a U.S. retreat would leave them even more vulnerable to future terrorist attacks. Simply put, an American withdrawal would be penny-wise, but pound-foolish,” Olivier Rémy-Bel writes.

The German government has banned the neo-Nazi group Combat 18, and the German police conducted raids across Germany, after links were discovered connecting the group to the killing last June of pro-immigration politician from Angela Merkel’s conservative party. Combat 18 is the armed wing of the Blood & Honor neo-Nazi network which was founded in Britain in 1992 and established its German branch in 2000. Europol has warned that the network is getting stronger in more than a dozen European countries. The group chose the number “18” for its name because these numbers are the first and eighth letters in the alphabet —A and H— which are Adolf Hitler’s initials. The group’s motto is “Was Es braucht” (“What it takes”).

In recent years, deadly white supremacist violence at houses of worship in Pittsburgh, Christchurch, and Poway demonstrated the clear line from violent hate speech and radicalization online to in-person violence. With perpetrators of violence taking inspiration from online forums, leveraging the anonymity and connectivity of the internet, and developing sophisticated strategies to spread their messages, the stakes couldn’t be higher in tackling online extremism. Researchers have developed the Redirect Method to counter white supremacist and jihadist activity online.

The governing coalition in Norway has lost its parliamentary majority after the far-right, populist Progress Party announced today (Monday) that it was leaving the government after the cabinet’s Friday decision to allow a Norwegian woman to return from Syria with her two young kids. One of the children requires medical treatment. The woman left for Syria in 2013 to marry an ISIS terrorists, and the children were born in Syria. The dilemma with which Norway has been grappling is reflected in other countries across Europe, which must decide whether or not to allow their citizens who left to join the fight in Syria or marry IS terrorists to return home.