Losing grip on Levant means ISIS wants lone wolves to terrorise Europe
A "lone wolf" attacker - a 27-year-old Syrian refugee who had been refused asylum last year - exploded a device carried in his rucksack killing self and injuring 12 others when he was refused entry to an open air concert hall attended by 2,500 people in the Bavarian town of Ansbach on the night of July 23.
Though authorities have not established any links so far between the suicide bomber and the Islamic State terrorists, they have not ruled out the possibility of a terror attack. Obviously, unless he was driven by the motive to explode a bomb inside the concert hall, why would he carry it in his backpack?
Only two days earlier, an 18-year old German-born Iranian youth, Ali David Sonoboly, opened fire with a Glock pistol and killed nine people, including children and injured 16 others, in the McDonalds outlet near a mall in Bavarian capital of Munich.
In his case, also the authorities could find no links with the jihadi terrorists. They have attributed it to his mental obsession with mass killings.
However, four days before the Munich attack, Mohammad Riyad, a 17-year-old Afghan (or is it a Pakistani?) refugee youth, wielding an axe attacked and wounded four people in a German train near a Northwest Bavarian town before he was shot dead.
In his case also, police found no apparent link between the quiet, well behaved young man and the ISIS.
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| A 27-year-old Syrian refugee exploded a device in Bavarian town of Ansbach on the night of July 23. |
But later, they discovered in his house a hand-painted ISIS flag and a note in an exercise book saying "Pray for me that I can take revenge on these infidels and go to paradise". A home video recovered there showed him brandishing a knife and boasting he was an IS soldier preparing for a mission.
Three lone wolf attacks, one after the other, have followed the ISIS carnage in Nice, France on July 14. On that day, a French-Tunisian drove a heavy truck through the Bastille Day crowds and killed 84 people and injured 300 others before he was shot dead.
Investigation has revealed he was a newly brainwashed ISIS cadre. Already, Germans are nervous about refugees from the Middle East flooding the country. After refugees and immigrants have carried out three attacks within a week, their fears are likely to worsen whether the attackers' jihadi terrorist connections are confirmed or not.
This raises two important questions.
Can these incidents be dismissed as copycat attacks triggered by the Nice carnage by ISIS cadre? Or, is Germany slipping into the Islamic State terrorists' arc of terror like France and Belgium?
These questions will be haunting the authorities already facing popular backlash of the Angela Merkel government's sympathetic policy on giving asylum to the refugees from countries affected by the war against the ISIS.
As a result of the liberal policy, an estimated million refugees are said to have entered Germany in 2015.
Germany has a population of nearly 4.5 million Muslims; massive influx of refugees belonging to the same religion has triggered ethnic and religious fears of Islam overwhelming Germany in the next two decades. Right wing political parties, preying upon these fears of refugees of threatening the German way of life, have grown in strength.
German security authorities have also warned about the refugee influx triggering civil conflict in Germany. The Die Welt, in an article "Security experts appalled at German policy", quoted a non-paper by security experts to say: "We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples as well as a different understanding of society and law."
This has made the government extremely cautious about attributing the attacks to Islamic terrorists immediately on occurrence as French President Francois Hollande did after Nice attack.
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| Munich attacker had some ISIS influence online. |
The European Union police agency (Europol) has been worried about the growing threat of Islamic State terrorism in Europe, particularly lone wolf attacks. In a statement issued after the Nice attack, Europol said it highlights "the operational difficulties in detecting and disrupting the lone actor attacks". Its report was prepared on the day when senior government officials of 38 nations forming the international coalitions fighting ISIS terrorism were due to meet in Washington DC, to discuss their operations.
According to the Europol data in 2015, 151 people died (as against four in 2014) and more than 360 injured as a result of terror attacks in European Union. Except for one death, all others were the result of jihadi attacks. Six EU states faced face a total of 211 terrorist attacks including those failed or foiled.
A total of 1,077 people were arrested in terrorism-related offences.
After the ISIS started losing its strongholds in Syria and Iraq, its activities are spreading farther across continents and getting bloodier. Even as the police in Ansbach were restoring normalcy in the town on Saturday morning, the ISIS struck in the distant Kabul, Afghanistan.
Two Islamic State bombers detonated suicide belts to kill 80 persons and injure over 260 others among thousands of Hazaras - a Shia minority in the Sunni dominated Afghanistan - peacefully marching to demand better power connection for their region.
In Brazil, on July 17 a group calling itself "Ansar al-Khalifah Brazil" appeared on social networking site Telegram pledging its allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi posted ISIS propaganda in Portuguese language.
Though Brazilian analysts dismissed it as mere propaganda, the authorities were not taking any chances during the upcoming Rio Olympics. They have arrested 10 people - all Brazilians - who allegedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State on social media and discussed possible attacks during the Olympics. Police are on the lookout for two more persons in this connection.
The writing on the wall is clear: as the Europol warned the Islamic State threat is only going to get worse.
Even if driven out of Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State is going to fight on because its tech-savvy psy-war is winning over vulnerable young Muslims, just as 15 young persons were lured from Kerala, to carry on its agenda.
And there is always a Pakistani connection to jihadi terrorism of any kind anywhere. Even Mohammed Riyad, the machete wielding attacker who went berserk in a Bavarian train, is suspected to be a Pakistani who had entered Germany posing as a Syrian refugee.
According to Fox News, the police recovered from his room a Pakistani document that gave advice on areas to head for in Germany after crossing the border which were accepting more migrants than others!
With Pakistan and its state-sponsored terrorists breathing fire and sympathy across the border, Kashmiri youth egged on by separatists agitating on the streets of Srinagar are highly vulnerable to the psychological impact of ISIS' gory deeds spreading across continents.
We should never discount it because it may not be politically the most fashionable thought.