Barcelona terror attack: portent of a more menacing future

Bystanders struggle in the aftermath of the carnage when a van crashed into pedestrians in Las Ramblas, Barcelona.

In recent years — in Nice, Frankfurt, Berlin, London and now Barcelona — security services have become depressingly familiar with the “mass rundown”, a low-tech tactic where terrorists weaponise a truck to run over pedestrians in crowded public places, inflicting mass casualties.

By far the worst incident so far was last year’s Bastille Day attack in Nice, which left 86 dead and injured 458. By comparison, the Barcelona attack, though horrible, was on a far smaller scale.

But against the background of Islamic State’s developing campaign in western Europe — a campaign that, as I’ve noted before, looks increasingly like sustained, low-level guerilla warfare rather than just a series of spontaneous terrorist attacks — Barcelona looks like a portent of a much more menacing future.

We should note that this is a developing situation, first reports are often wrong, and there’s much we still don’t know about this attack and the group that conducted it. But from the evidence available, we can say with some confidence that Barcelona was part of a larger operation. Indeed, it seems likely the attack was planned to be much more complex, involving vehicle-borne explosive devices as well as the truck targeting pedestrians.

A van wired with explosives was discovered close to Barcelona hours after the attack. The night before, an explosion in Alcanar — on the Mediterranean coast about 200km from Barcelona — killed one person and severely wounded another. Neither has been officially identified, but 20 gas canisters were found in the house, and the two have been linked to the person who rented the van used in the Barcelona attack.

As my colleague Roman Ortiz, a leading Spanish-Colombian expert on terrorism and insurgency, points out in an email, this suggests Barcelona was intended to combine a mass rundown with at least one car bomb.

Spanish police believe the Alcanar explosion was caused by terrorists accidentally detonating a bomb, linked to propane cylinders, that they intended to use in the next day’s attack. If the Barcelona attack had been perpetrated according to plan, including the car bombs, it would have been far deadlier than Nice.

The Alcanar mishap seems to have prompted the terrorist group to immediately launch the mass rundown in Barcelona, probably because the Alcanar cell was part of a bigger plan and the group’s leaders didn’t want to risk being arrested before they could launch the main attack. The follow-on attack in Cambrils a few hours later, where several pedestrians were run down and five terrorists engaged in a deadly shootout with police, suggests that at least one other active terrorist cell was part of a co-ordinated effort.

This pattern of events — at least 11 people involved in near-simultaneous attacks in multiple cities separated by hundreds of kilometres — implies an extensive underground network with several operational cells, some­thing more akin to the Franco-Belgian Molenbeek group that mounted a series of deadly attacks in France and Belgium in 2015-16, than to ad hoc or lone-wolf terrorism.

As Ortiz notes, this type of large-scale operation demands intelligence collection, careful planning, a high degree of operational security and sophisticated logistics. This in turn suggests the likely involvement of Islamic State personnel with training or combat experience from Iraq, North Africa or Syria. The accumulation of resources, people and know-how — two operatives in Alcanar, four in Barcelona and five in Cambrils, along with substantial amounts of explosive — suggests knowledge on the part of, if not direct support from, Islamic State’s central command, which has been looking for ways to strike back as its heartland comes increasingly under threat.

Islamic State claimed responsibility immediately after the Barcelona attack but before the one in Cambrils. This suggests Islamic State leaders knew an operation was under way but were unaware of specific details. Yet the number of people involved and the dispersion of safe houses and caches along suggests that terrorist cell members were confident of their ability to move, communicate, assemble materiel and conduct planning and reconnaissance without significant risk of detection.

This high degree of impunity arises from several factors unique to Spain. Spain’s internal security service, equivalent to ASIO, has maintained a high terrorist threat warning for several years, even though Spain’s last terrorist attack (by Basque separatist group ETA) was in 2009, and al-Qa’ida’s attack in Madrid occurred more than 13 years ago. Until this week’s attack, the official threat level sat at four out of a possible five. Yet Spanish police presence in public spaces was not particularly high or intrusive. There are no police checkpoints or overt patrols in Madrid, for instance, in contrast to France, where 10,000 troops have been patrolling streets and guarding key spaces since the 2015 attacks.

The lack of a similar effort in Spain is partly due to lack of personnel, but is also driven by political factors. Given Spain’s troubled past — in particular the Franco dictatorship and associated repression — neither the political elites in Madrid nor the people supported a massive police presence in the streets, let alone a French-style use of the army.

Moreover, in the case of Islamic State-inspired terrorism, Spain is now the principal European destination for illegal immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East (overtaking Greece and Italy early this year) and has a significant, and alienated, Muslim population of about two million (in 2016), half of whom have Spanish citizenship.

It goes without saying — yet can’t be said too often — that the overwhelming majority of Muslim immigrants, like other Muslims worldwide, have nothing to do with terrorist activity. But it takes only a tiny number of people to sustain a terrorist campaign, and the presence of a marginalised Muslim minority creates a permissive environment for terrorist operational and support networks.

Spain’s Muslim community seems tiny in a country of 46 million. But 1.1 million Muslims are concentrated in just three regions: Madrid, Andalusia and Catalonia. Catalonia has more than 515,000 (about one-quarter of all Spanish Muslims) in a regional population of just 7.5 million.

And in Catalonia, the region of which Barcelona is the capital, there are other complicating factors. Despite the official disbandment of ETA in 2011, Catalonia still has an active secessionist movement, with regional leaders pushing for independence from Spain. Against this background of separatist tension, officials in Madrid had little political scope to increase the presence of Spanish national security forces lest such a move be seen as an attempt to intimidate Catalonian separatists.

As a result, Catalonia’s regional police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, have been left almost entirely to their own devices on matters of internal security, including counter-terrorism. Regional police not only lack the advanced capabilities of national agencies but are divided between pro-independence and pro-Madrid factions.

Earlier, regional police refused to raise security in Barcelona and other Catalonian cities, despite pressure from Madrid after the Berlin terrorist attack, in case this might be interpreted as an anti-independence move. This will likely come under scrutiny now, as the Barcelona attackers used very similar tactics to those in Berlin.

Policing in Catalonia has thus been under significant political pressure in recent years, despite the competence and bravery of individual cops. At the same time, Ortiz and other Spanish experts claim the Catalonian government has gone out of its way to facilitate the settlement of Muslim immigrants, in an effort to dilute the ­influence of Madrid and the demographic weight of Spanish (as distinct from Basque or Catalan) culture. According to these analysts, this attitude, combined with under-resourced law enforcement and the reluctance of national agencies to get involved, created a degree of tolerance towards radical extremist groups.

To summarise, then, what we know so far: the Barcelona attack seems to have been part of a larger, more complex plot, prepared by a militarised and organised underground network covering several cities. If all its elements had worked, it would have been at least as deadly as anything seen in recent years in Europe.

Even with the failure of the car bomb component, the underlying strategic factors — existence of a potential base for an extremist movement, weaknesses of internal security and policing, lax immigration controls and the political impact of regional secessionism — made Catalonia a favourable environment for Islamic State to build a base. Thus, even as Islamic State’s so-called caliphate recedes in Iraq and Syria, we may one day look back on Barcelona, along with the other attacks of the past two years, as the first signs of a much larger challenge.