Facts are still emerging from the Bastille Day massacre in Nice. What we think we know will certainly change but as I write — the early morning in London, nine hours after the attack — it’s clear that a rethink is needed. Here are some initial rough observations.
The first is that this is part of an ongoing campaign across Europe. Weeks ago, Islamic State spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani called for attacks during the Islamic month of Ramadan, repeating his call for supporters to attack “where you are, with what you have”. Attacks in Orlando and Istanbul followed, but France was spared until now, as more than 10,000 French troops continued to guard cities in the wake of last year’s Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo attacks, and French security officers worried about threats to the Euro 2016 soccer championship.
Earlier this week, intelligence suggested a threat to resort towns in France, Italy and Spain. This reflected an assessment in late May by Patrick Calvar, head of France’s General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI), who testified that terrorist networks were evolving toward a guerilla methodology and away from car bombs and suicide attacks.
His testimony echoed something I wrote after the Brussels attack in March, and have heard from officers of BKA, the German federal police: the terror threat in Europe is now both large-scale and increasingly military in nature. There’s less focus on spectacular suicide attacks, more on guerilla-style assaults, with teams of one or two people using small arms and improvised weapons to penetrate large urban areas, inflict maximum damage, then melt away to continue operations.
That’s not to say large suicide bombings won’t continue — Istanbul and Brussels showed how shockingly effective these can be — but it does suggest that smaller attacks by individuals and ad hoc groups, against soft targets of opportunity, on the spur of the moment, will coexist with larger and more structured plots.
This poses an enormous challenge for police and intelligence services: French security expert Olivier Guitta has estimated that in France intelligence agencies have to keep tabs on 100 times as many people as a decade ago. BKA and DGSI calculate that 400 to 600 operatives, many holding European passports but trained in Syria, are in western Europe.
Some are operating in small, clandestine cells while others have infiltrated the refugee stream entering Europe from the Middle East and North Africa. For comparison, 400 to 600 operatives is the size of the whole combat element of the Irish Republican Army during the last phase of the Troubles in Northern Ireland — sufficient to sustain an urban guerilla campaign indefinitely.
Along with easy access to weapons and explosives from conflicts in Turkey, Syria, the Balkans and eastern Europe, the flow of asylum-seekers creates a ready-made network within which operatives can hide, and whose grievances they can exploit. It’s worth remembering that Islamic State cut its teeth in Iraq and Syria with attacks that specialised in polarising populations, provoking tit-for-tat atrocities, which they then exploited to gain support.
There’s a risk it will attempt the same in Europe. As I wrote after Brussels, it’s even possible we may see a formal wilayat — an Islamic State external province — declared in Europe this year, as we’ve seen in Africa and Asia.
The backlash against asylum-seekers (which deepened this week when German prosecutors announced the findings of a six-month investigation that concluded more than 2000 men, mainly of Middle Eastern or African origin, assaulted 1200 women across Germany on New Year’s Eve) is both understandable and highly dangerous, in that it plays into the hands of Islamic State’s polarisation strategy.
An obvious paradox: on the one hand, all but a tiny minority of people entering Europe as refugees are innocent victims fleeing violence or looking for a better life outside countries destroyed by war. On the other, it takes only a tiny minority — a few dozen, let alone the hundreds believed to be present — to generate a real threat.
A second observation is that though this is happening in Europe, it can happen anywhere. Anytime people gather in large groups — at concerts, shopping centres, sports stadiums, outdoor venues like the Bastille Day fireworks in Nice, crowded indoor spaces like the Orlando nightclub where a gunman killed 50 people last month, demonstrations like last week’s in Dallas, or the Republican and Democratic political conventions — there are soft targets terrorists can attack.
Underlying conditions in Europe differ from those in the US or Australia, but surface manifestations are similar. The same challenge that afflicts European intelligence services, of tracking increasing numbers of people with static or declining resources and protecting an expanding range of urban targets from a growing collection of extremists, foreign and domestic, applies equally here. Likewise, the scale is different, but the challenge of responding with compassion to refugees, while (quickly and fairly) screening for extremists and keeping borders secure demands serious resources and new ideas.
This suggests a third observation: the stock responses from our political leaders are failing, and what we need most is a rethink.
I was struck, in the immediate aftermath of Nice, by the glib responses from politicians in Europe and the US.
French President Francois Hollande promised to increase bombing in Syria (where French warplanes are targeting camps at which French jihadists train), extended the state of emergency declared after last year’s Paris attacks and announced increased security at border crossings.
Hillary Clinton called for expanded intelligence resources and greater co-operation with allies, while President Barack Obama offered investigative support to France. Donald Trump said he would declare war on Islamic State if elected. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev wrote that “force is all terrorists and their sponsors understand, and force is what we must use”.
Each of these predictable, rote sound bites could have been scripted before Nice or tweeted by an intern on auto-send. They represent what are now deeply entrenched policy positions and cognitive biases on the part of elected officials.
But it’s unclear how any of them — except perhaps Clinton’s call for more intelligence resourcing — would help. And, as I’ve argued before, pumping up police resources, absent a plan for how to use them without destroying liberties and alienating communities most vulnerable to terrorist recruitment (whom we desperately need as allies in the fight against Islamic State) could represent a cure worse than the disease, destroying our open society to save it.
I’m increasingly of the view that we need a community-led effort akin to the Cure Violence methodology developed by Gary Slutkin and his team to tackle gang violence in Chicago, and since implemented across the US and in parts of the Middle East. This treats violence as a public health problem and applies local, evidence-based interventions to interrupt it. In many cases, this involves engaging and diverting the tiny minority — 2 or 3 per cent, in most cases — of individuals most prone to engage in violence and to lead others into similar behaviour.
The goal is to get to them before they progress to serious violence, not in a punitive sense necessarily but through communities taking charge of their own. This approach recognises that communities must own the problem, in co-operation with law enforcement if necessary, while also recognising that a heavier police and security presence in marginalised communities can make the problem worse. It also seeks to avoid militarising or escalating the violence (something that is a key Islamic State goal) and focuses less on ideology and more on violent behaviours.
Would this solve the problem? No — or, rather, not by itself: arguably we’re already seeing the start of a low-grade guerilla war in Europe, and robust security and intelligence responses are now required. But it would help inoculate vulnerable communities and prevent violence spreading beyond its present level. It would also, by its nature, address a broader range of issues than just radical Islamist terrorism — including social alienation, economic marginalisation, structural poverty and racism.
Whatever the approach, it’s clear that more of the same (the default setting for political leaders) isn’t working, that we need new ideas, and that these need to come from communities.
A final observation that’s unfortunately necessary: while new responses to the evolved terrorist threat are developed, people may consider some basic additional security precautions. Think carefully about attending large public gatherings or going to crowded venues with limited exit points. Try to avoid crowded times in airports, shopping malls and train stations.
If you do go, keep an eye on the exits, always know where an alternative exit can be found and keep an eye out for “hard cover” — solid immovable objects that can deflect a bullet or bomb blast. As a rule of thumb, in a bombing you want to be at least 200m from the point of blast, behind hard cover and away from large panes of glass. It may seem silly to mention this, as you won’t know about a bombing until it happens. But many recent attacks involved follow-on bombs, and hard cover could save your life when the second blast comes.
Be aware, also, not only of what may happen in an initial attack but of how the crowd will react: people have been crushed in attacks as everyone rushed the exits at once. Think about where the crowd may move, how to stay out of the stampede, and how to “get off the X” and keep moving away from the attack. Carry a basic first-aid kit and a headlamp. As someone who works a lot in war zones, if there’s one item I would never knowingly be without, it’s a hands-free torch: more than once, a headlamp has allowed me to get out of danger.
If you’re not in the immediate vicinity of an attack, stay quiet and low, and make your non-combatant status as obvious as possible to police and security forces (who can be almost as dangerous as terrorists in the chaotic aftermath of an attack). Stay off your mobile phone, as emergency services will need the bandwidth to coordinate, and terrorists have used Twitter and text messages to find people hiding during large attacks.
None of this absolves elected leaders or security professionals from getting a grip on this evolving threat. But precautions like these can help: if nothing else, because they remind you that you’re not a passive victim.
Likewise, ideas such as Cure Violence — things we may dub “community-led resilience” — are worth considering. And standing together with neighbours and friends, as people in Nice are doing today, is both the right thing to do and one of the few useful steps we can all take together in the face of an extremist threat determined to force us apart.
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