Spawn of the caliphate takes unpredictable war to West

Police and security agencies face a wildly unpredictable and potent threat.

Britain’s counter-terrorism agencies have been at full stretch for months, tracking potential plots and all the time expecting Islamic State and its followers to lash out in the West as its strongholds in Iraq and Syria are encircled.

Khalid Masood lived up to their expectations when he drove a car on to the footpath on Westminster Bridge in March, mowing down pedestrians indiscriminately before stabbing and killing PC Keith Palmer. It was exactly the kind of low-tech terrorism that is difficult to detect and prevent.

The attack in Manchester was starkly different in that powerful explosives were used. This is the first time Islamist terrorists have successfully used explosives in Britain since the atrocities in London on July 7, 2005.

Investigations into Masood, 52, led to the conclusion that he was a lone actor: he appeared to have planned and executed his attack in Westminster entirely on his own. What triggered him to do so is a ­secret that died with him when he was shot dead by a police officer.

The suicide bomber who carried out the attack at the Manchester Arena cannot, however, have been a lone actor.

He will have had assistance to either acquire or make the explosives; there will have been people who groomed and encouraged him on his nihilistic path — someone will have been dripping poison in his ear that it is God’s will that he target the teenagers and young children of the “decadent” West.

What will alarm the police and security agencies most is that the bomber is likely to be part of a ­terrorist cell.

A key line of inquiry today will be whether he is, or has close links with, one of the 350 jihadists who have returned to Britain from the conflict zone in Syria filled with hatred and equipped with the battlefield knowledge of how to make viable explosives.

There are distinct similarities between the attack in Manchester and the terrorist assault in Paris in November 2015. As the Paris ­attackers chose the Bataclan concert hall as their target, so the Manchester bomber selected the Ariana Grande concert at the arena. But the means of deployment were closer to another event in Paris that same night — the detonation of rucksack bombs outside the Stade de France.

The days of Islamic State and its caliphate are numbered. There is a military inevitability about its defeat. But its angry death throes and the threat from foreign fighters fleeing places like Raqqa pose a wildly unpredictable and potent threat.

The Times