LISBON, Portugal (AP) – In the twenty years since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, a mix of extremists in our country, geography and weaknesses in counterterrorism strategies have combined to turn Europe in a primary goal for jihadists committed to hurting the West.
Europe saw its mouth open as the 9/11 attacks unfolded across the Atlantic. These events would also transform lives in the Old Continent, with hundreds killed and thousands wounded at the hands of Islamic extremists in the following years.
Since 9/11, Europe has witnessed many more jihadist attacks on its homeland than the United States. Because? Several reasons, analysts say.
Over the last decade or so, “what we have seen in Western Europe is an unprecedented jihadist mobilization,” says Fernando Reinares, director of the program on violent radicalization and global terrorism at the Instituto Real Elcano in Madrid.
Proof of this, he says, are not only the bombings, coups and stabbings that have plagued Western Europe in recent times, but also the tens of thousands of European Muslims who felt compelled to join groups. insurgent terrorists during the recent wars in Syria and Iraq. .
Western Europe has struggled to integrate important Muslim populations into the dominant society. Many Muslims are disadvantaged and feel deprived of rights, and some maintain complaints against the countries where they live.
“There’s a sense of alienation and frustration (that) jihadists often add up,” says Peter Neumann, a professor of security studies at King’s College London.
“This is not the same in the United States,” says Neumann, the chief security policy adviser to candidate Armin Laschet in the current German election campaign. “American Muslims are much less hostile to their own country than European Muslims and are much better integrated.”
And in recent years, amid the growing influence of Islamic State propaganda and promises, soldiers returning from Syria and Iraq have been inspired to go to their home countries in Europe. , sowing alarm among European governments.
As it turned out, 2001 was a pivotal year for jihadist terrorist activity in the United States and Europe. At the turn of the century, the United States “was the grand prize for al-Qaeda, not for Europe,” says Olivier Guitta, CEO of GlobalStrat, an international security and risk consulting firm in London.
But once the United States tightened its security after 9/11, he says, al-Qaeda went in search of easier targets. In Europe, he took an opportunistic approach, recruiting networks of supporters in Muslim communities to carry out spectacular attacks.
This strategy marked some serious milestones for Europe. In 2004, train bombings in Madrid killed 193 people and injured more than 2,000. A year later, London bombings, sometimes called 7/7, with coordinated suicide attacks targeting the public transport system killed 52 people and injured more than 700.
Later, the Islamic State group became the main threat. He claimed responsibility for a series of notorious attacks, including one in Paris in 2015 that killed 130 people and injured hundreds of others, the deadliest violence in France since World War II. In 2016, nail bombs exploded in Brussels, killing 32 people and three perpetrators and injuring more than 300 people. Later that year, a truck crashed into a crowd in Nice, France, killing 86 people and injuring 434.
Some critics have accused this violence of the weak bass of the continent’s defense. Intelligence capabilities differ widely among the 27 member countries of the European Union.
Daniel Benjamin, formerly senior counterterrorism adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and now president of the American Academy in Berlin, says this problem is difficult to avoid in this mosaic of countries of varying size and wealth.
“Inevitably,” he says, “there will be stronger and weaker security and intelligence communities among a set of countries as diverse as those you find in Europe, especially those with such varied resources.”
However, Guitta of GlobalStrat says that anti-terrorism cooperation between EU countries has improved considerably since the 2015 Paris attacks.
This may prove valuable in the near future. Reinares, of the Spanish Royal Elcano Institute, predicts that al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, rivaling its importance, “will compete to carry out major attacks on the West.” And Europe needs to watch out because it’s an easier target than North America or Australia, he told an online conference on Thursday.
The continent, says Reinares, is closer to jihadist bases and is more permeable, either internally due to the absence of border controls in 26 countries or through migrant routes used by tens of thousands of people each year. .