Walk down a street or the steps to a subway in London, New York, Paris or Sydney. Sit on a cafe terrace in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Madrid or Los Angeles, if the weather permits, and read a book, a novel perhaps, or even a recently published tome on current affairs. Order another coffee, or beer, or glass of wine, or fizzy water. Call a friend, worry about your career, ponder your favourite sports team’s championship prospects, look forward to dinner with the family, plan a holiday with a loved one. Look at those around you, all doing much the same thing.
Nothing you see will tell you that you are facing any particular threat. There may be a policeman or two more than usual – their weapons only remarkable if you are in the UK – or perhaps some additional security evident when you take the train or bus or drive home. You will almost certainly no longer notice the barriers, metal detectors and security guards outside certain buildings in the city where you live or work. All have been part of the landscape for a decade or more, like the reports of violent conflict in distant, dusty countries. You notice them only when there is an ‘incident’, a seemingly random attack on a soft target somewhere in Europe or the US or against foreign tourists visiting a museum or a beach resort somewhere hot and Islamic. Then, with al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, lone wolves and extremism back in the headlines, you may, suddenly, feel a sharp, if fleeting, sense of vulnerability. At that instant, you have just become a victim of terrorism.
There are many definitions of terrorism, and no clear consensus has ever emerged on which one should be adopted in international law and by policymakers, let alone in the media or by the general public. One study found 109 different definitions suggested by academics and others between 1936 and 1981. The US government alone has used dozens of different definitions over the decades.1 If knowledge of terrorism has increased enormously since 2001, the debate about its nature and causes is as divided and heated as ever. In this work, and my previous books, I have preferred to use the terms militant or violent extremist to describe, however imperfectly, those who are often called terrorists. This is not to downplay their atrocities, or suggest in any way that their acts of violence might be justified, but is simply an effort to avoid the distracting controversy which goes with the word. In fact, terrorism can be defined relatively easily. In its broadest sense, terrorism is a tactic which involves the use of violence against civilian targets to achieve political, social or religiously conceived aims through the provocation of fear. Lots of different actors do this – state and non-state, local and international. Plenty combine terrorism with other tactics or strategies too. Few, however, willingly accept what is, to almost everyone, a powerfully pejorative description.2
Of course, the simplest and most significant point about terrorism, shared by many (though not all) definitions of the term, is that its aim is to terrorise: to cause extreme fear of the kind that might even lead us to act irrationally, to behave without thinking, to panic, in short. Some terrorists never physically harm anyone or destroy anything, but simply threaten to do so. They exploit both the natural human instinct of self-preservation and our sense of collective solidarity to prompt the fear that they seek. The modern concept of terrorism has its origins in the late eighteenth century and ‘La Terreur’, a bid by the French revolutionary government to defend their radical project by intimidating all potential opponents through spectacular public violence, largely executions. It was the fear that the guillotine inspired, rather than the number of heads in baskets on what was to become the Place de la Concorde, that was important. Terrorism’s greatest effects are thus achieved indirectly, through the reaction it inspires rather than the actual destruction of life and property. This is why, in that moment when, having read of an attack or the threat of an attack, you experience a sudden pang of fear, you become a victim yourself.
The fact that the number of people to have been killed in Britain in terrorist attacks by Islamic militants – fifty-three – is statistically negligible is irrelevant.3 We know the actual chances of being hurt in even a sustained terrorist campaign are minimal, but when scrolling down headlines on your phone or tablet, and you come across news of a major road accident, outbreak of disease or simply the mortality rates of heart disease or cancer, you do not feel the same anxiety, or dread fascination, as you do when reading of a bomb blast or shooting, even though any of these scourges of modern life is infinitely more likely to cause harm to you or your loved ones. The reason, obviously, is that it appears utterly impossible to know when and where such an event might take place. The violence appears utterly unpredictable. Many of the places where we usually feel safe – trains, airports, schools – suddenly become danger zones. We extrapolate from the individual attack, and turn it into a general rule. A gunman has attacked a museum, so no museum is safe. A classroom, thousands of miles away, has been bombed, and we cannot help but wonder if that could, might, happen here. Our faith in the institutions we have built to protect us is shaken. Terrorism undermines the legitimacy of the state by demonstrating its inability to fulfil its fundamental function of protecting its citizens as they go about their daily lives. It threatens too the state’s all-important monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.4 We all recognise this instinctively. A single bomb on a bus is manageable for policymakers. Two is a serious problem. Three can bring about the fall of a government, simply because there is a general consensus, among officials, policymakers and voters, that those in charge are no longer doing their job. We may understand that the threat is not immediate, but it appears present, everywhere and at all times, and this makes us feel deeply vulnerable. Life or death, injury or health, seems a lottery. This sense of perpetual menace is what the terrorists seek above all, for this is what will mobilise pressure on policymakers to change policies, weaken economies, or simply influence the way millions of people see themselves and the world. It is also what inspires us to raise the drawbridge, shun the foreign or the different, narrow the channels of communication and exchange, and return to the comforting certainties of what we think is sure and familiar.
If the terrorists’ aim is to appear ubiquitous, unknowable, entirely unforeseeable, then it follows that our aim must be to try to identify and assess the reality of the overall threat they pose. And this is what the remaining pages of this book seek to do.
Over the previous chapters I have outlined the principal components of Islamic militancy today. These are the two major groups which are currently operational – the Islamic State and al-Qaeda; there are the networks of affiliates that both have established as well as other independent groups that may or may not pose a danger to the West; and there is the movement of Islamic militancy. Each currently poses different threats in different ways, but the last decade or so has taught us that it is when elements of one or other category combine forces that we should be most concerned.
One clear threat at the time of writing remains al-Qaeda. Though the group is undoubtedly much weaker than it was a decade ago, it is still committed to pursuing broadly the same strategy formulated by bin Laden during the 1990s. Al-Qaeda still aims to inflict damage and fear on the West to dissuade intervention in the Islamic world as well as to mobilise and radicalise the umma through acts of spectacular violence. It aims to construct a caliphate, though as a long-term aspiration, not an immediate goal. It has increasingly localised its operations, but has retained an interest in developing the capacity to strike in the West.
Al-Qaeda’s ongoing rivalry with the Islamic State will no doubt spur the group to make greater efforts to execute a spectacular international operation like those which established its pre-eminence in the world of Islamic militancy fifteen or so years ago. To do this the group may well leverage the resources of its network of affiliates which, though battered, still exists. Most of these affiliates appear primarily focused on local or regional targets for the moment, so the most likely candidate for close collaboration on or subcontracting of such a project would be al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. However, with the energies of the latter currently largely devoted to exploiting, or surviving, recent upheavals in Yemen, and its capable leader, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, killed in a US missile strike in June 2015, the al-Qaeda senior commanders in Pakistan may be forced to seek alternatives. The affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, is still struggling to hold off IS and it seems unlikely that its commanders on the ground would be enthusiastic about diverting resources to open a front against the Far Enemy. Al-Shabaab, if it is still an affiliate, is also clearly focused on its local campaign, and what is left of al-Qaeda in the Maghreb appears unlikely to be of much assistance either. The group may have to call on any remaining assets in South Asia to fill the gap.
The second major danger is that the Islamic State escalates its current carefully calibrated strategy of calling for individuals to mount their own strikes in the West to direct involvement in a campaign of terrorist violence within European nations or across the Atlantic. There are already signs of such an escalation. From a position of eschewing all international targets, IS first shifted to calls for leaderless jihad in the West, then, using local affiliates, to attacks on Western targets in the Islamic world such as tourists in Tunisia. The next stage of this fairly typical progression is obvious: to attempt to strike hard in the West itself.
But though this might also fit with the rhetoric and world view of many of the IS leaders, particularly those of a more apocalyptic cast of mind, there are reasons to believe it will not occur immediately. First, the more pragmatic of the senior commanders may see such a campaign as counter-productive. It would prompt a powerful response from the West which, even if it did not involve ground troops, would be unwelcome, as it would distract from the state-building project of IS and it would drain resources from the battle against the Shia in the region. It could also jeopardise local support from tribes and factions uninterested in global campaigns but which might well be worst hit by Western reprisals. Much will depend on the degree to which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-appointed caliph, and the former Ba’ath Party officials and military men who exercise significant power within the organisation agree on strategy. The former appears to genuinely believe he is a protagonist, chosen by God, to play a key role in the final and imminent battle between good and evil. The latter appear more pragmatic. The future direction of the movement may depend on who exercises the greatest influence, and, of course, who remains alive.
For it is likely the IS leader, who has repeatedly been reported to have been seriously injured, will be killed eventually. What might then happen is entirely unclear. Could the group agree on another leader? Could they find one with the same capabilities and apparent authority? Would he become caliph? Would the loss sufficiently weaken IS for other rival militant groups in Syria, the Iraqi government, so-called ‘moderate’ factions or even the Assad regime to roll back its advances?5
The answer to these questions would lie in the evolution of the environment in which IS operates as much as the internal dynamics of the group. IS emerged through exploiting opportunities created by the multiple weaknesses of local and, to a lesser extent, international powers. As long as these remain, so too will the group, in one form or another. It has thrived also on the increasingly sectarian nature of the conflict in the region, which is likely to intensify as regional powers, primarily Iran, and organisations, such as Hezbollah and a variety of hard-line Shia paramilitary groups, seek to bolster Assad in Syria and the government in Baghdad. In late spring 2015, there were suggestions that a stalemate had set in. IS had been pushed out of some marginal territories, and even out of the solidly Sunni city of Tikrit. Yet in May IS enjoyed perhaps its most successful week since the campaigns of June 2014, taking Ramadi, an important city in western Iraq an hour’s drive from Baghdad, and Palmyra, the desert town famous for its Roman-era ruins 120 miles east of Damascus. The best-case scenario over the next two to five years is that IS is somehow pushed out of all the territory in Iraq over which its hold is tenuous at the moment, including Mosul, and if, and it’s a very big if, events in Syria take some kind of marginally more positive turn, then IS could also be worn down there to a fragmented, tenacious but significantly less dangerous remnant. The worst-case scenario, sadly more likely, is that those fighting IS remain disunited, committed to narrow sectarian or other agendas, blinded by a short-term vision of their own interests, and weak, and the group itself becomes more entrenched in the areas it currently controls, able to pick off targets of opportunity as they arise to capture new territory.
A major consideration, though, must be what capability IS actually has to strike the West. Though it has significantly more conventional arms and many more fighters than any other Islamic militant movement has ever possessed, this does not necessarily translate into the power to launch attacks overseas. In today’s security environment, for IS as for al-Qaeda, sending teams of Syrian or Iraqi bombers into France or Germany or the US is extremely difficult and any such effort would at the very least require them first to have established a local presence in the target country. IS needs to create those critical connections outside its own organisation, as al-Qaeda has done, if it is to pose a genuine threat. Its outreach effort may not be much use in this regard. Of the various ‘governorates’ established around the Islamic world, perhaps only the groups in Libya and Tunisia might be able to reach into Europe. Certainly Boko Haram or a handful of disaffected Afghan commanders will not provide that capability.
The obvious candidates to fill the gap would be European veterans of the wars in Syria and Iraq who fought with IS and either maintained contact with the group after returning home, or who could be sent home with orders to prepare a campaign of terrorist violence. But no one is entirely certain how likely, or even feasible, this might be. One historical parallel to the role the Syrian conflict is currently playing in the general landscape of contemporary Islamic militancy is the role Afghanistan played, with a few short breaks, for around three decades from the early 1980s. From then until only a few years ago, the country, and of course the adjacent strip of largely ungoverned land over the border in Pakistan, drew somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 foreign volunteers, and perhaps more. Some, maybe several thousand, came from the West. This is similar to the number and composition of the ‘foreign fighters’ today in Syria. Life in contemporary training camps run by IS resembles that in earlier Afghan counterparts, though it is of course considerably more comfortable. There is the same mixture of physical and psychological conditioning – especially important for ‘soft’ Europeans unused to any hardship – the same basic training in light weapons and the same process of selecting certain volunteers for more advanced missions, whether local suicide attacks or, potentially, something more far-ranging.6 There are reports of at least one camp being called ‘al-Farouq’, in homage either to the second caliph, or to the famous al-Qaeda camp near Kandahar where the 9/11 hijackers were first selected for their mission, or indeed both.7 There is also the same initiation for some volunteers into greater and greater violence, and advancement into leadership roles for others, just as was the case among Afghan trainees. Few, it is fair to suppose, left for Syria attracted by the idea of taking part in beheadings, but in a brutalising environment of conflict, surrounded by fellow believers and others who have already been hardened to horrific levels of cruelty, outlook and behaviour can change. Afghan veterans were at the forefront of successive waves of violence around the Islamic world throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many played a significant role until very recently. Some still do. It seems likely, or at least very possible, that Syrian veterans will play a similar role in years to come.
However, it is still very unclear quite how useful the historic lessons of Afghanistan might be. Many of those Europeans who travelled to Afghanistan, and other conflict zones, over previous decades ended up dead, maimed, disillusioned with the whole militant project, or, even if they did return, were no more enthused by the idea of killing people in their native lands than when they left home.8 For some, such experiences were certainly a gateway into more active violence. Omar Saeed Sheikh, the LSE graduate who became infamous for his role in Pakistan-based groups in the 1990s, was one. The transformative experience for him was charity work during the conflict in Bosnia. But at the same time, hundreds of young British men were fighting in Kashmir, some making the journey from Pakistan into the disputed territory to battle Indian security forces several times. I knew a few, and though most described the experience as hugely important to them, none had even contemplated violence in the UK on their return. Admittedly, this was before the culture of contemporary transnational militancy had begun to spread more widely among young Muslim men born in the West, but even a decade later, in 2006, a London-based businessman remembered his own journey via Pakistan to Afghanistan as ‘a bitter experience’. The sight of wounded foreign volunteers who had sought to fight for the Taliban leaving an assault in the back of a pickup truck convinced him that he was there as ‘cannon fodder, nothing more’, and on his return he set up a small NGO working to stop others repeating his experience.
Then there is the precedent of Iraq. Hundreds of men from the West went to Iraq between 2003 and 2008, primarily to fight the US occupying forces. Though it was widely predicted that they would come back and launch terrorist attacks at home, few actually did. And if there are signs that many Europeans who travel to the territory held by IS are drawn into greater and greater radicalism, there is evidence too that some are profoundly disappointed by the gulf between their expectations and the reality. Recent studies looking at the phenomenon of ‘foreign fighters’ over decades have suggested that between one in seven and one in forty individuals who return from such conflict zones become involved in violence once back home.9
The truth is that with this particular component of the overall threat to the West, we are in uncharted territory. In 2014, police officers in the UK made 165 arrests for offences linked to Syria, including terrorist financing, commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism, and attending a terrorist training camp. This was more than six times the total of 2013 and constituted almost exactly half of all terrorist-related arrests in Britain over the year.10 In Europe, there were also worrying signs. Beyond the attack by Mehdi Nemmouche, the gunman who shot four dead in the Jewish museum in Brussels in May 2014, there was a young Frenchman arrested in Cannes with explosives six months later shortly after returning from Syria, and a group of Syrian veterans who were detained after a firefight in Belgium in January 2015. They had been planning a shooting spree in Brussels. Yet of the fifty to two hundred US citizens who are thought to have actually travelled to Syria in recent years,11 senior officials said only a ‘relatively small number’ had joined IS, even fewer had returned to the US, and none had so far been identified as ‘engaged in attack plotting.’
A further concern is that one of the many independent groups that are currently uninterested in attacks in the West might conceivably become so in the future. A substantial number of these are based in South Asia – an area which this book has not covered in the depth it deserves and one which is entering a period of some instability as almost all remaining US troops pull out of Afghanistan and seek to put a definitive end to the international involvement there. The three of most concern are the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban and Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Pakistan-based group responsible for the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. There are several key differences between them. The Afghan Taliban, a movement with numerous sub-factions and strands, has always stuck to a nominally nationalist agenda and shunned international terrorism. Even back in the 1990s, many within the Taliban saw the global agenda of the largely Arab extremists living in Afghanistan as an irritant, even a threat to their regime. Since, relations have evolved, but though personal associations developed between senior al-Qaeda militants and Taliban leaders during the decade after the 2001 war, these by no means indicated a convergence of organisation, method or aims. The Afghan Taliban by 2015 was divided between more hard-line ground commanders and an apparently more moderate senior leadership based mainly in Pakistan which had been involved in an intermittent peace process for several years. It had also, in a precedent useful when looking at IS and the trouble it is likely to have expanding beyond Sunni-dominated areas, been unable to spread far beyond rural areas dominated by the Pashtun ethnicity, who constitute around 40 to 45 per cent of the total population and had always been its core constituency. There was certainly no immediate indication that the movement would lurch suddenly towards either launching terrorist attacks on the West anywhere outside Afghanistan, or permitting others to do so from the territory they controlled.
As for the Pakistani Taliban (Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan, TTP), any cohesion among its varied factions and commanders had largely collapsed by the spring of 2015. This was not necessarily a good thing for the West, as the rare previous occasions when the TTP had been linked to international terrorism had been the result of individual commanders within the movement seeking some kind of internal advantage over rivals, or simply going ‘off-message’ and ignoring the orders of more senior leaders to prioritise the local battle against Pakistani security forces. The TTP had been badly hit by a series of offensives launched by the Pakistani Army in 2013 and 2014, which was one reason for the horrific attack on a school patronised by military families in Peshawar in December 2014 in which more than 130 children died. Fragmented, disorganised and, in some cases, desperate, the TTP posed a threat because of its weakness, rather than its strength. In such a state, it is always possible that one of its commanders will come across an opportunity, like a group of young British or American volunteers, to cause serious harm. But this scenario, though plausible, is nonetheless improbable. As with their Afghan counterparts, it is hard to imagine a serious threat from the TTP to the West in the immediate future.
Finally there is Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), which, despite claims to the contrary, does not have, and has never had, links to al-Qaeda. Its leaders have, in part because of their close relationship with the Pakistani security agencies, always maintained a focus on the local region, India and particularly Kashmir. LeT does have, however, a long history of factions breaking away to join forces with extremists who are committed to a more international agenda. LeT’s effective and organised global support network has never previously been exploited for any kind of long-range terrorist operation but would be a very significant asset should the leadership of the group, for whatever reason, decide that they wanted to launch one.12
Beyond the established groups, and the affiliates and the independents, there is of course the movement, which is the primary concern of the last two chapters of this book. Swelling the ranks of the its members is an explicit focus of both al-Qaeda and IS. ‘To my Muslim brothers residing in the states of the Zionist–Crusader alliance . . . know that Jihad is your duty as well . . . You have an opportunity to strike the leaders of unbelief and retaliate against them on their own soil,’ Adam Gadahn, a US convert who regularly offered media advice to bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, said in a broadcast tape as early as 2010.13 ‘Strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the [tyrants]. Strike their police, security . . . as well as their treacherous agents. Destroy their repose. Embitter their lives for them and busy them with themselves. If you can kill a disbelieving American or European – especially the spiteful and filthy French – or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war . . . against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be,’ said Adnani, the former mason turned IS main spokesman, in September 2014.14 And exhortations such as this from IS are having an effect: individual attackers in Australia, the US and Denmark in the first half of 2015 all claimed to be acting on behalf of IS. A shooting at a Prophet Mohammed cartoon contest in Texas in May was actually claimed by IS itself.15 In Canada, an attack took place when an aspirant IS volunteer was prevented from travelling to Syria. More generally, though few around the world may react to the repeated calls that al-Qaeda and IS broadcast, there is little reason to imagine that the movement and the violent activism it fosters will weaken any time soon. It is simply too well established.
Within this context, one real threat from Syria and other conflicts may not be a direct physical one but rather a less tangible but potentially more significant danger: that of returning veterans who do not get involved in any terrorist violence themselves but who help propagate extremist ideas among others. The role of these more experienced men, with the spurious credibility derived from seeing combat, as a vector for violent extremist ideologies has been demonstrated again and again over recent years.
None of this is particularly heartening, but then few threat assessments ever are. This has induced a form of ‘threat fatigue’ in Western publics. Security officials tend to see this as a problem, but it could equally be seen as the healthy result of a much greater general understanding of the danger Islamic militancy actually poses. Over the last decade, an astonishing amount of information about Islamic militancy has become available. In 1995, there were around a thousand books with terrorism in the title; by 2011, there were ten times as many.16 In 1997, no one outside specialist circles had heard of al-Qaeda. Now there is barely a day without a news story somewhere in the world mentioning the group. There are lots of articulate and perceptive analysts working in the field, and a huge body of academic research on everything from pre-Islamic poetry in the Arabian peninsula (essential for understanding the meanings of the vocabulary used in the Koran) to the network analysis of the social dynamics of recruitment among contemporary extremist groups. Many of the more dubious commentators who were so prolific in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks have been marginalised. The publics in the UK, US and Europe are both increasingly informed and increasingly sceptical of claims of officials and politicians about if, why and how they should worry.
This scepticism is often justified. Knowledge may mean power, but power does not necessarily mean knowledge. Even when the facts are known, decisions may be based on other concerns. Security services have strong professional and institutional motives for erring on the side of caution, particularly when discussing a domestic threat. ‘We’d be daft to say it’s all under control, we’d just get our budgets cut,’ one MI5 officer admitted in a moment of unexpected frankness over a drink in a Whitehall pub at the end of the last decade.17 Policymakers are now aware that exaggerated claims of threats can be counterproductive, damaging their own credibility but also that of agencies like the police or security services who need the public’s confidence in order to keep them safe. This is weighed against a need to remind the public to be vigilant and, more nefariously, to convince them that yet another increase in the security services’ powers is justified. The difficulty that legislators face when arguing for more surveillance or greater powers of detention is usually countered with dire warnings of what might happen if Parliament does not acquiesce. There is also the simple truth that none will risk the accusation of having been complacent in the aftermath of an attack. The penalty of publicly underestimating a threat is considerably higher than overestimating it. The oft-cited mantras of anti-terrorist officials are ‘it only takes one to slip through’ and ‘they have to be lucky once, we have to be lucky all the time’. Such statements are accurate but entirely unhelpful when it comes to policymaking.
Of course, the greater the uncertainty, the more vulnerable any assessment of danger is to exaggeration and exploitation, and in this case it is the very rarity of such attacks that makes them so especially hard to predict. Take the risk of a major attack using some kind of biological or chemical agent. Between 1998 and 2001, bin Laden did describe the obtaining of chemical weapons as a religious duty and even claimed to have stockpiled such arms as a ‘deterrent’. Al-Qaeda also made desultory efforts to build laboratories in Afghanistan. I visited the biggest such facility, in a camp near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, just days after it had been vacated by extremists in November 2001 and saw quite how basic the operations were: a small hut crammed with sacks of chemicals and apparatus found in most school science laboratories. In 2002 in London, a supposed plot to create ricin, a poison, from castor beans turned out to be largely bogus, the work of an Algerian agent provocateur.18 In 2003, Saudi and US intelligence services claimed to have learned of a plot to release cyanide gas on the New York subway system, though no one was ever arrested nor evidence released to the public. One of the main sources for US claims that Saddam Hussein had a substantial biological weapons programme before the invasion of Iraq later confessed he had fabricated his entire story to bring down a hated, repressive regime.19 A few simple questions I put to a captive militant held in northern Iraq who had supplied information to Western intelligence services about Saddam Hussein’s supposed supply of chemical weapons to al-Qaeda immediately established that he was lying: he had never been to Afghanistan, or met bin Laden, as he claimed. The ‘factories’ in northern Iraq run by Islamic militants who had carved out an enclave there before the conflict turned out to be basic in the extreme too. In 2004, Jordanian authorities claimed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had planned a strike with chemical weapons on the US Embassy in Amman and a range of other targets. Al-Zarqawi denied the planned use of chemicals, though was happy to admit the existence of the plot. No evidence was offered to contradict him. Little has emerged in recent years to counter the conclusion that all these various examples encourage: that the fear of chemical or biological weapons is unjustified.
Such arms are, after all, extremely difficult to produce, store, weaponise and use effectively. They are almost certainly beyond the capabilities of any extant Islamic militant group. Some commentators point to the example of the Aum Shinrikyo sect in Japan, which was able to manufacture sarin gas and release it on the metro in Tokyo in 1995. But the sect had a billion dollars in assets, access to state-of-the-art scientific facilities, highly qualified and capable experts, a degree of toleration from authorities, and political connections within the Japanese establishment.20 Even IS has nothing approaching these resources today.21 The group has reportedly inserted chlorine into mortar bombs to make chlorine gas, which is prohibited by the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention.22 But this First World War technology is of limited lethality and very far from being a weapon of mass destruction. On the other hand, the Syrian regime, though almost all of its nastiest weapons have been destroyed, has repeatedly used chemical arms, killing hundreds at least and neatly demonstrating that it is really only states that have the wherewithal to manufacture and deploy even basic versions of these arms locally, let alone thousands of miles away. True, a state may one day pass such a weapon to a militant group, but this brings us back to the original problem: if all policy decisions were made on the basis of what could conceivably occur, rather than what will probably occur, government would be impossible. No state has previously transferred such technology to terrorists, nor does any state appear likely to in the short or mid-term. There is much that can be done, and should be done, to reduce that possibility but it should be seen for what it is: extremely unlikely.
Perhaps the most familiar doomsday scenario involves fanatical terrorists in possession of a nuclear device. This is equally implausible. Bin Laden vetoed a suggestion to target a nuclear power plant with one of the planes on 9/11. A supposed plot to use a ‘dirty bomb’ – a low-tech device which spreads mildly radioactive material through conventional means – in the US in 2002, much publicised by the Bush administration at the time, was based on a spoof article about how to make an ‘H-bomb’, which a US convert who had trained in an Afghan camp and then returned to the US might have read and, just possibly, might have taken seriously.23 Bin Laden held some kind of discussions in August 2001 with a Pakistani nuclear scientist who had extremist views, but otherwise there is no evidence that al-Qaeda or any other Islamic militant group have even begun to look for such arms. One scenario that is occasionally suggested is that Islamic militants somehow raid Pakistani nuclear facilities. But the nuclear arsenal in Pakistan is kept in numerous locations, with weapons disassembled and spread across various sites. So a militant group would have to have exact intelligence about the location of each component of a weapon, then be able to find them, seize them and finally assemble them. All this would seem, by any stretch of the imagination, an almost impossible task for groups which so far have relied on little more sophisticated than assault rifles, grenades, box cutters, fairly banal commercial or home-made explosives and ingenuity. If the egregious manipulation of public opinion or media sensationalism seen in the early part of the last decade is rarer now, old habits die hard. In the aftermath of the Islamic State’s seizure of Mosul in 2014, British newspapers reported that forty kilograms of uranium stolen from science laboratories in the city’s university had been used by IS to make a dirty bomb.24 The source was a boast by supposed militants in Syria on Twitter and was entirely uncorroborated. Almost a year later, the Australian foreign minister made a similar claim, raising the prospect of a ‘large and devastating’ attack.25
So where does this leave us? The Islamic State has dramatically changed the landscape of extremism but so far has not altered the threat to the West in the same way. There remains the possibility of mass-casualty attacks, probably closer in form to those seen in Madrid and London in 2004 and 2005 than to the 9/11 attacks or the abortive bid to bring down half a dozen transatlantic planes in 2006, but only if the major groups manage to lever the capabilities of their affiliates or successfully find volunteers in Western countries. There is also a greater likelihood of low-tech, DIY attacks by individuals and small groups which emerge from the potent movement of extremism. Taken together, this is enough to be worrying, but is not a threat that can realistically be termed ‘existential’.26 It is no reason to be relaxed, of course, but our communities, societies and nations have weathered far worse. The real impact of Islamic militancy will not be felt in the places where this book is likely to be read. It is in the Islamic world where the monthly death toll frequently exceeds the total in the West over the last decade.
This is not to minimise the costs of such terrorism to the West, however, nor of the effort to counter the threat it poses. Though less obvious than a blast in a Tube train or a shooting at a synagogue, the indirect impact of Islamic militancy on our lives is significant. The cost in civil liberties has been high. In every country in the West over the last decade and a half, citizens have given up substantial rights in the name of security. We have also spent, and continue to spend, an enormous amount of money in the effort to keep ourselves safe. There has been the vast expense of the controversial wars fought in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, estimated in the trillions of dollars.27 By June 2015, the US had spent $2.7 billion on its bombing campaign against IS, with the overall cost of its military operations in Iraq and Syria running at more than $9 million a day.28 The budget for the US National Intelligence Program, which includes the CIA, military intelligence agencies and several others, has been around $50 billion each year for the last eight, while that for the Department of Homeland Security is around $40 billion. The single intelligence account from which GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 are funded in the UK receives more than £2 billion every year of public funds.29 These are huge sums, particularly at a time of economic hardship for all Western nations. Then there is private sector expenditure on ‘security’, which is considerable and unquantified but has helped create and sustain an industry that has become a powerful and influential actor itself. This is not a positive development.
Added to these costs are those caused indirectly by the ongoing instability in the Middle East, to which extremism evidently contributes significantly. The new surge of Islamic militancy, and particularly the growing sectarian divide throughout the Muslim world that it exacerbates, impacts on the price of oil and gas, for example, having massive consequences on economies across the globe. A constant security threat means that countries like Pakistan, Libya, Egypt, even the giant Nigeria, remain unable to address all the other problems of development that afflict them. Trade deals languish; important reforms are postponed; neighbourly relations deteriorate; counter-productive strategic decisions are taken based on the apparently urgent, short-term need to eliminate a physical threat; terrorist violence is used to justify the state’s violence; the security establishment and the military is reinforced; crime flourishes. All this makes the world a less safe place for everyone. Problems with indirect effects on our lives have an unwelcome habit of becoming direct ones. The sudden surge of migrants across the Mediterranean from Libya in the summer of 2015 was, at least in part, a consequence of extremism. Who, having made the hellish journey from sub-Saharan or eastern Africa, both areas racked by militant violence, to the North African shore, would now want to remain in a region where men can not only execute a dozen or more people on a beach, but release a video of their acts that is seen by huge numbers of people around the world and escape any kind of sanction? There are other costs too, incalculable for the moment. In a few decades we may well look back on the effort and resources committed over the last decade or two to countering terrorism, and try hard to remember why we decided this was a greater priority than mitigating the growing threat posed by climate change.
But perhaps the greatest damage done so far – beyond the sheer loss of human life and the physical destruction that has resulted from the phenomenon of Islamic militancy and the efforts of the West and its allies to eradicate it – is to relations between communities at a global and a local level.
Surveys of the attitudes of populations in the Arab or Islamic world towards their Western counterparts make almost as depressing reading as threat assessments. The US-based Pew Center has completed a series of surveys over the post-9/11 era. These revealed the rapid decline of support for al-Qaeda and its methods from around 2004 onwards and, especially important, the correlation between that decline in any one country and the advent of a campaign of violence there. Pew’s surveys between 2011 and 2014 found much that was heartening. A vast poll of Muslims across the world in 2013 revealed that support for suicide bombing still remained limited, concerns about extremism were high, and levels of support for al-Qaeda remained low. But the same survey also found that at least half of respondents in the majority of countries surveyed believed Western popular culture was harmful to morality, that relatively few Muslims found the idea of intermarriage acceptable, and that a substantial minority of Muslims in twenty-four of the twenty-six countries said ‘most’ or ‘many’ Muslims and Christians were hostile towards one another.30 There was also little to suggest that the findings of two earlier surveys, between 2003 and 2011, were no longer valid either. These had examined Muslims’ views of non-Muslims and vice versa across the world. They had revealed a deeply worrying trend. The proportion of people in the West who said they viewed Muslims ‘favourably’ or ‘somewhat favourably’ had remained more or less steady, at between around two-thirds in the US, UK and France over the period, and had risen from around one-third to closer to a half in Germany and Spain. But almost everywhere in the Islamic world the view of Christians and Jews had become more negative. In Indonesia and Jordan, the decline was limited, with around half the Muslim populations of each country still saying they saw Christians favourably in 2011. But elsewhere it was dramatic. In Turkey, 31 per cent of people had said they saw Christians favourably in 2003, only 21 per cent in 2005, and only 6 per cent five years later. In Pakistan, the level was just over 25 per cent in 2006 but had dropped to 16 per cent in 2011. In no state surveyed did more than 17 per cent of respondents say they felt favourably towards Jews, with the level down to 2 or 3 per cent in most countries by 2011.31
Even less encouraging were responses to questions about the qualities associated by Muslims with the West. Around two-thirds in 2011 said they thought people in the West were selfish, greedy and violent, while more than a half thought they were immoral, arrogant and fanatical. These were higher levels than five years before. The proportion of people in the Islamic world believing that Arabs had carried out the 9/11 attacks was under 30 per cent everywhere, 9 per cent in Turkey, and dropped below its level in 2006 in many places. Those believing that the West was fundamentally hostile to Muslims were in a solid majority pretty much everywhere, more than 70 per cent in places, with the proportion again increasing over the years.32
And though Pew had found that the Western view of Muslims and the Islamic world was more positive, and had improved marginally over the period, other pollsters, particularly in the US, did not. In October 2001, one survey found that 47 per cent of Americans viewed Islam favourably. This had declined to 37 per cent by 2010, and to only 27 per cent in 2014.33 Significantly, the survey also showed much depended on age, with younger respondents consistently more favourable towards Muslim Americans – largely, it was presumed, because they are more likely to actually come into contact with any.
This was encouraging in that it indicated some hope of improvement in the future, but underlined too why extremists are so committed to driving communities apart, physically as well as emotionally and politically. To reiterate a point made several times already in this book, the aims of terrorist violence are threefold. The first is to terrorise enemies, and thus, through the functioning of democracy, to force the leaders of those democracies to make decisions that they would not otherwise have made. The second is to mobilise supporters by inspiring them into action. The third aim is perhaps the most important. Here, the violence is addressed to the uncommitted, the swing voters in the global struggle between right and wrong, belief and unbelief. These are the people within a terrorist’s own community, or a particular constituency of significance in their campaign, who need to be convinced of the righteousness of a cause, the efficacy of a strategy, and the ability or vision of a leader. But they are also those who have so far resisted the urge to hate, to retaliate, to use violence themselves among the community which is being targeted. The aim, then, is to polarise.
Al-Qaeda leaders and extremist thinkers more generally have often described their desire to force Muslims around the world to make a choice and to deepen divisions within and between communities. Bin Laden repeatedly spoke of the importance of reducing the immensely complex matrix of identities that each of us is composed of – one’s social origins, gender, education, nationality, city, favourite sports team, sexual proclivity, language and so on – to a single marker of faith. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi frequently explained how he sought to use violence to turn communities against each other. In early 2015, in a chilling if lucid editorial in its magazine Dabiq, IS laid out its own strategy to eliminate what the writer, or writers, called ‘the Gray Zone’.34 This Gray Zone was, according to IS, what lay between belief and unbelief, good and evil, the righteous and the damned, and home to all those who had yet to commit to the forces of either side too.
The Gray Zone, IS claimed, had been ‘critically endangered [since] the blessed operations of September 11th, as these operations manifested two camps before the world for mankind to choose between, a camp of Islam and a camp of kufr’. The magazine even quoted bin Laden, in line with the IS belief that it, rather than the current al-Qaeda, is the true inheritor of his legacy: ‘The world today is divided. [President George] Bush spoke the truth when he said, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” Meaning, either you are with the crusade or you are with Islam. Eventually, the Gray Zone will become extinct and there will be no place for grayish calls and movements. There will only be the camp of [the caliphate] versus the camp of kufr.’
Over the years, the anonymous author of the ten-page article claimed, successive violent acts had narrowed the Gray Zone and by the end of 2014 ‘the time had come for another event to . . . bring division to the world and destroy the Gray Zone everywhere’.
This event, apparently, was the attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, in Paris, in January 2015.
The park of Buttes-Chaumont lies in the north-east of Paris. It is not one of the most fashionable neighbourhoods of the French capital, with a very different look and atmosphere from the beaux quartiers in the city’s west, but it is steadily being gentrified. There is still much public housing and streets dominated by communities of immigrant origins, with lots of halal butchers and busy back-room mosques. There are lots of restaurants and organic food shops serving the new middle classes too.
The park itself commands one of the best views over Paris, and is enjoyed from dawn to dusk by an eclectic collection of elderly and very young locals, occasional tourists, students from nearby schools, aspirant landscape artists, office workers and joggers. Among the last, for a short time in the middle of the last decade, were several young men whose parents were born in Algeria, Tunisia and elsewhere in Africa, but who had all grown up in France. They were part of several interlocking networks spreading across the nation which all supported organisations in Iraq fighting the US occupying forces. They had decided they needed to get fit before joining the mujahideen in Iraq themselves. The training was hardly rigorous: a few sessions of light exercise on the well-clipped grass among the daffodils and chrysanthemums, and a fifteen-minute explanation of how a Kalashnikov worked from a man who had once fired one.35
The members of the ‘Buttes-Chaumont network’, as it became known to police, were young, poor, with few educational qualifications or skills, and from broken homes or chaotic families. None had much knowledge of politics, or religion, or of much at all beyond a life of fast food, hip hop, badly paid temporary jobs, overcrowded apartments in undermaintained housing blocks, cheap cannabis and petty crime. They had been to the same schools, played for the same sports teams and had come together once again to listen to a young and charismatic preacher who had set up his own study circle after publicly arguing with a series of established clerics in the neighbourhood. In 2004 and 2005, eight set off to join the mujahideen. Three were killed, two badly injured and one imprisoned. In court, the survivors described how they had made their decision to travel to Iraq after watching videos of the fighting there, news reports of abuse of prisoners by US soldiers, clips from other conflicts, and after listening to the preacher’s argument that jihad was an obligation on all Muslims if one was attacked anywhere in the world. Among those convicted for their roles in the network was a pizza-delivery boy called Chérif Kouachi, twenty-two years old in 2005, who was arrested days before he was due to leave for Iraq.36
Kouachi had grown up in care homes in west and central France and had come to Paris in his late teens. For several years, he had done odd jobs and slept on friends’ sofas. Before eventually being sentenced to three months in prison for his bid to reach Iraq, Kouachi had been held on remand for more than a year and a half in the huge Fleury-Mérogis prison, Europe’s largest, in the southern suburbs of Paris.37 The prison was known for acute overcrowding, and authorities struggled to keep veteran Islamic militants and ordinary criminals apart in an institution where 3,800 inmates were crammed into space designed for half that number. One of the veterans was Djamel Beghal, a French Algerian and one of those senior extremists active in the violent campaigns of the early 1990s across the Middle East who had fled to the West when local authorities began to gain the upper hand. Beghal had split his time between France and the UK, and had been detained in France in 2001 shortly before the 9/11 attacks while returning to Europe from Afghanistan. Charged with planning to bomb the US Embassy in Paris, he had been jailed for ten years, which gave him the opportunity to preach, organise and convince. He became a mentor to Kouachi.
Beghal’s reputation and charisma had drawn other men too. Also in Fleury-Mérogis was Amedy Coulibaly, a serial armed robber whose parents had come from Mali in the 1960s. Small, muscular, energetic, almost febrile, Coulibaly was born in 1982, the only boy among ten children, and had grown up on one of the toughest public housing developments in France. He was no stranger to incarceration and had been robbing shops with guns when still at school. In Fleury-Mérogis, where prisoners were able to mix in the vast recreation yards almost without supervision, Coulibaly had become a close friend of Chérif Kouachi and another follower of Beghal.38
Coulibaly and Kouachi continued to see each other on their release. They also sought out Beghal, who had been moved out of Fleury-Mérogis and into house arrest in a small rural village. Surveillance from French security authorities initially turned up little of interest, however. Kouachi got a job in a supermarket, married a young woman who had come to France from Morocco ten years earlier, and had a child. For a honeymoon, the couple travelled to Mecca. On their return, Kouachi’s wife gave up her job as a kindergarten teacher and began wearing the full veil. Coulibaly, who had earlier been described by a court-appointed psychiatrist as ‘immature’ with ‘psychopathic tendencies’, found employment at a Coca-Cola bottling factory and as a coach in a gym.39
He too had a steady partner: a young French woman called Hayat Boumeddiene, whom he had met in 2007. Boumeddiene also had a troubled background, having grown up in care homes after her Algerian mother died and her father remarried, though she had never been in trouble with the law. The couple were hardly observant Muslims, taking holidays in Malaysia and Crete, where Boumeddiene was photographed on a beach in a bikini with her arms around her lover. Coulibaly kept up with his contacts and friends in the underworld, played Internet poker and went clubbing.
Of the two it appears that Boumeddiene was the first to move towards a more rigorous practice of Islam. Just a year or so after the holidays in the sun, in 2010, she gave up her job as a supermarket cashier when it became illegal to wear the full-face veil, or niqab, in public places in France. Quite what Coulibaly made of this is unknown. When police heard the former armed robber’s name mentioned in a plan being formulated by Beghal, his mentor in Fleury-Mérogis, to break a well-known Algerian militant out of prison, they raided the apartment he shared with Boumeddiene and found ammunition for an assault rifle. Coulibaly said he was merely hoping to sell the cartridges but received a four-year sentence. Interviewed by police at the time, his girlfriend denied being an extremist and condemned al-Qaeda attacks. Phone records showed the content of most of the hundreds of text messages that the young woman sent and received every month was phrases from the Koran or other religious texts. She also told the police her boyfriend was less than pious. ‘He likes having fun, probably goes to mosque once every two or three weeks, he condemns [al-Qaeda attacks] as well,’ she said. ‘But he keeps in mind . . . well, the bad things that are done to innocent people in occupied countries, and that it’s normal that people who suffer injustices defend themselves and take up arms against their oppressors.’40
Quite when Kouachi became interested by extremist Islam is also unclear. At his trial in 2008, Kouachi’s lawyers had argued he was a reluctant, or at least naive, member of the Buttes-Chaumont network. This may not have been entirely true. Kouachi had told French security services on his arrest that he had been ‘ready to die fighting’ in Iraq and co-defendants remembered the young aspirant rapper as at least talking the language of militancy long before their abortive effort to go to war. ‘Chérif spoke to me about smashing Jews’ shops, or grabbing them in the street to beat them. He spoke about nothing else; that and doing some [attacks] in France before going,’ one told investigators. Interviewed by police, the preacher who had formed the group described Kouachi’s desire to ‘burn synagogues and terrorise Jews’.41 Any nascent militancy was certainly hardened during his time in Fleury-Mérogis. At the hearing in 2008, after twenty months on remand in the prison, Kouachi refused to stand for a woman judge. In 2010, he too was detained in the dragnet prompted by the discovery of the prison break-out plan but, for lack of evidence of any direct involvement, was released after four months without charge.42
So far, there is little very extraordinary in the story of Kouachi, or Coulibaly. Their marginal background, youth and profound ignorance of Islam or the world in general were characteristic of an increasing number of European extremists during the period and are even more so today. So too is the role of prison, of older, more experienced extremists and of an interlinked network of dozens of individuals in their ‘radicalisation’. All that is missing is the lack of any great activity online, which suggests that the role of the Internet in extremism today may be sometimes exaggerated. Adhering faithfully to the pattern of other such militants, in August 2011 Kouachi and his older brother Saïd travelled to Yemen where they successfully made contact with elements within, or close to, al-Qaeda’s affiliate there.
The contact was fleeting but appears nonetheless to have been very significant. AQAP had occupied the southern coastal towns of Zinjibar eight months before and were downplaying their global jihad in favour of a local one. This was a period where they did not launch any significant attacks on the West. Yet the Kouachi brothers seem to have made contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, the high-profile preacher killed a year later in a US drone attack. Al-Awlaki was not part of the official AQAP hierarchy and so had more liberty of action. According to Chérif Kouachi’s public claims, and those of AQAP senior leaders, al-Awlaki both inspired the brothers to launch an attack on Charlie Hebdo and provided some funding for it. The pair also received some basic weapons training, an experience of mainly psychological and symbolic importance. It is not hard to learn how to handle an AK-47 – it takes about a day or so – but it is difficult to take the final step to becoming someone who is prepared to kill in cold blood. That the Kouachi brothers could now claim to be ‘mujahideen’ fighting for ‘al-Qaeda’ allowed them to frame any attack as a legitimate part of an ongoing war: the murder of unarmed civilians became a military act. They were no longer ‘terrorists’, they were soldiers of faith. It also allowed AQAP, however tendentiously, to claim their attacks afterwards.
The Kouachi brothers stayed out of trouble on their return to France in the autumn of 2011. Saïd Kouachi had never really been considered a threat by authorities, despite a tangential involvement in the Buttes-Chaumont network and several trips to the Middle East.43 Steadier and more cautious than his brother, Saïd lived with his wife and child in Reims, a small city east of Paris, where he ran a Koranic bookshop.44 He was able to bolster his brother’s ill-informed extremism with a certain amount of knowledge and argument. Their sister later described how the two men were ‘sectarian’ in outlook. ‘They had an intolerant vision of Islam, certainly. They were very racist towards anyone who wasn’t a Muslim or Arab,’ she told police.45
Though intermittently watched, surveillance on the pair was dropped in early autumn 2014 around the same time as Amédy Coulibaly was released from prison. Coulibaly, now thirty-two, almost immediately married his long-term partner, Boumeddiene. If there had been any doubts over his commitment to extremist Islam before his latest incarceration, there were none after it. Over the following weeks, the couple bought cars on credit using fraudulent papers and then sold them to raise tens of thousands of euros. On 5 January 2015, Coulibaly travelled to Belgium to swap a Mini Cooper for assault rifles, handguns and ammunition. On the 6th, he met Chérif Kouachi late in the evening. On the 7th, at 10.19 a.m. the two men exchanged text messages. Kouachi had left his home in Gennevilliers in the north-western suburbs of Paris a short time before, having told his wife he was going shopping in the city and would be back in the evening or the next morning. An hour and a half later, the Kouachi brothers reached the offices of Charlie Hebdo in an anonymous office building on the eastern side of central Paris and the killings began.
The satirical magazine had been a target of Islamic extremists around the world since reprinting caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in 2006 in the middle of what became known as the Cartoon Crisis. The images in question had been drawn for a Danish newspaper which itself had subsequently been the target of a series of extremist attacks. The outrage they prompted was far from spontaneous, being largely provoked by a group of northern European Islamic clerics who mobilised followers, then lobbied successive governments in the Muslim world to publicly condemn the images. The clerics also included more offensive pictures among those they claimed had been published. Once sufficient anger had been generated, with demonstrations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iran and elsewhere, all government-sanctioned or -organised, the row took on a momentum of its own.46 Charlie Hebdo, which had existed in various forms since 1960 and was part of a long tradition of irreverent and anti-clerical French satire, reprinted the original cartoons alongside similar contributions from their own team of artists. Five years later, the Charlie Hebdo offices were destroyed in an arson attack on the eve of publication of a ‘sharia’ special edition and further cartoons of the Prophet. In 2013, the magazine’s editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, was listed in AQAP’s Inspire magazine alongside Salman Rushdie and Geert Wilders, a Dutch far-right politician, as ‘wanted dead or alive for crimes against Islam’ with the headline ‘A bullet a day keeps the infidel away’.
When the Kouachi brothers entered the Charlie Hebdo offices, they first shot a maintenance worker who was sitting at his desk, then sought out Charbonnier. They killed him and then ten others, all members of the editorial team except for one policeman, who had been guarding the editor, and a visiting travel writer. They then left, shouting, ‘Allahu Akbar, God is Great.’ Outside, a second policeman tried to stop them, was shot and wounded and begged the advancing gunmen for his life. They ignored his pleas, shooting him again as he lay on the pavement.47 Then they drove away, changing cars in the north of Paris. Sleeping out in woods, the brothers somehow evaded a vast dragnet for nearly forty-eight hours. Early on 10 January, they stole another car but were recognised and chased by police. After an exchange of fire outside the town of Dammartin-en-Goele, twenty miles north-east of Paris, the two men dumped the vehicle and ran into a small printworks in a light industrial zone. They shook hands with the owner and told a visiting salesman there to leave, explaining ‘we don’t kill civilians’. When police assault specialists landed on the roof of the works at around five in the afternoon, the brothers emerged shooting, and were killed.
Coulibaly died at almost exactly the same moment. He does not seem to have selected his targets in advance, though his actions were clearly coordinated with those of the Kouachis.48 Hours after the attack at Charlie Hebdo he shot and wounded a jogger in a park near his home in a suburb of south-west Paris. The next day he killed an unarmed policewoman and seriously injured a local authority street cleaner. At around lunchtime on the 10th, probably after somehow communicating with the cornered gunmen in Dammartin-en-Goele, he entered a kosher supermarket in the east of Paris. Coulibaly was wearing body armour and armed with a sub-machine gun, an assault rifle and two handguns. He killed four people and took the remaining customers and staff hostage. He talked to some, threatened others, and made himself a sandwich from food on the shelves. Armed police stormed the shop minutes after receiving word that the siege in Dammartin-en-Goele had ended. Coulibaly did not survive the assault.
If the profiles of the attackers in Paris were familiar, so too was the form of their attacks. Coulibaly had wired the supermarket with explosives according to some reports but killed with firearms, not big bombs. These were the most effective weapons men like the former armed robber and the Kouachis could practically lay their hands on and an indication of the continuing pragmatism of violent extremists in the West.49 At the offices of Charlie Hebdo in particular, the killings resembled executions, with the gunmen shooting unarmed victims from very close range.50 We do not know if the Kouachis had been watching videos of executions over previous months or years, but it seems likely. As others had frequently done before them, the attackers made efforts to explain their acts. Coulibaly called a TV station from the supermarket; Chérif Kouachi spoke from the printworks when a journalist called a fixed line there.51 Both justified their violence with the standard arguments, heard so often over a decade or more. All three knew that their actions would almost certainly end in their own deaths. The Kouachi brothers reportedly told police negotiators they wanted to die as martyrs. Certainly none appeared to have any escape plans.
What made the Paris attacks of January 2015 notable were three things. The first was the target. One of the most significant problems facing al-Qaeda over the previous decade or so had been that of preventing others, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq or al-Shabaab in Somalia, from conducting indiscriminate attacks in the name of al-Qaeda against targets that most Muslims which would consider illegitimate or in which the ‘collateral damage’ was seen as unjustified. This was particularly the case when the dead were Muslims. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had repeatedly tried to mitigate al-Zarqawi’s savagery for this reason and both men had repeatedly urged extremists to avoid causing such casualties over subsequent years. The strategy of ‘leaderless jihad’ magnified this risk. But there was no such danger posed by the choice of Charlie Hebdo as a target. Punishing those who had insulted the Prophet was seen as a legitimate objective by many who could not realistically ever be described as extremist. A poll found that 27 per cent of British Muslims said they had some sympathy with the motives of the Charlie Hebdo attackers, while a quarter disagreed with the statement that acts of violence against those who publish images of the Prophet can never be justified.52 The attack was also guaranteed to attract massive attention across the world. The staff of Charlie Hebdo, whether one agreed with their views or not, represented certain values that are central to Western traditions of thought and politics – specifically, the belief in freedom of speech. The number who died in the attack on their office was identical to the toll of Merah’s rampage, but because of the symbolism of the target the impact was immeasurably greater.
During the attacks, the Kouachis would say they had been sent by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Coulibaly, however, would claim that he was acting for the Islamic State. In the video he prepared before the attacks, which was uploaded in its aftermath by a still unknown third party, the black flag of the group is visible behind him as he speaks. That the Kouachis, with a decade or more of involvement in the movement of Islamic extremism, were loyal to the older group does not seem surprising. Nor does the attraction of IS for Coulibaly, whose involvement was much more recent. This is the second notable lesson to be drawn from the attack: with its newer, fresher, more immediate message and with its more accessible, less austere tone, IS holds an appeal for a new generation of extremists in a way that al-Qaeda increasingly appears to lack. A video from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was uploaded within days of the attack, claiming responsibility for the killings at the Charlie Hebdo office, but it took care to distance itself from Coulibaly, who it said was acting independently. The Islamic State never explicitly claimed the supermarket attack as their own but did by implication when Boumeddiene surfaced in Syria a month later and gave an interview to Dabiq, the organisation’s English-language magazine. She had fled France a few days before the operation. In March, she appeared again, without speaking, in an IS video entitled ‘Blow Up France II’.
In the turmoil surrounding the Paris attacks, one detail went largely unnoticed. In the car abandoned by the Kouachi brothers during their flight from the site of the shootings in Paris, police discovered two GoPro cameras. Such devices can be fixed to a helmet or clothing and are often used by practitioners of extreme sports to provide startlingly immediate images of their activities. The third lesson from the attacks in Paris is that extremists will continue to exploit, and be influenced by, developments in media technology and that their use of the media will continue to present us with difficult choices.
This was not the first appearance of such cameras in terrorist acts. Mohamed Merah, the Toulouse and Montauban gunman, had a GoPro camera fixed to his body armour throughout every one of his twelve killings. He filmed his approach to the site of the murders, the deaths themselves, and his escape. Merah spent much of the last thirty-six hours of his life editing these images into a twenty-four-minute clip. He told police he had made arrangements for it to be broadcast. Quite what these were is still unclear but one USB key containing the clip was sent to Al Jazeera. Merah was confident that the network would broadcast the short film because it was always showing ‘massacres and bombs and suchlike’. In fact, Al Jazeera, after appeals from victims’ relatives and President Nicolas Sarkozy, showed none of the clip because Merah’s images revealed ‘nothing not already in the public domain’. Mehdi Nemmouche, who will stand trial for the killing of four at the Jewish museum in Brussels in May 2014, also had a GoPro camera but appears to have made some kind of programming error which meant it failed to capture images of his attack. The two GoPro cameras that the Kouachis had purchased a few weeks before the massacre were still in their packaging when they were found in the abandoned car. The one that Coulibaly had bought was not: it was fixed to his body armour throughout the hostage-taking in the supermarket. At least one witness remembered seeing the gunman with a laptop computer, apparently downloading images from the device, with his weapons beside him.53 No one is entirely sure what happened to the images Coulibaly recorded during the siege of the supermarket, where they are, or what might be done with them. But the next step for the terrorists is obvious and inevitable. It is a live stream of a terrorist attack, the ultimate combination of terrorism and media. The question all of us will face is: will we watch?
There were vast demonstrations of solidarity in France in the days that followed the January attacks. Dozens of world leaders flew into the French capital, including a handful from Muslim-majority states. Saudi Arabia issued a statement condemning a ‘cowardly terrorist attack that was rejected by the true Islamic religion’. A ‘survivors’ edition’ of Charlie Hebdo sold nearly seven million copies, with generous assistance from the French government and others. The words ‘Je suis Charlie’ were worn on T-shirts and hats, projected onto buildings, and posted on Twitter and Web pages across the world. ‘It is not the prophet who was avenged, it is our religion, our values and Islamic principles that have been betrayed and tainted,’ Tariq Ramadan, the high-profile and often controversial commentator and thinker, said.54 Many other Islamic clerics and leaders expressed similar sentiments, as did large numbers of ordinary Muslims in Europe and beyond. So too did the killers’ families. The Muslim policeman who was shot dead outside the Charlie Hebdo offices and the Muslim shop assistant who helped his Jewish customers escape from the supermarket were feted as heroes.
On the other hand, there were isolated instances in France of schoolchildren refusing to take part in a minute’s silence in memory of the victims, and some #jesuiskouachi hashtags appeared online. In many countries there were protests by Muslims against Charlie Hebdo, and particularly the survivors’ issue, which was felt to have compounded the magazine’s original offence.55 There was a 500 per cent rise in Islamophobic attacks on mosques in France in the first quarter of 2015, while one survey in the UK three months after the attack suggested that more than half of people felt there was a fundamental clash between Islam and the values of British society.56 Overall, however, it was clear that the prediction by the Islamic State that the Gray Zone would soon disappear entirely had not come to pass, and nor was it likely to do so any time soon, either in France or anywhere else.
This, amid all the fear, pain and alarm, was good news. The Gray Zone is where all that is best about the world we have created for ourselves exists: it is where there is diversity, tolerance, understanding, discussion and debate. It is where there is exchange and enquiry and curiosity. This is no doubt why it is detested with so much vehemence by extremists, who cannot abide it. The rest of us cannot live without it. The Gray Zone is worth protecting, with all the resources and courage we have, which means with moderation, sense and, of course, with as accurate and impartial an understanding of those who threaten it as possible. The principal aim of terrorism is to ‘terrorise’, to provoke irrational fear that forces policymakers or populations to alter their thinking or behaviour. To be afraid of terrorism is normal, to be concerned is natural. But it is better to be so in measure and in reason, not in panicked ignorance, and thus win one immediate and important victory.