Living in danger: How big is terror risk in Europe, from whom?

WASHINGTON: Anger is in the air in Europe. Across the political spectrum, observers see vitriol and prejudice burgeoning. In the past two months, lone perpetrators have committed a trio of fatal terror attacks, claiming four lives in total.

In Belgium, two Swedish football fans were shot dead in October in an apparent retribution for Quran burnings in their home country. In France, a teacher and a tourist were stabbed in two separate incidents, the second perpetrator having reportedly pledged allegiance to the “Islamic State” (IS).

Earlier this month, European Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson, who is herself from Sweden, said: “With the war between Israel and Hamas and the polarization it causes in our society, with the upcoming holiday season, there is a huge risk of terrorist attacks in the European Union.” Johansson’s assessment is alarming, but in the EU, the individual member states, not the European Commission, control risk assessment. In the past few months, authorities in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden have all increased their alert levels, citing the risk of Islamist terror (generally concentrated in Western Europe) but also from the far right.

“The danger is real and greater than it has been for a long time,” Thomas Haldenwang, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, wrote earlier this month. In December, authorities in Germany and the Netherlands detained four individuals allegedly linked to Hamas, the Palestinian militant group responsible for the Oct 7 terror attacks on Israel, suspicion of plotting for at least nine months to obtain weapons. German prosecutors said these could have been used to target Jewish institutions.

Thomas Renard, the director of the International Centre for Counter-terrorism (ICCT) in the Netherlands, said the heightened alert was about more than the conflict in Gaza. It is linked to a partial resurgence of radical Islamist groups like IS and al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Syria.

“The terrorist threat is much higher now than it was two or three years ago,” Renard said.

The attacks carried out in Europe since early October were on a much smaller scale and less coordinated than those executed in Paris and Brussels by actors claiming allegiance to IS in 2015 and 2016.

“In the peak of the [IS-declared] caliphate, we were facing a highly organized structured group, extremely powerful, extremely attractive, so to speak, that really could attract tens of thousands of individuals from around the world,” Renard said.

That is not the case for the time being, he said. Though the present situation is concerning, authorities also learned from the wave of attacks inspired or directed by IS in Europe, he added.

These days, relevant agencies in the European Union are much better at sharing information between national law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as well as with other member states. “It does not always work perfectly, obviously,” he said. “It works much better than it used to. There’s much more information flowing.”

Renard said that member states, at least those most affected in Western Europe, are also spending much more money on counter-terrorism. Whereas intelligence services used to focus heavily on the detection of advanced plots, authorities now tend to think more broadly about counter-terrorism.

“Nowadays, there is a much more comprehensive response that has been put in place, starting with early prevention,” Renard said.

Efforts start locally, involving prevention officers, civil society organizations and educational institutions.