Despite its best-efforts France has not yet been able to track the perpetrators of recent terrorist attacks on its soil, particularly after the re-publication of Prophet Mohammad’s cartoons by newspaper, Charlie Hebdo.

Unable to zero in on any specific group or link the perpetrators to any shadow outfit, the French sleuths are said to contend that terrorist of today does not conform to any known stereotype.

This theory pops up two questions:  

• Have terror groups affected a change in strategy for their acts of terror in Europe, specifically France, by blind-recruiting radicalised individuals who cannot be traced back to them?

• Is there a new kind of terrorist – an individual terrorist belonging to no group – acting alone?  

The element of deniability could be part of new terror strategies.

Here, the attackers could be loners. They do not carry sophisticated weapons. (For instance, most of the attackers in France carried ordinary knives). They never come under the police radar.

They are unknown to the intelligence agencies. They do not have any provable allegiances to terrorist groups.

No terrorist group claims them to be their members. They do not have any political agenda. The police have found no literature or text messages that could link them to terror.

During interrogations they exhibit no sign of radicalisation. It is difficult to prove that the social media accounts which spew venom are theirs.

NEW PROFILE -NORMAL INDIVIDUAL

With such profiles, the terrorists can pass off as any normal individuals, maybe as tourists or temporary workers. That makes them really hard to track or probe their backgrounds or even discover and follow a money trail.

These terrorists are in contrast to their peers, who had indulged in a lot of violence in France at the turn of the century.

The past terror attacks were highly organised ones, mostly serial attacks, that required a high level of coordination, synchronization, communication and weaponry. These attacks were carried out by large groups; even larger groups coordinating every move in the back-end. The attacks were not orphans. In most cases, the Islamic State claimed responsibility. Hundreds of people died or were seriously injured in these attacks across France.

The old timers were easy to track down. Not the new age terrorist, who is self-radicalised

Yet, they were easier to track down because there was an organisation behind them; the group members could be, and were, followed and arrested or eliminated by the security forces.

Take the latest attacks that targeted the French outside France, for instance.

In October, three persons were wounded in an explosion at a ceremony in Jeddah the French consulate of Saudi Arabia had organised to commemorate the end of WW-I.

Not a suspicious soul was found in the CCTV footage that covered the fortified place. The police found not a single clue. They do not know if it was the handiwork of an individual or a group.

In the October 29 attack in Nice, France, an unidentified person killed two people with a knife in the city’s Basilica. A third one succumbed to knife injuries at a nearby bar.

A fortnight earlier, a French teacher was beheaded outside Paris.

His crime: he had shown students cartoons of the Prophet that appeared in Charlie Hebdo. The killer was shot dead by the police but he could not be identified. French anti-terror prosecutors treated the assault as “a murder linked to a terrorist organisation” in the absence of any evidence.

CRACKDOWN -NO CLUE

French police cracked down on individual Muslims after the latest attacks. They deported Muslims with questionable backgrounds. They increased surveillance in Muslim-majority areas across the country.

Yet, breakthrough eluded them.

Hence new questions:

• Are these attackers self-radicalised people working on their own?
• Are they isolated individuals with a fanatical grouse against the west?
• Are they killers with a deniability feature that de-links them from the terrorist groups which may have recruited them using blinds?
• Are they conducting personal ‘jihad’ because none of the attacks was followed by phone calls claiming responsibility or throwing challenges to the police or submitting a list of demands?

Says terrorism expert, Jean-Charles Brisard:

“In the past year, all seven Islamist extremist attacks in France, including the most recent three, have been carried out by individuals unknown to the intelligence services, who used unsophisticated weapons and had no clear links to terrorist groups.”

Brisard heads Paris based Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, a Paris-based research organization.

A theory gaining currency in France is that these individual attackers are not acting at the behest of anyone and are self-motivated terrorists. “After the defeat of the Islamic State in Syria, either individual terrorists escaped from Syria to Europe or launched themselves as solo terrorists, intent on carrying out ‘jihad’ against the West”, says the theory.

French political scientist, Gilles Kepel subscribes to this view. He is an expert on Islam and the Arab world.

According to him, “In an environment that emphasizes ‘cultural ruptures’ — pitting a radical, Salafist Islam against the West but also against moderate brands of Islam — these young men become radicalized and will act with the right spark…. Without this atmosphere, there wouldn’t be a spark. Without a spark, there wouldn’t be an attack either.”

Kepel calls the re-publication of the Prophet’s caricatures as the “spark”.

PET EXAMPLE -A PAK YOUTH

These theorists have a pet example of Zaher Hassan Mahmood to flash around.  

He arrived in France from Pakistan several years ago as a young man looking for work. He watched the videos of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons repeatedly and worked himself up into ‘jihad’ mood, bought a butcher’s knife and stabbed two people outside the newspaper’s offices in Paris on September 25.

Zaher Mahmood was arrested; he confessed to the crime and explained the reasons for his action as well.

Journalists in France who specialise in “jihad terror” groups tend to believe that the likes of Zaher Mahmood are individual terrorists because they have no political reasons for carrying out the attacks.

The Zaher Mahmoods have only one reason and it is religious reason.

And they are adding to the already expanding pool of terrorist groups, which, forced out of West Asia, are looking for ‘work’ sanctuaries in Europe, specially France.  

Clearly, the new phenomenon is a new worry for Europe grappling with Corona blues!

—–By Poreg Team