20 years on, the terrorist threat is as great as ever

Telegraph

21 hours ago

On July 6 2005, I joined colleagues on the balcony of our office building overlooking St James's Park to see the Red Arrows streak past in a trail of red, white and blue in celebration of London's successful bid to host the 2012 Olympics. Less than 24 hours later, a parallel universe enveloped the capital in a sea of blood and chaos. In the two decades since that day of infamy, how has the threat of violent extremism changed? Are we now equal to its challenge?
The suicide bombers who caused carnage on public transport above and beneath the streets of London were acting in the name of al-Qaeda (AQ), the dominant Islamist terror franchise of the day. Fifty-two people were murdered and 700 injured in a co-ordinated attack involving four bombs packed with shrapnel, detonated at four locations. The logistics involved and the prior movements of two of the bombers suggest a high degree of training most experts agree was enabled by senior AQ assets in Pakistan. The motivation for the attack was to influence British foreign policy to force a withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The threat we face two decades on has arguably mutated to something even greater. Organised group attacks can be devastating but they are also relatively easy to detect. Another co-ordinated bomb attack narrowly failed on July 21 that year, with heightened panic leading to the tragic death of innocent Jean Charles de Menezes. Public co-operation led to the perpetrators being swiftly arrested. Two other multi-handed plots in 2006 and 2007 were successfully stopped.
The next decade saw the terrorist threat from Islamists mutate from one with an ostensible foreign policy objective and external support to home-grown radicalised terrorists acting for Islamic State (IS) whose objectives were global jihad and the creation of a worldwide Caliphate. Attacks became more frequent and less sophisticated. Many more of the perpetrators involved had criminal backgrounds and psychological impairments. Ideological strikes in iconic locations by dedicated groups had devolved into lone actor attacks using vehicles and knives involving deeply inadequate perpetrators animated by online grievance and conspiracy theories.
While the attacks and plots of 7/7 and those intercepted afterwards always had murder in mind, there was at least some recognisable rationale behind the attacks. Today's Islamist extremist is motivated only by how high he can make the body count before being martyred in a 'divine' cause.
Althought the vast majority of terrorist attacks since 7/7 have been carried out by Islamists and they remain the overwhelming threat to our security, the extreme Right has been growing in potency. However, the state's cack-handed and plainly ludicrous insistence that the risks posed by these groups is somehow equivalent to Islamist terror plays into the very grievance narratives that fuels a broader and more complex challenge than was the case in 2005.
We now have a networked and 'always on' terrorist threat enabled and amplified by online communication still in infancy at the time of 7/7. The internet connects, inspires and mobilises today's lone actor terrorist. Moreover, the West has seen a collapse in morale and collective identity in part resulting from the stealthy infiltration of the state and its organs by Islamist-adjacent groups and supporters. Don't take my word for it. Hizb ut-Tahrir (HbT), a hugely influential global Islamist organisation, has a three-stage strategy to establish a caliphate, including penetration into government positions and military special forces to build public opinion. HbT was proscribed here in January 2024 because of the violent anti-Semitism it stirred up in the wake of the October 7 massacre.
Today's terrorist threat is more diverse and unpredictable than in 2005. Our resilience against violent extremism is hollowed out by institutional timidity. We still face tactical, technical and operational obstacles hampering disaster response. While Islamist extremism is supported by a tiny fraction of Muslims, virulent anti-Semitism has taken hold within and animates hatreds, the precursor for domestic terrorism, from events thousands of miles away. These challenges require a strong response, putting country before political calculation or progressive distractions.
In remembering the innocent lives sundered by terrorists on that awful July day, two decades on, we owe their brutally foreshortened lives a debt that is far from being repaid.