Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 24 March 2024. © Richard Kemp
The terrorist attack in Moscow is a devastating reminder that the threat from global Islamic jihadism never went away. US intelligence believes the Crocus City Hall massacre was the work of Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISKP. Only a few days before they had warned of terrorist attacks in Moscow, intelligence perhaps from the same source as the warning to Iran before the ISKP suicide bomb attack at Kerman in January that killed nearly 100.
Don’t think IS have forgotten about Europe either. Only last summer it emerged that Iraqi security services had passed intelligence to MI6 that IS was planning a major assault in the UK, also against a large public gathering. And just a few days ago, German police arrested two ISKP terrorists plotting a gun attack on the Swedish parliament.
The West is unwilling to confront this growing threat head-on, just as it has wavered so badly in dealing with aggression from Russia in Ukraine and from Iran both in the Middle East and here in Europe where Tehran also continues to plot violent terrorist attacks and is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. Thankfully, recent IS attack plans in Britain and Sweden, as with hundreds of other jihadist plots against us, have so far been frustrated by intelligence penetration. But Moscow shows that intelligence alone cannot stop attacks, a hard lesson we have learned many times before.
ISKP has been based in Afghanistan since 2014. It was badly degraded by Coalition forces until their withdrawal in 2021, since when the number of attacks and attack plans worldwide has predictably increased as a result of greatly reduced US capabilities to collect intelligence and take direct military action. That withdrawal endangered our citizens and emboldened jihadists as well as our other enemies such as Putin who no doubt saw Western weakness as a green light to devour Ukraine.
We have seen the results of our failure to stand up properly to that invasion, frightened by Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling into denying Ukraine adequate means to win. Now we are doing the same in the Middle East where Israel is battling jihadists in Gaza. Hamas is not Continue reading