Posts Tagged ‘UK terrorism’

Second up this evening, a new piece for the Observer, this time in the wake of the atrocity in Christchurch, New Zealand. Draws on earlier work on the extreme right wing in the UK, though admittedly my work on the XRW has tended to look more at it through the lens of lone actor terrorism. Am sure the topic will rise as one of attention, as it has been for some time.

This aside, spoke to the Financial Times after a letter bombing campaign which appears to have been linked to Irish related terrorism, to Geo TV about the Pakistan-India clash, to the Financial Times again after the Christchurch attack (reproduced in the Irish Times), and my earlier Telegraph piece on Hamza bin Laden was reproduced in the Irish Independent. Also, did a longer interview with the BBC World Service’s excellent BBC NewsHour Programme on the massacre in Christchurch.

The Extreme Right Was Once a Loose Group of Loners. Not Any More

The pattern has changed and must not be ignored


Christchurch has turned everyone’s attention to the phenomenon of extreme rightwing terrorism. But it is an alarm bell that authorities in the UK have been ringing for some time, having seen an ascendant extreme-right threat. Our collective attention, when thinking about terrorism, may be dominated by Isis, but given the rich vein of references to the UK in Brenton Tarrant’s screed, there are clearly other concerns to which we should pay attention.

Around the turn of the century and during the early noughties, the extreme-right threat in the UK tended to consist of a ragbag of isolated loners. For the most part middle-aged white men, they tended to be discovered by chance – violent characters with spotty employment histories, a few of them picked up as a result of investigations into online paedophilia. Some particularly shambolic cases, such as that of Neil Lewington, were uncovered by accident. Lewington was arrested by British Transport police after urinating on a train platform in 2008. Subsequent investigations uncovered an aspirant one-man terror campaign, planning pipe-bomb attacks and gathering Nazi memorabilia.

This pattern has now changed. An early indicator was Pavlo Lapshyn’s terror campaign in the West Midlands in 2013. Arriving from Ukraine on a scholarship, he immediately launched an attack on the Muslim community, starting by killing elderly Mohammed Saleem in a murder that baffled police. He then started building bombs of escalating potency that he left outside mosques in the West Midlands.

Fortunately, while Lapshyn was an expert bomb-maker, he got his timings wrong and all three of his devices failed to kill anyone. When police caught him they discovered that he had a history of bomb-making back home in Ukraine and was deeply embedded in online extremist communities.

The case marked a worrying evolution. Here was a well-organised young man with capability and ideology. The fact that he was from another part of Europe showed the potential for extreme ideologies to spread across the continent. He also reflected broader links between extreme rightwing communities in the UK and continental allies.

The threat in the UK became even more pronounced with the emergence of National Action. Part political action group, part online community, part terrorist group, NA brought together a cluster of angry men around a xenophobic ideology focused on committing acts of terror and fighting back against a society they believed had been overrun. In contrast to earlier iterations of the extreme right in the UK, National Action’s members were mostly younger men.

There is a distinct trajectory here: from disorganised loners to semi-structured networks, and ideologies that are no longer isolated in national geographies, but speak to global communities who feel left out. A narrative is developing of an ascendant extreme right that is becoming more organised on our shores and has links abroad.

More disturbing is the degree to which we can see evidence that these ideas have originated in our country. Prominent among Tarrant’s ramblings are references to British fascist leader Oswald Mosley. We have a sad history of intolerance in our public discourse, and its mainstreaming in an increasingly febrile public forum creates a context for violent extremists to believe the time for action is now. We have already witnessed the murder of Jo Cox, and Darren Osborne’s attack on Finsbury Park mosque. It is essential to clamp down on it before it tears further at society’s fragile fabric.





Don’t underestimate the role of female jiahdis like Shamina Begum














Al Muhajiroun’s Long Shadow





 Muslims Against Crusades 30.7.2011-563 – Anjem Choudary 



















Finally this evening, a piece for the Telegraph which they have given a title which clashes pretty wildly with what I have written. The point I seek to make in the article was that Anjem Choudhry needs stringent detention, but we need to be careful that we do not start to set some sort of precedents which we then start to over employ. Anyway.

Beyond this to conclude my catch up, spoke recently to El Pais about ISIS, spoke to the New Arab about ISIS in Central Asia, and my earlier piece about China’s security problems in Pakistan was picked up by the Economic Times.

Clamping down on hate preachers like Anjem Choudary will only make things worse

In a picture taken on April 3, 2015 British muslim cleric Anjem Choudary poses for a photograph after attending a rally calling for muslims to refrain from voting in the 2015 general election during outside the Regents Park mosque in London. British radical preacher Anjem Choudary was charged under anti-terror laws on August 5, 2015 with inviting support for the Islamic State jihadist group. Choudary was denied bail at Westminster Magistrates court and remanded into custody to re-appear at a London court on August 28. AFP PHOTO / NIKLAS HALLE'N (Photo credit should read NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP/Getty Images)
Extremists like Mr Choudary are a long-term management problem CREDIT: NIKLAS HALLE’N/ AFP

Anjem Choudary is imminently back on our streets. The panic that his release has engendered is likely an exaggeration of the threat he poses. But the bigger issue his case raises is the persistent and chronic responsibility that he is to the police and security services.

Given he is unlikely to recant his abhorrent views, he, and a select few around him, will continue to be an expensive and long-term burden. The answer is a pointed strategy to manage them, while also making sure not to create a parallel system of justice that damages our liberties in the long run.

There has been scant evidence provided that Mr Choudary has moved on with his life. While some committed and long-term extremists do change their minds over time, these are unfortunately the exception rather than the norm.

Were he allowed to, Mr Choudary would undoubtedly return to his earlier pattern of behaviour: advancing his extremist views, recruiting followers to the cause and providing a microphone for violent Islamist ideologies in the West. He has been on this journey for his entire adult life, merely adapting his rhetoric to reflect how legislation has changed around him.

He is not, however, simply being turned back onto the streets. Mr Choudary will be placed under highly restrictive conditions. He will be kept offline, away from centres of radicalisation and his old networks, away from children, and have to report to authorities on a regular basis. This will have an effect on his ability to propagate his message.

But in many ways the bigger problem is not that he returns to his old ways. His high profile almost guarantees he will be unable to move without being observed or controlled. The political ramifications of him doing something embarrassing mean police and security services will ensure he is on a very short leash. Security services will try to extend this tight control to those in the immediate circle around him – though as we have seen with other recent releases, this is difficult to do for a community that does not get smaller.

This is a chronic management problem. Dedicated extremists like Mr Choudary are unlikely to recant their views any time in the near or medium-term future. And as we have seen with cases like Khalid Masood, the Westminster Bridge attacker; Ronald Fiddler, the former Guantanamo detainee who blew himself up in Iraq last year; Abdul Wahid Majid, the Crawley man involved in the al Muhajiroun community since the late 1990s, who was the first reported British suicide bomber in Syria in 2014; or Terrence Kelly, more famously known as Khalid Kelly, who first fell into al Muhajiroun’s orbit in 2002 and then blew himself up in an ISIS attack in Iraq in November 2016 (to name a few).

People can take a long time to move from moving in extremist circles to being involved in attacks. Of course the radicalisation trajectory is not the same for everyone. But the point for security services is that radicalised individuals can remain of potential concern for some time.

Inevitably, the answer is complicated, but has to be individual specific. For persistent long-term radicals who show little evidence of recanting their views or moving on with their lives, restrictive conditions that control who they fraternise with, what information they access, and where they are able to go is the answer.

New technologies may be able to help alleviate the burden of how this is carried out (monitoring technology may enable methods of keeping tabs on people and their behaviour without having physical officers in permanent observation). This needs to also be accompanied by intense efforts to get people to disengage and de-radicalise. All of this may appear draconian, but it is a limited number of people that we are talking about.

For those who break these terms or refuse to move on, escalating levels of punitive sentencing will keep them off the streets. This reduces the burden on security services for a period, but also is an important deterrent to others.

But, most importantly in some ways, we have to be careful that legislation or tools we put in place to control Mr Choudary (and the relatively small group around him) do not completely warp our legal system.

As irritating and consistently dangerous he and parts of his group might be – they represent a fringe of a fringe. Overreaction will only strengthen their sense of victimhood and bolster their cause.

Managing this as a chronic problem with no clear conclusion is unfortunately going to be the only way to deal with a core group of individuals who trouble our society. Letting them simply run rampant or punishing them in an extreme way will not make the problem go away, it might in fact make it even worse.



The word “terrorism” no longer captures the threat we face

Violent attacks look less and less like terrorism as we know it

September 26, 2018 / Leave a comment












More catching up, this time from this week’s Telegraph in the wake of this week’s still-unclear incident outside Parliament.

Also catching up on some media interviews, spoke to NPR, the Independent and il Foglio about the Westminster incident, to RFI about ISIS in Indonesia, to BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire show about the news that emerged about Salman Abeidi’s evacuation from Libya, to the Independent again about the Toronto shooting, to Vice about ISIS returning into a guerrilla organisation, and on the other side of the substantive equation to Bloomberg about Turkey’s relations with China and the South China Morning Post about Kazakh-Chinese relations in the wake of the Sauytbay case in Kazakhstan (which was subsequently picked up by China Digital Times).

TELEMMGLPICT000171684858_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqH8oGYaaASnJZUiuddQ1p_w4wRx7k9ixzqw8pl8JMpsMForensics officers work near the car that crashed into security barriers outside the Houses of Parliament in London, Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2018 CREDIT: FRANK AUGSTEIN/AP

Despite the attack on Parliament, all signs suggest we are safer than we were last year

Since the attempted bombing in Parsons Green last year, we have had something of a lull in visible terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom. We have had a few panics, and when it first popped up on news feeds this morning, it may have seemed like the incident in Westminster was just another of those.

Clearly, the terrorist threat is still with us. But it has also shifted and, though we can’t be certain what is around the corner, it seems to have lessened. Once dominated by large-scale plots, it is now concentrated around isolated individuals advancing ideologies of different stripes in lo-tech and often uncoordinated ways.

Isil’s loss of territory in Iraq and Syria has made a big difference. Cells and individuals with experience of the battlefield in Syria and Iraq remain a concern, but the groups on the ground seem far more preoccupied with their activity in the Levant than in launching attacks against far-off capitals.

The brutal murder of four cyclists in Tajikistan and the use of a Moroccan suicide bomber in the Philippines show how Isil remains a worldwide player. But the scale and ambition of directed attacks that we saw with in Paris in 2015, and the networks around them, seem to have waned.

Instead, we have seen a fairly constant patter of small-scale incidents characterised by individuals with a wide range of backgrounds, mental faculties and links to extremist groups, who are driven as much about what is going on their lives as by whichever the terrorist ideology they may have associated themselves themselves with.

This community has been empowered in part by the fact that our definition of a terrorist attack has widened. Once upon a time, a car driving into a crowd would have been seen as a traffic incident. Now it is immediately considered as a possible attack, even if this is later disproved.

Think back to last October, when a car mounted the pavement in South Kensington near the Natural History Museum. The immediate concern was a terrorist incident had taken place, with speculation running wild that this was the case.

Ideologues with political axes to grind leaped to the scene and spewed out commentary, and the entire public discourse swerved in a charged direction. Yet soon it emerged that we were merely dealing with a taxi crashing into crowds. A month later in Covent Garden, another taxi crashing into people sparked a similar panic which also quickly died down.

Similarly, many groups are now quite happy to claim any sort of incident, even when the link is spurious. Look at the shooting in Toronto in July, or the shooting last October in Las Vegas, which were both claimed by Isil without much credibility. At the same time, some attacks are genuinely Isil-inspired and directed, and we only need to look back to the first half of last year to see genuine terrorists using vehicles to plough into crowds and murder people.

This is the complexity of the terrorist threat that we are now facing. Varied methods and fractured extremist movements create a very confusing environment for members of the public.  Nevertheless, it does seem, at least for now, to be a safer one.

Security services deserve some credit for the shift in threat. As they have become better attuned to disrupting networked plots, we consequently see less of them. For terrorist groups still keen to launch attacks, this requires a change in methodology (and consequently a similar reaction from security forces).

But we can also see the quality of the individuals involved seems to be going down. Does this mean that terrorist groups are no longer attracting the sort of people they were before (and therefore losing their power), or does it mean that the ideology has simply become more diffuse and accessible (so then a wider range of people can connect with it)? Or maybe both?

There are no easy answers. But what is certain is that the threat will go on, and that if we are not careful we can undo all this positive change.

We know that a politically fragile and febrile environment, where narratives of exclusion and separated societies are increasingly mainstream, is an optimal place for people to latch onto extreme ideas and impulses and act on them. In such an environment, mainstream figures who openly talk in exclusionary terms creating the perception of a “clash of civilizations” which extremist groups thrive on.

To drag these ideas into the mainstream is to create a context where extreme answers seem justified. That gives ideological cover to people who are really just angry at their government or angry at their life, and are lashing out.

A persistent number of people continue to find the answer to their personal crises in violence. We are now facing a terrorist threat whose methods are almost indistinguishable from the general violence that permeates organised societies. If our political discourse is confrontational and negative, it will increase that violence.

We may not be able to eradicate the ideas or the groups which drive terrorism, but we can certainly try to change the public discourse and create an environment in which we are not doing terrorist groups’ jobs for them.




Raffaello Pantucci
Newsbrief31 July 2018


















Raffaello Pantucci
Raffaello is the Director of International Security Studies at RUSI.

