Tag Archives: Terrorism

Britain, Government, Islamic State, National Security, Society, Terrorism

Terrorist atrocity in the heart of London: a direct attack on democracy

TERRORISM

Police London

A security review is now underway following yesterday’s attacks within the vicinity of the Palace of Westminster. More armed police officers are to be deployed on the streets.

Terror came on London yesterday to the seat of government and Parliament for the first time since the IRA attacked Downing Street with mortar fire in 1991. Prior to that, in 1979 Airey Neave MP was murdered by a bomb planted in his vehicle which went off in the House of Commons car park. This time, people walking on Westminster Bridge were mown down by a car whose driver then proceeded to Parliament.

The assailant rushed the officers on the gate and was able to assault and kill a policeman before being shot dead. Praise must go to the officers who stopped him going any further and to the emergency services who were quickly on the scene to tend to the dead and injured.

All such attacks are appalling but especially so when the democratic process is the target and innocent people simply taking in the sights are the victims. Partly as a result of those earlier atrocities the security around the Palace of Westminster is nowadays extremely tight while allowing life to go on as normally as possible. But the days when it was permissible to move easily around government buildings – or even walk through Downing Street from Whitehall to St James’s Park unchallenged – have long gone.

The gates at the entrance to Downing Street began as removable barriers installed at the time of the IRA hunger strikes. Now they are a permanent fixture, along with all the other security paraphernalia required in these troubled times. The more recent threat posed by Islamist terrorism has seen the Westminster defences strengthened, with concrete bollards and barriers installed to stop lorries packed with explosives driving into the precincts patrolled by heavily armed police officers.

But what yesterday’s attack shows is how sophisticated weaponry is not necessary to make the sort of impact the terrorist seeks. From what we know, just a hired car and a knife was all it took. As with the lorry attacks in Berlin before Christmas in which 12 people died and in Nice last summer which killed 84, terrorists are increasingly using rudimentary and readily available methods of causing death and injury. This was seen here with the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in 2013. The trained terrorist bomber despatched by his jihadist masters to cause carnage is being supplanted by the self-radicalised loner who is more difficult to trace.

One saving grace in this country is that our strict firearms laws make it hard for would-be terrorists to obtain the weaponry to carry out a Paris-style shooting and kill scores of people. There has not been a major attack in this country since the July 7 bombs on the London transport system in 2005 killed more than 50 people. But we cannot be complacent and, indeed, while the security agencies have thwarted many plots since then, it is not possible to stop them all. Inevitably, however, once the identity of the perpetrator is known there will be questions as to whether he was known to the authorities, which have been expecting an attack here for some time. Vigilance and good intelligence remain essential.

The Westminster incident came as new security restrictions were announced for taking laptops and tablets on certain airlines from specified airports and as foreign ministers from 68 coalition countries met in America to step up the international effort to destroy Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil). The campaign is about to reach a critical stage. The battle for Mosul, hard-fought for more than three months, is making slow but bloody progress, with Islamist fighters staging a counter-offensive and hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped.

This was the first meeting of the military coalition ranged against Isil since Donald Trump took over the White House in January. The US president has vowed to make the fight against Isil a policy priority and the Washington summit was convened by Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State, to fill in the gaps and devise a plan.

But this will be easier said than done. It will require diplomatic compromises if Syria and Russia are to be part of the co-ordinated assault. Only troops on the ground will be able to dislodge Isil fighters: air attacks will not work on their own and always run the risk of killing civilians, as happened yesterday when a school harbouring local people was hit in Raqqa. The Islamists have no compunction about using human shields. The plan against Isil must also include what to do about Libya, which will become the next HQ for the fanatics after they are driven out of Syria and Iraq.

The so-called Islamic State is acting as an ideological driver for jihadist attacks in the West. They pose a real and present danger but they also want us to over-react and shut down normal life even more than it has been already. Even as we mourn those killed and wish the injured a speedy recovery we must also deny the attackers the disproportionate reaction they seek.

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Europe, France, Government, Islamic State, Society, Terrorism

Europe and Islamist attacks

TERRORISM IN EUROPE

Intro: President François Hollande of France may think that declaring war on the extremists will shore up his own fragile political position

THE INSTINCTIVE RESPONSE on horrors such as those that have taken place in France and Germany in recent days is to look for a pattern, a narrative that might go some way to explain the inexplicable.

The brutal and bloody murder of an 86-year-old priest in Normandy invites such thinking, since it follows years of attacks on Christians in the Middle East: first by al-Qaeda and then by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Is radical Islam seeking a war with Christianity?

The very suggestion or notion of such a conflict between faiths would delight followers of ISIL, but it is hard to reconcile with that group’s dreadful persecution of fellow Muslims. ISIL has killed many more Muslims than it has Christians or Jews.

Or are the Islamists targeting Western liberal values more broadly, seeking to reinstate the Islamic Caliphate that once existed across the Middle East and parts of Southern Europe?

If so, that end has been poorly served by the enormity and mayhem in Normandy and Bavaria, lands that were never home to Muslims in the middle ages and which have only come to have Muslim residents as a result of those liberal Western values.

Seeking some kind of explanation for the evil that has been perpetrated is perfectly natural, but we should not impute too much calculation or design to those individuals who carry out such heinous crimes.

Whilst we may look for explanations the truth is there is no rationale or logic, nor any coherent argument in explaining away why Europe is suffering such appalling atrocities on its streets. These are the acts of inadequate and disturbed individuals with a nihilistic desire to destroy anything that challenges them and their ill-formed and warped idea of the world.

We must harden our defences against such acts, but we should be wary of the idea that those acts represent a clash of cultures – for that suggests some sort of parity between irrational extremist ideology on the one hand and a civilisation of shared traditions developed over thousands of years on the other.

President François Hollande of France may think that declaring war on the extremists will shore up his own fragile political position. Such a response, however, also risks validating the arguments of Marine Le Pen’s National Front (i.e. that the French establishment has failed to face up to the existential threat of terrorism).

Security and intelligence operations should be reviewed in the face of these latest attacks, particularly as the numerous intelligence agencies that operate in France are highly dysfunctional and disjointed. Great care must be taken not to dignify the attackers or their pathetic dreams of grandeur. They are murderers only deserving of contempt.

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Britain, Government, Iraq, Islamic State, Middle East, Military, Syria, United States

The intervention by the West in the Islamic State on humanitarian grounds is a right one…

ISLAMIC STATE

Intro: The West must do all it can to prevent the creation of an Islamist semi-state

The Islamic State has become a serious threat, and one that has to be confronted. Its outlook is based on foundations that are medieval, aims which include the destruction of all other faiths and the imposition of Sharia law. The establishment of a caliphate, under which Islamists are ruled, is an overarching objective.

The military successes of the Islamic State have been remarkable. Its campaign has spread across large swathes of Syria and Iraq like a plaque, threatening Baghdad as Iraq’s capital and pushing towards the Kurdish homeland in the north. This advance has caused chaos and anarchy and has driven thousands of religious minorities from their homes under the threat of ‘convert or die’.

The resultant effect is a humanitarian crisis in Iraq, a threat to the stability of a fragile Middle East and a challenge to Western security. Islamist hardliners speak of ‘humiliating’ the United States with a pledge of ‘raising the flag of Allah in the White House’. The ranks of this violent and barbaric army include around 3,000 who are said to hold European passports.

The immediate reason why the outside world has to intervene is to help those displaced people turned into refugees avoid the threat of execution. Many are trapped in the perilous and harsh geography of Iraq and will soon die if aid is not delivered. The worrying comments of General Sir Richard Dannatt, the former head of the British Army, that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 has helped to create the conditions for the rise of the Islamic State, suggest we also have a debt to pay.

There remains, too, a much wider task facing the West. Preventing the creation of an Islamist semi-state that both destabilises the nations around it and provides a safe haven for the plotting of terrorist attacks elsewhere is central to the US starting air strikes in Iraq and by halting the advance of the jihadis. Britain is providing logistical support.

This difficult operation has to strike a careful balance. Act too cautiously, and the West may fail to provide sufficient help to those in most need. Get too involved too quickly, and recent history will soon be repeated, with our military being sucked into an unwanted and protracted conflict which could potentially make the West an even greater target for terrorist outrages in the future.

President Barack Obama has indicated that he sees this military operation as being a ‘long-term project’. In military terms, the situation will have to be monitored very closely to decide whether what we are doing is working and, if not, what should be done instead. Mr Obama has said that Iraqis themselves must take a lead.

Where the West’s action should certainly be unstinting and unsparing is in the provision of humanitarian aid. The US and Britain will hopefully do their best to help bring urgently needed supplies – food, water and medical supplies. The Head of the Church of England, Archbishop Justin Welby, is right in his condemnation when he speaks of an ‘evil pattern around the world’ where religious minorities are persecuted for their faith.

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In response to the escalating situation in Iraq, three RAF Tornado fighter jets from RAF Marham in Norfolk have departed for the skies over Iraq. Their mission is to assist in the delivery of humanitarian aid to refugees who have fled in fear of the ISIS insurgents to the slopes of Mount Sinjar.

Technically, this is a humanitarian aid relief effort. No-one should be making the mistake of assuming this operation is in anyway routine. This isn’t an aid drop into a zone struck by a natural disaster, such as happens after an earthquake, but a relief effort that is dealing with the plight of retreating religious minorities. The military are dealing with a situation that is very much man-made.

The ISIS advance has demonstrated their brutality in the most sickening of ways. There are frequent reports of beheadings, crucifixions and the burying of people alive. Amongst those being targeted are the Yazidi, one of the most ancient Christian communities on Earth.

American air strikes against the militia of ISIS, and the UK aid operation that accompanies them, are aimed at saving thousands of lives that are in perilous danger.

Whilst the Islamic State is an organisation that is regarded by the West as the most deadly of destabilising forces in the region, we should also be clear that there are many who will see any US/UK involvement as a provocation. The RAF Tornados are fully armed, and have flown direct to a war zone.

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It will be curious for many Britons, that – given the political sensitivity of UK military involvement in the Middle East – a British deployment has happened without a debate having taken place in the House of Commons. Parliament may be in its summer recess, but military operations in a war zone are exactly the kind of circumstances that could justify a recall. The last time the Prime Minister thought he knew the will of Parliament on a sensitive matter in the Middle East (on support for the rebels in Syria) MPs swiftly disabused him of that notion. If air strikes had gone ahead against President Assad of Syria, the sworn enemy of ISIS, the jihadists could have now also been in control of Damascus. That embarrassing foreign policy reversal was perhaps the most damaging in modern British political history, and has certainly marked one of the lowest points in Mr Cameron’s premiership.

It is apt to point out that this is a tinderbox moment in Iraq, a country still a long way off from being a coherent and sustainable political entity. War zones are, by their very nature and definition, places where the unexpected happens. ‘Mission creep’ will always be an inherent risk.

The questions are real, and not subjective rhetoric. For example, what would happen if British warplanes came under attack? Would they be justified in returning fire? What exactly are the rules of engagement? Any military action – however limited – must have defined objectives, a time limit and a clear endgame.

This demonstrates why it is wise for our political leaders to ensure they have the full backing of the country, through its democratic representatives, before they make a commitment in a conflict situation. The Prime Minister has, so far, not sought that endorsement.

Air strikes against ISIS positions, humanitarian aid drops and even arming the Iraqi Kurds are all options that could be justified if Turkish anxieties can be assuaged. But, as recent history has shown, a full military intervention is bound to have unforeseen and potentially calamitous consequences.

It was ill-conceived foreign intervention that led to the situation we have today in Iraq. The West must avoid making it even worse.

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