Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Winning the online war after the fall of Isis

Home Secretary Priti Patel downgraded our national terrorism threat assessment last week from ‘severe’, where it has sat for the last four years to ‘substantial’. Attacks have now been reduced from ‘highly likely’ to ‘likely’.

We’re never given the full analysis of the reasons for the changes in alert levels, which is independently assessed by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC).  But it’s fair to say from what we know, it’s more an art than a science. And there are plenty of reasons to remain pessimistic. The threat of violent extremists across the ideological spectrum to cause us severe harm continues.

It’s undoubtedly true that in terms of numbers, attacks and potential attacks thwarted by the security services in Western Europe have been on a downward trajectory from 2016 onwards. However, as research carried out by the Norwegian Defence Research Institute shows, the current rate of attacks – actual and stopped – is still higher than the preceding 20 years of data collection.

What’s more, it’s a mistake to think that the destruction of the IS caliphate in north-eastern Syria is even remotely the end of the story as far as the risk to our national security is concerned. The west’s grotesque failure to prevent the escape of thousands of IS battlefield combatants and their dependants in the face of the Turkish invasion of the Kurdish-held zone will come back to haunt us for years to come.

At this moment, committed IS terrorists – many from EU countries, further alienated by years of harsh confinement in legal limbo – are fleeing in the wholly predictable chaos caused by the US withdrawal. What do the diplomats and governments, who stood by while this catastrophe evolved, think these people will do? Stateless, numberless and with an unchallenged fealty to a medieval death cult and nowhere to go? Some are almost certainly back among us already, awaiting instructions from the heir to Al-Baghdadi.

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