Terrorism

On the Israeli side of the Syrian border, near al-Quneitra, you can watch the war. From my vantage point on the hill, I see a town held by Jabhat al-Nusra and another held by Nusra’s enemy, Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Behind a hill in the distance, I’m told by my Israeli guide, is an area controlled by Isis. Near a road blockade, a sign reads ‘Mortal Danger. Any person who passes endangers his life’ — a point reinforced by the rumble of mortars exploding and the screams that follow. I’ve never heard anything like it. The photographer I’m with is braver than me, or perhaps more foolish. He ventures past the

As Emmanuel Macron stood on the steps of Downing Street on Tuesday urging Britain’s ‘banks, talents, researchers, academics’ to move across the Channel after Brexit, security services in France were dismantling yet another Islamic terror cell preparing to launch a terrorist attack. That makes three this month, a clear indication that the Islamists are itching to carry out a major attack in the run-up to April’s presidential election. Tuesday’s police raid targeted addresses in Clermont, Marseille and the Paris area. ‘The suspects had a plot that was sufficiently advanced for the police to decide to arrest them’, said a police spokesman. According to the French media, police had been monitoring the suspects’ text

Friday morning’s attack in Paris in which a machete-wielding man was shot and wounded in the stomach by a French soldier after he injured another soldier near the Louvre museum is the first terrorist incident in France since July. Then two teenagers murdered an elderly priest in his Normandy church, an attack that shocked and repulsed in equal measure. While the full details of Friday’s incident are still to emerge, it hasn’t the hallmarks of a determined and well-organised attack. There were no explosives in the two backpacks recovered at the scene and launching oneself at two armed soldiers holding just a machete is frightening but foolhardy. Nonetheless, interior minister

Europe’s unpreparedness to deal with the terrorist threat it is now facing is highlighted in two reports today. The Wall Street Journal has obtained a copy of the report prepared for the Belgium parliament on the failure of the Belgium authorities to stop the Islamic State terror cell who travelled from Belgium to carry out the 2015 Paris attacks. The report details a quite remarkable litany of incompetence, including the failure of the Belgium police to act on a warning that Salah Abdeslam had changed his social media profile picture to a picture of the Islamic State flag. The failure of Belgium’s various police and intelligence agencies to cooperate with

Anybody who has observed Germany in recent years may have noticed that the country’s politicians have gone a bit nuts.  For instance, it isn’t just Chancellor Merkel but a broad swathe of the German political class, who believe it wise to invite an additional 1-2 percent of the population into the country in a year and only wonder afterwards whether this was a good idea. Happily there is a reassuring factor: this is that the German police and domestic intelligence agency (the BfV) generally appear to be on top of the resulting challenges.  Listen to any of their representatives and you will be assured that the agency is fit to

A man has set fire to a train in Switzerland and stabbed lots of people. On the BBC News last night the perpetrator was described as ‘a Swiss national’. Similarly on the BBC News online today: ‘The suspect, described as a Swiss man aged 27, was also taken to hospital after the incident near Salez in St Gallen canton, close to Liechtenstein.’ Do you know, I think there is something the BBC – and the Swiss authorities – are not telling us. This attack was quite similar in some respects to one carried out in London recently, in which an elderly American woman was murdered. Then, at least, the BBC

At the beginning of his war memoirs, Charles de Gaulle famously wrote, ‘All my life I have had a certain idea of France’ and its ‘eminent and exceptional destiny’. It was not only an abstract concept: the picture in his mind was of ‘the Madonna in mural frescoes’. What is President Hollande’s certain idea of France? Presumably it cannot be the Madonna, since Hollande is the child of French laïcité, which creates an unbridgeable gulf between religion and the republic. But what happens when, in the name of one religion, men in France enter the temple of another and slit the throat of a priest, as happened this week near