Europe may face grim future with suicide

New Daesh efforts to sow terror in Europe are pushing counterterrorism authorities to their limits, forcing citizens and their leaders to resign themselves to a new era where attacks may be a fact of life, not an exception, according to an editorial published in The Washington Post.

European Union leaders say they have swept away barriers among security agencies and bolstered border controls in the wake of a year of terrorist attacks capped by the assault on one of Berlin’s bustling Christmas markets.

But missed signals before and after Monday’s violence raises questions about whether the changes — or any changes — are enough to prevent a repeat of a year that saw a double-bombing in Brussels, slaughter-by-truck in Nice, France, and shooting carnage in a Munich mall before the Berlin violence that killed 12 and wounded dozens more.

A call by Daesh leaders for their followers to plan and carry out independent strikes against Europe bodes ill for efforts to stem the violence, officials and analysts say, given the practical barriers to constantly monitoring a large pool of potential attackers.

The changed terror tactics suggest that counterterrorism authorities may be successfully disrupting larger attacks, analysts say, offering a positive spin to the grim reality that small-scale violence may be inevitable.

“We see how the terrorism networks have much more difficulty in planning operations on a large scale,” said Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, deputy director of the Geneva Center for Security Policy.

The Berlin attack “is not necessarily an intelligence failure, because unless you start surveilling everyone, then these cases can happen everywhere.”

Assaults such as in Berlin require little advance planning or logistical support, starving authorities of chances to snag perpetrators in advance, even when they have been flagged on suspicion of terrorist activity.

German authorities monitored the Berlin attacker, 24-year-old Tunisian Anis Amri, before the incident but abandoned their chase after concluding they had no evidence to press terror-related charges.

Amri’s connections to the Daesh remain unclear, although a video of him pledging allegiance to the group released Friday suggests at least some level of contact before he commandeered a truck and plunged it into the market stands.

Europe’s open borders — a cherished centerpiece of the European Union — also make potential attackers more mobile than security authorities, a fact underlined by Amri’s apparently successful escape by train from Germany after the attack, making it more than 500 miles despite being Europe’s most-wanted man before his death in a shootout in Milan early Friday.

Some European countries have temporarily closed their borders this year because of migration and terrorism, only to quickly reopen them because of the economic and logistical demands involved.

Source: MENA