Islamic State Terrorism Returns to Europe Amid a Rising Tide of Antisemitism
Last month, the Islamic State (IS) carried out terrorist attacks in France and Belgium, probably the two most infamous targets of IS’s global attacks wave during the “caliphate” era.
THE ISLAMIC STATE’S FOREIGN ATTACKS CAMPAIGN
IS’s then-spokesman, Taha Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani), made a speech in September 2014 calling for Muslims across the world to carry out terrorist attacks against their infidel neighbours. If guns or bombs were unavailable, Falaha implored his listeners, “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.” A massive campaign of terrorism followed, with fifty attacks in 2015 and more than seventy in 2016. IS developed a model for its attacks on a sliding spectrum from operations it wholly conceived and controlled, through to attacks it guided and assisted, and more rarely there were individuals “inspired” by the jihadists. The terror continued at a high level into 2017, before declining at the end of that year as the “caliphate” came under strain, with the loss of its twin “capitals”, Mosul and Raqqa.
France and Belgium had special places in IS’s attack campaign. France was notable as quantitatively the worst victim of IS’s terrorism in these years, and qualitatively, too. The extent of IS’s involvement in the shocking massacre of the staff at Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 is contested, but that atrocity was in many ways the public beginning of the Islamist terror wave that swept over the West for the next three years. Months later, on 13 November 2015, IS carried out its most devastating attack, in Paris, a fully-controlled operation with terrorists trained in, and dispatched from, the “caliphate”. 130 people were slaughtered, including ninety in a horrifying carnage at the Bataclan theatre.
The remnants of the Paris network were behind the 22 March 2016 twin suicide bombing in Brussels, at the airport in Zaventem and the Maalbeek metro station, which murdered thirty-two people. IS’s reach in Belgium was not happenstance: Belgium was the first victim of IS’s caliphate-era attacks campaign in the form of Mehdi Nemmouche’s assault on the Jewish Museum in Brussels on 24 May 2014, slightly before the official caliphate declaration. France would have been the first victim but Ibrahim Boudina was arrested three months earlier as he travelled back from Syria with instructions for a bomb attack. (IS’s global terrorism campaign per se dates back to 2002, before the invasion of Iraq; it was less emphasised when there were Anglo-American targets on the ground in front of IS.)
The most recent attacks by IS loyalists in France were against policemen: a vehicle ramming attack in Colombes on 27 April 2020 wounded two officers and a stabbing near Metz on 3 February 2020 wounded one. On 24 May 2019, a parcel bomb outside a bakery in Lyon wounded thirteen people; the perpetrator had pledged allegiance to IS. None of these attacks were claimed by IS. The most recent lethal and claimed IS attack in France was the mass shooting in Strasbourg on 11 December 2018 by Chérif Chekatt, which killed five people. France suffered two other attacks from IS earlier in 2018. The last lethal IS attack in Belgium was also in 2018, in the period when the caliphate was being reduced to shreds. On 29 May that year, Benjamin Herman, a prisoner on day release, stabbed to death two policewomen and used their weapons to murder a civilian.
Since the final destruction of IS’s caliphate in March 2019 at Baghuz, in eastern Syria, IS has tried to keep its global terrorism going, but has had “success” at a much lower level. Outside of the active IS theatres—Iraq and Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, West Africa, and the Philippines—there have been just over half-a-dozen IS attacks before last month’s events: in Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Britain, Austria, New Zealand, Israel, and (in October 2022) Iran. There was some initial suspicion IS was involved in the November 2022 bombing in Istanbul; the Turkish government has since pointed very strongly to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) being responsible.
LATEST ATTACK IN FRANCE
On 13 October 2023, there was a stabbing attack at the Gambetta high school in Arras, in the far north of France, near the Belgian border. The attack took place at 11 AM, during breaktime. Thankfully no children were hurt, but the staff who confronted the assailant were not so lucky. One teacher, Dominique Bernard, was murdered, and three people—another teacher, a security guard, and a cleaner—were seriously wounded before the police arrived and arrested the killer.
The jihadist nature of the crime was evident immediately: witnesses testified that the murderer had shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he went about his rampage. The murderer was soon identified as, Mohamed Mogouchkov, a 20-year-old of Chechen origins who is a former pupil at the school.
Mogouchkov’s inclinations were not exactly secret: he had “alarmed teachers with his extremist language” during his school days, and since the summer of 2023 he had been under surveillance after the security services intercepted worrying telephone calls. Indeed, the day before the attack Mogouchkov had been brought in by police for questioning about his radicalism, but had been let go when no sign he was preparing an attack could be detected. French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin stated somewhat defensively that the domestic intelligence agency, the DGSI, had done its job “seriously”: “There was a race against the clock. But there was no threat, no weapon, no indication.”
As in so many such cases, there is an indication that Mogouchkov’s family environment played a role in his beliefs. Mogouchkov’s elder brother is in prison for Islamist militant activity, his father was deported in 2018 as a security threat, and after the Arras school attack one of Mogouchkov’s younger brothers, as well as his mother, a sister, and an uncle, were arrested. The brother and a cousin had since been charged for conspiring in the attack.
In custody, Mogouchkov confessed that his attack was on behalf of IS and he seems to have pre-recorded a video swearing bay’a (an oath of allegiance) to IS’s “caliph”. This would be in line with how IS’s guided attacks—those where citizens in Western States and other places around the world are essentially remote-controlled by IS operatives—usually work. The targets and timing are discussed, sometimes money and even weapons are supplied (as in a notable case in Hyderabad, India, in 2016), a bay’a video is created and sent to the IS handler, who then talks the IS loyalist through the attack—in some cases right up to moments before it begins—and afterwards the bay’a video is released by “Amaq News Agency”, along with IS’s acknowledgement of responsibility.
This system, which became highly efficient at the height of the foreign attacks campaign, allowed IS to do two things. First, it meant IS could be sure internally that an attack was one of theirs. Second, it meant the group was able to prove to sceptical outsiders that it had pre-attack contact with the terrorists who were usually dead by the time Amaq put out its statement. There was much talk of “lone wolves” in the 2015-17 period; this was misguided when it came to IS, and is in general a category that exists more in theory than in practice. There was also a school of analysis at the time that IS would “claim anything”, but this simply was not (and is not) true.
Terrorism is a tactic in support of IS’s political warfare, and a crucial component of such warfare is messaging or propaganda, overseen by IS’s important media department. To be effective, IS must maintain credibility in its messaging: every self-interested incentive IS has is to be truthful about these things. There have been exceptions, probably most prominently IS’s claim of Stephen Paddock’s mass-shooting in Las Vegas in October 2017, though this is an ambiguous and anomalous case in many ways, starting with the lack of a bay’a video and the fact that all this time later there is no conclusive evidence of why Paddock did what he did.
Significantly, the Islamic State itself has not claimed Mogouchkov’s attack. The reporting is unclear on whether Mogouchkov sent his bay’a video to IS, which might be the explanation. A simpler explanation is that IS tends not to acknowledge its agents if they are arrested, at least not immediately; “martyrdom” is required for Amaq to immediately laud a terrorist.
LATEST ATTACK IN BELGIUM
Three days after the Arras attack, on 16 October, a 45-year-old Tunisian, Abdesalem Lassoued, shot dead two Swedish citizens in Brussels, before being tracked down the next day and killed while resisting arrest. “Martyrdom” attained, and Lassoued having shared his bay’a video with twenty-six people, one of whom posted it publicly on social media, IS’s Amaq system worked in stereotyped fashion, confirming within hours on 17 October that Lassoued was one of their agents.
The 413th edition of Al-Naba, IS’s weekly newsletter, released on 19 October, had an item on the Brussels attack, which was mostly a reprint of the Amaq message. Lassoued’s kunya is given as “Abd al-Salam al-Muhajir”. (Al-Muhajir means “the Foreigner”, which in the IS context generally means non-Iraqi.) Lassoued is said to have “set off … towards a number of the unbelieving Christians who were in the vicinity of Sainctelette Square, north of the Belgian capital, Brussels, and targeted them with his machine gun, killing two of the Christians and wounding two others, praise be to God”.
Al-Naba says Lassoued “restored the atmosphere of terror for the Crusaders provided by the attacks of the lone wolves of the mujahideen (al-dhiyab al-mujahideen al-munfarida), as one of the soldiers of the caliphate attacked a number of unbelieving Christians in the heart of [a European] capital”. The juxtaposition of “lone wolves” and “soldiers of the caliphate” (i.e., an IS agent) there is slightly odd, since they are flatly antagonistic categories, but it seems IS is referring to the European belief and public discourse around the fear of “lone wolves”, rather than an endorsement of the concept. Previously in Al-Naba, when IS has used the expression “lone wolves”, it has specified that this is a Western term. Presumably because the group feels it has made itself plain on this point—or perhaps more mundanely for space reasons—this distinction was not spelled out this time.
Al-Naba notes: “The mujahid—may God accept him—appeared in a video clip shortly after he carried out the blessed operation, in which he stated that the motive behind this act was to take revenge for the Muslims.” The Naba article concluded with great satisfaction that this video had spread across the internet, Belgium had tightened its security measures, and there had been speeches from the leaders of Sweden and France about the enduring threat from the Islamic State—rare statements from wretched infidels that IS was happy to agree with.
There are two elements of this to pick up. First, the Swedish dimension. Lassoued specifically targeted Swedes for murder—easier at the moment he did it because Swedish football fans were in town for Sweden’s Euro qualifier against Belgium—and Lassoued’s online footprint shows he believed numerous conspiracy theories about Sweden, including that its State social services kidnap Muslim children. When Al-Naba says Lassoued took “revenge for the Muslims”, the reference is to the recent spate of Qur’an burnings by political agitators in Sweden. The actual response in Sweden and some other Scandinavian States has been to make moves towards further codifying Islamic blasphemy in the law, but this appeasement has done little to help, not least because Turkey’s government has cynically kept the issue inflamed (as have Russia’s intelligence service) to hinder Sweden’s entry into NATO.
Second, Belgium’s new security measures. The Lassoued case has been a tremendous embarrassment for the Belgians. Lassoued had come to the attention of Belgian intelligence in July 2016, soon after he had arrived illegally in the country, because a foreign service (the Italians, it seems) warned Brussels he had been “radicalised” and wanted to travel to IS’s caliphate. The Belgian security services, however, concluded “there was no concrete indication of his radicalisation” and did not add Lassoued to the terrorism watchlist. Nonetheless, Lassoued’s 2019 asylum application was rejected in 2020—as it had been previously in three other European States—probably due to the raft of other suspected crimes Lassoued was involved in, including human trafficking. A surprise, then, that at this point the Belgian authorities lost track of Lassoued, and did not move especially quickly when Lassoued resurfaced earlier this year threatening a resident at an asylum centre. What was already a national scandal—with or without a finding of “radicalisation”, Lassoued should have been deported years ago—turned out to be even worse. Tunisia had convicted Lassoued in absentia for “common law offences” and requested his extradition in 2022; the request went unanswered, it seems because it got lost. The public prosecutor blamed understaffing in his office, which was not exactly reassuring. The Justice Minister, Vincent Van Quickenborne, had to resign.
Lassoued, having been guided by IS, was not a “lone wolf”, and he transpired to not even be a lone actor: two accomplices in France have been charged.
IMPLICATIONS
As Belgium tries to fix its perennial security deficiencies, France’s President Emmanuel Macron has called up 7,000 troops to bolster domestic security for an indefinite period. The French response is not to the Arras school attack alone, but what the Interior Minister has described as the development of a “jihadist atmosphere” in recent weeks. Serious as this is it is also an issue of degrees. Despite, as outlined above, the relative dearth of IS attacks in France in the five years since IS’s caliphate was swept away, France has continued to experience Islamist terrorism at a steady and alarming rate. Probably the most notorious instance was the beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty on 16 October 2020 by Abdoullakh Anzorov, like Mogouchkov a Russian-born Muslim from Chechnya.
The recent issue that has created the worry for European governments is the flare-up in former Mandate Palestine after the Iran orchestrated a pogrom that slaughtered 1,400 Israelis on 7 October ignited a war Israel is determined will end with the uprooting of HAMAS and the other Gaza-based elements of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) like Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
The reaction in the West has disclosed a staggeringly high level of latent antisemitism that was activated before Israel began its defensive actions, when it was still uncovering the dead, and before media-abetted incidents of political warfare like the Ahli Hospital fiasco. A terrifying number of people in Western countries, by no means solely within Muslim communities, were clearly exhilarated by the IRGC/HAMAS massacre of Jews in Israel and took it as inspiration to intimidate and attack Jews domestically. Governments are now faced with the problem of trying to contain violence against Jews amidst a broad social license for antisemitic agitation under the guise of “pro-Palestinian” and “peace” activism.
IS has sought to capitalise on this situation, calling for a global war against Jews and their enablers—i.e., all Western and Arab governments—as the way to secure “God’s promise of the annihilation of” Israel. Mogouchkov was arrested before this call was put out and made a reference to the 7 October pogrom, albeit a “very marginal” one. Perhaps he will prove to be an outlier. Perhaps IS’s external attacks infrastructure remains a battered shambles and it is simple coincidence that they got two volunteers so close together last month. Or perhaps IS has restored its terrorism capacity in Europe just in time to surf a rising tide of the Continent’s most ancient and ruinous hatred.
Nothing has changed since the Battle of Broken Hill.