Itongadol.- The growing number of jihadist atrocities in Europe has "unfortunately not yet reached its peak," said Boaz Ganor, Founder and Director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) in Herzliya.
"European societies are not used to it. They will require resilience, and skillful security forces," he added.
At least 84 civilians were reported killed when a Franco-Tunisian terrorist rammed a truck into crowds, and opened fire in the French Mediterranean city of Nice on Thursday night.
The mass casualty attack appears to be the work of a lone-wolf, or a localized cell operating without direct support from ISIS, Ganor said.
"Such attackers are inspired by ISIS, but they are not necessarily activated operationally or directly supported by ISIS. If I had to make a calculated guess, I would say that this appears to be the situation here." Ganor, who has been holding meetings with senior European security officials in recent weeks, cautioned that the European Union\’s ability to thwart terrorism is "only as strong as its weakest link. If one link is not strong enough, the rest of the chain of prevention is vulnerable. Europe is a chain, and weak link states endanger themselves. and other states," he said.
The European Union would be better equipped to deal with the threat by establishing an international, counter-terrorism organization, Ganor said. This would enable the entire bloc to tackle terrorism in a unified manner, and carry out essential tasks, such as intelligence gathering, in the most efficient way.
Such an organization could, for example, gather open source intelligence on social media, and provide early alerts to all EU members on lone-wolf suspects, instead of EU member states gathering intelligence separately.
Alternatively, the EU would need to reinstate national border controls, and conclude that "the current structure that they have built, based on the Schengen Area [where border controls have been lifted] is unsuitable to the current threat," Ganor said. That would constitute a fundamental change to a core EU principal, and Ganor said he did not envisage this happening any time soon.
In addition to lone wolf terrorists or local cells who are influenced by ISIS\’s ideology, the threat of organized cells, sent directly by ISIS on jihadist killing missions, such as the one behind the attacks in Paris in November 13, 2015, which left 130 people dead, remains very much in place, Ganor said. The terror organization has an interest in pulling off spectacular attacks in the West to divert attention away from losses in the Middle East.
ISIS is losing ground in its quasi-state in Syria and Iraq, yet it is still able to generate terrorism far from its caliphate, Ganor pointed out.
ISIS was once seen as a Middle Eastern, regional problem, yet today, "The genie is out of the bottle. ISIS has outer rings of attacks…They have regional franchises. ISIS is attempting to direct attention away from its defeats, and replace them with success stories about distant terror rings, to prove that it is still a force to be reckoned with," Ganor said.