After London, war on ISIL must adapt

The Westminster attacker was barely known to MI5, yet was able to launch a deadly attack

An undated photo released by the Metropolitan Police of Khalid Masood, the man who carried out a terror attack outside the UK Parliament. (Metropolitan Police via AP)

To their immense credit, Londoners appear to have shrugged off the terror attack outside the British Parliament last week. For the security services, however, the questions continue. The man who committed Wednesday’s attack, Khalid Masood, was known to MI5 and had been on the service’s radar for years. However, it was decided his behaviour did not justify active monitoring. For that, the service and its politician overseers have been heavily criticised.

Yet ISIL is changing its tactics. In response to the push against their strongholds in Syria and Iraq, the group’s ability to manoeuvre has been compromised. ISIL has adapted – and that means that intelligence agencies worldwide will need to adapt as well.

As ISIL has lost territory it has also lost the ability to recruit and train attackers and plan attacks. In contrast to the coordination shown in the November 2015 Paris attacks, ISIL’s claimed major attacks in Europe last year, in Nice, Berlin and Istanbul were all low-tech, involving trucks and guns. It seems likely that as ISIL continues to be defeated in its regional strongholds, such attacks will become its prefered method.

That will make the task much harder for intelligence agencies. Lone wolves are much harder to detect and those who are merely “inspired” by ISIL, rather than trained by it, are the hardest to detect of all. At the moment, it appears that Masood fell into that category. He was either radicalised in prison in the UK or “self-radicalised” online. He may not have had much contact with ISIL “officially”, he may have decided to carry out the attack on his own.

This kind of radicalism is profoundly difficult to detect. It flourishes online, in the hidden spaces of the internet. Like other radical groups – Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and others – these groups spread an ideology that seeks to destabilise nation states. In the case of ISIL, the ideology has literally torn two nations apart.Online, these ideologies find vulnerable men and women, with no competing voices to disuade them.

That extremism poses a grave threat. The war against radicalism will not be won with weapons alone. Of course, ISIL must be defeated by military means in its Middle Eastern strongholds. But its ideas and those of the many international groups like it must also be defeated in all the forums in which they fester. Only then can a repeat of the London attacks be avoided. Just as the extremists are adapting in how they attack us, so we must adapt to defeat them.