Train attack shows impossibility of tracking all jihadists

The thwarted attack by a gunman on a high-speed train between Amsterdam and Paris has underlined the difficulty faced by intelligence services in tracking the unprecedented numbers of potential jihadists, experts say.

The 26-year-old Moroccan suspect in Friday’s shooting, who was overpowered by two US servicemen and other passengers before he could kill anyone, was first flagged to Spanish authorities as a potential extremist and intelligence sources said he had travelled to Syria.

In a timely interview published on the same day as the attack, Alain Grignard, a senior member of Belgium’s counter-terrorism police unit, said the terrorist threat has “never been higher in all the years I’ve been working”.

“It boils down to mathematics and it’s all linked to the Syria dynamic,” Grignard told CTC Sentinel, the in-house journal of the US military academy at West Point.

“There’s no way of knowing the exact numbers but I can tell you with certainty that at least 300 have travelled — that’s the number we have sufficient evidence to bring charges against. At least 100 have returned to Belgium, but we are under no illusions that there aren’t more we don’t know about. It’s impossible to do surveillance on everybody.”

It’s a point driven home by terrorism expert Raffaello Pantucci of the Royal United Services Institute in London.

“The authorities know about a lot of people but not which ones will actually launch an attack,” he said.

“It’s a very resource-intensive job. You need three shifts with several people, and equipment and vehicles, to watch someone 24 hours a day. Intelligence agencies just aren’t big enough to do that for everyone.”

A Spanish counter-terrorism source said the Moroccan suspect in Friday’s attack had lived in Spain for a year before moving to France and visiting Syria in 2014.

Grignard said the number of terrorism suspects had mushroomed in recent years.

“To give you an idea of the scale of the challenge, in the past two years we’ve charged more people with terrorism offences than in the 30 years before that,” he said.

“Our approach in Belgium is to detain everybody suspected of fighting with terrorist groups in Syria when they return to Belgium. We interrogate them and charge them if we have evidence. But in lots of cases we do not have enough evidence,” he added.

Brussels, where the suspect boarded the train, is thought to have the highest per capita number of people in Europe leaving to fight in the Middle East.

The threat was underlined when Belgian police busted a jihadist cell linked to the Islamic State group in January, thwarting an alleged plot to attack police.

But France has the highest overall numbers joining the jihad, with the government reporting that 843 had left for Syria as of May — more than half of them unknown to authorities at the time of their departure.

“It’s the perennial problem of how you prioritize between serious concerns,” said Pantucci. “Plus there’s the Schengen free movement — it’s very easy for people to move around.

“Intelligence agencies in different countries are getting better at talking to each other, but they may make different assessments of individuals and put their priorities in different areas.”

As if to underline the obstacles to intelligence-sharing, the initial revelations about Friday’s attack have brought conflicting accounts from France and Spain.

Spanish authorities told AFP he travelled from France to Syria and back last year, but French officials said they were never informed of this.

Although jihadist profiles vary greatly, one of the key trends in Grignard’s view has been an increasing number who come from “inner-city gang” backgrounds.

“Young Muslim men with a history of social and criminal delinquency are joining up with the Islamic State as part of a sort of ‘super-gang’,” he told CTC Sentinel.

He cites the cell broken up in January “who were radicalized very quickly, and when they came back from Syria they had no fear of death”. Two militants were killed in the raid.

“When our commandos launched their raid it took the suspected terrorists one second to switch from chatting between themselves to opening fire.

“These guys had maybe more experience in gun battles than our own commandos. Here in Belgium and across Europe we are now reviewing how we do these kind of raids,” said Grignard.

There is also a limit to how much security can be mounted, particularly around trains.

“Airplanes leave from a specific place — you can build a security apparatus around it,” said Pantucci. “It’s just not possible to do that with trains. You would have to do that at every station from large terminals in Paris to small towns in rural france.

“And if you create more barriers, you cause big crowds and that just creates a new target.”