Isil’s ‘virtual caliphate’ is next threat
BRITAIN will not be safe from Isil terrorist attacks while the extremists’ “virtual caliphate” survives, one of the Prime Minister’s senior security advisers has warned.
Patrick Mcguinness said that as the last fighters were swept out of the areas of Iraq and Syria formerly under the militants’ control – self-described as the “caliphate” – the web had now become the front line against the group.
Counter-terrorism experts told a conference at the Royal United Services Institute in London that the priority was to destroy the “virtual caliphate” of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil). Mr Mcguinness, the deputy national security adviser, said the speed at which vulnerable Britons could now be radicalised and plan attacks made them almost impossible to stop.
He made the comments as a senior European Union security official warned of the prospect of jihadists using biological warfare or cyber weapons to cause havoc.
Mr Mcguinness said: “Until Islamic State cannot occupy space online freely, we will not be safe.” He said the speed at which people are “brought to violence” was now “almost too fast to catch without the most extraordinary intrusive surveillance techniques which are not going to be sustainable or acceptable in a Western democracy”.
Mr Mcguinness called on web companies to do more to tackle the threat. Large companies such as Google had made steps towards taking down extremist content, but he questioned if it was a high priority for them and “whether or not it is the A-team on this”.
He went on: “It is massively about the choice that the tech companies make as to what they have on their networks.” He said the tech giants would need to use similar techniques used to battle online child sex abuse.
“These firms have got it in them to resolve this issue substantially.”
A senior EU official also warned that home-grown radicalised attackers were a bigger threat than extremists returning from the Middle East and warned that jihadists fighting for Isil, also known as Daesh, may be able to cause havoc with cyber or bio weapons.
Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union’s counter-terrorism coordinator, also suggested a “Daesh 2.0” may emerge after the fall of the caliphate as the militants join forces with al-qaeda.
He said there was growing consensus among intelligence chiefs that foreign fighters who had travelled to Iraq and Syria to join Isil would either die there or flee to other “hotspots” as the caliphate collapsed. The return of foreign fighters was expected to be a “trickle”, he said. However, he warned that home grown extremists could employ cyber and biological weapons to cause destruction.
He said it was “probably easier than before for a lone actor to perpetrate an attack with catastrophic consequences”. He also warned that advances in biological engineering meant jihadists may in future manufacture biological weapons, rather than homemade explosives.
An early issue of an al-qaeda propaganda magazine offered instructions on “how to make a bomb in your mum’s kitchen”. He said: “What if anyone will have a similar article on how to process a virus in your mum’s kitchen?”