Europe will need to adopt Israeli tactics
WHYMOHAMED Lahouaiej Bouhlel decided to drive a lorry into the crowds watching the Bastille Day fireworks, killing at least 84 people, will never be answered satisfactorily.
The fact that he was a mentally disturbed petty criminal who could have had contact with Daesh in the last weeks of his troubled life can fill in at least some of the blanks.
What part his family life and criminal record played in his plans, and whether he was galvanised by exposure to Islamist propaganda — perhaps he was seeking redemption through martyrdom — are not only of interest to point-scoring journalists and politicians: Western security services need to sit up and take note.
Bouhlel is a very different kind of perpetrator to Daesh operatives who carried out terror attacks earlier this year in Brussels and last November in Paris. They were part of a network stretching back to Daesh’s headquarters in Raqqa, Syria.
Some of them had actually been there, training and fighting as soldiers of the “Islamic State”. While their level of professionalism was relatively high, by acting as part of a group, they were more liable to be identified and located, simply because they were known to other, lower-ranking cell members and collaborators.
They were deadly because Daesh provided them with logistical support and bomb-making skills. But the tragedy in Nice proves that sometimes just having a license to drive a heavy vehicle is enough.
Israel’s security forces have been facing this kind of threat for several years, particularly following the weakening of Hamas and other Palestinian organisations in the West Bank.
Over the past nine months, the majority of terror attacks have been carried out by individuals without any clear organisational affiliation. This is why knives, vehicles and makeshift guns were used, rather than expertly-assembled explosive vests, as in the past.
Locating these individual perpetrators has necessitated what one Israeli officer calls “a shift in the intelligence paradigm”. Instead of looking out for terror networks with a discern- ible hierarchy, the Shin Bet and the IDF have been assembling profiles of potential attackers — usually teenagers and young people, often suffering from some form of domestic issues and without connections to politics or religion.
Using social media, they have identified patterns of radicalistion, whereby potential perpetrators have been persuaded very quickly to carry out a terror attack. On this basis, the intelligence services are creating new watch-lists of suspects who can be subjected to increased electronic surveillance and, in some cases, warned off and their parents notified.
These are new tactics are still being refined but there have already been a number of successes in which attackers were located and arrested in advance. It will not be easy to apply these methods to much larger populations in Western democracies where laws often limit electronic surveillance, but short of cancelling massevents, or holding them in maximimsecurity conditions, it is hard to see what else can be done.