WE SHALL NOT FLAG OR FAIL

Top security expert warns we need boots on the ground – in Britain – to f ight a new war on terror

IT WAS a murderous attack on the people of Britain at the very seat of our democracy – and under the watchful gaze of the statue of Sir Winston Churchill, a man who, more than anyone in the past two centuries, has symbolised the spirit of defiance.

Khalid Masood’s senseless rampage is a bloody reminder that now more than ever a Churchillian spirit is what we need: defiance, but laced with sharp intelligence.

Of course, there has been criticism of the security arrangements at Parliament, and of our overworked security services. Perhaps it is inevitable. But much of this is unfair. In fact, Britain’s Government quarter has no shortage of physical obstacles, armed policemen, surveillance cameras and scanners to detect weapons.

Parliament should always be accessible – and, remember, closed gates create risks, too. Members of the Cabinet are static targets if they have to sit and wait to enter the Palace of Westminster.

But the pressing issues lie elsewhere. We must look at what is taking place 3,000 miles away in the desert towns of Mosul and Raqqa, where Islamic State is suffering a desperate and almost certainly fatal military collapse. The disturbing result of this is that we here in Britain and in Europe must expect to become the new front line. There is every reason to believe the failure of IS’s ‘caliphate’ will be played out on our streets.

The statistics of defeat are clear. IS has lost 30 per cent of the territory it controlled in Syria, and 62 per cent of what it held in Iraq. The battle for Mosul, its Iraqi stronghold, is approaching a final conclusion. Normal life is resuming for the oppressed people in the eastern part of the city, which was finally retaken in January after a threemonth campaign by Iraqi and Kurdish forces.

NOW, 100,000 Iraqi troops are bravely fighting their way into the western part of the city, where 2,000 IS fighters are effectively trapped inside its warrens, facing almost certain death. The front line is 500 yards from the al-Nouri mosque, where in July 2014 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the ‘caliphate’.

There is no sign of him there now, nor of the 40 IS commanders who have been killed in US air strikes. Baghdadi’s last audio message was in November.

For sure, Mosul is a tough battle – with dense smoke and rubble concealing IS snipers – but there is no doubt about who will win.

Meanwhile, the Syrian town of Raqqa, the IS ‘capital’, is under siege from American troops and their Syrian Kurdish allies, the Turks, plus Syrian government forces backed by Iran and Russia. Again, the eventual result is clear.

But if all this is desperately needed good news for the people of Mosul and Raqqa, it is time for the citizens of Europe to take note.

IS is losing both its territory and the tax revenues that sustained it, and so must find other ways of making a mark – of reminding its sympathisers that it is not yet defeated.

There are other signs of the terror group’s decline. Its reach on social media is much diminished from the days when it publicised horrific acts of cruelty with slick videos. Iraqi experts believe that IS is no longer capable of producing them. Recent efforts have been of poor quality.

IS’s Twitter activity has been reduced by 45 per cent since 2014. New IS accounts are removed after only two days.

It is an unmistakeable retreat, which is why there has been an upsurge in IS terror attacks everywhere. Some 55 people were killed when an open-air used car market was hit in Baghdad, and more than 30 people died as IS killers dressed as doctors struck a military hospital in the Afghan capital of Kabul.

Attacks in Europe are highly likely, and as last Wednesday made clear, Britain is very much in the firing line.

There is no reason why networks used to smuggle foreign volunteers to Syria could not be used for the opposite purpose, and place those same volunteers back into the wealthy capitals of Europe.

Certainly, as we saw in the November 2015 Paris attacks, trained IS fighters know how to infiltrate the waves of migrants and refugees. How then should we respond?

The first answer is with maximum caution. Since several hundred of those who went to fight with IS, or to live in its ‘caliphate’, may return to these shores, we should consider interning them until we are satisfied they have not committed murder or rape, for which they should be tried back in Iraq and Syria, and that they represent no future danger here. The onus should be on them to prove otherwise.

If this means building new jails, so be it. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Those who have broken the law by joining proscribed organisations and pursuing terrorist causes abroad must not expect to enjoy the full freedom enjoyed by other British citizens.

We must also deal with an associated problem – the radicalisation of those already here, particularly through the prison system.

The truth is that mosques are no longer the main incubators of terrorism (and we should pay due respect to those Muslim clerics who see off radical interlopers, not to mention women who resist the tyranny of radical imams).

Instead, IS has discovered the potential in Britain’s huge prison population, where religious conversion can seem an avenue to salvation when life has reached its nadir. This involves conversion to a highly angry and resentful version of Islam, known as ‘prislam’.

There is not much talk of peace and goodwill.

As a matter of urgency, we need to isolate jihadist ideologues from other criminal inmates – perhaps as the Dutch do by creating jails within jails, with specialist staff to handle them.

Moreover, known jihadis should be imprisoned as far from their support networks as possible, as the Spanish authorities did by jailing ETA inmates hundreds of miles from the Basque region.

Then there is our shocking complacency about what are effectively Muslim enclaves, in Birmingham, Blackburn, Leices-

Those returning from fighting with IS should be interned

ter, Luton, and parts of east London such as Tower Hamlets.

It seems incredible that in a British Muslim population of 3.1million, as many as 200,000 women do not speak English.

It is troubling, too, that in parts of Birmingham, once colourful saris and shalwar kameez have been replaced by more restrictive clothes in pervasive black, symbolic of more puritanical versions of Islam. Four-year-olds are being made to wear hijabs and even polygamy is smiled on, often by Saudi-influenced mullahs from backward areas of Pakistan and Bangladesh.

DISGRACEFULLY, we have also allowed countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia – nations we should be suspicious of – to finance mosques and schools that propagate intolerant versions of Islam and actively retard integration.

Deft changes to school catchment areas and to boards of governors might help reverse that, as would more positive emphasis on groups who have integrated well, from the Chinese via the Jews to the Poles and Vietnamese. Most of all, however, we need to become more intelligent in the way we work.

GCHQ and MI5 have had some notable successes, but just consider the scale of the task. At any one time, 4,000 MI5 personnel have 3,000 suspected jihadist sympathisers on their radar, of whom 500 may require constant monitoring, some of it electronic.

Putting this number of suspects under human surveillance requires a huge number of people and, moreover, is a job that requires years of training.

Assuming that it takes 30 officers to mount 24/7 individual surveillance operations, one would need 15,000 officers to monitor 500 jihadis, or nearly four times the entire workforce of MI5. They must, then, concentrate on who is actually a real threat and on the major jihadi networks, especially those with known links to IS or Al Qaeda abroad.

One answer is relying on ‘big data’ scooped up from intercepts, card transactions and social media accounts. But I have major doubts about that approach, as the sheer quantity means useful analysis becomes impossible. The Americans have gone down this route, and we risk doing the same. Big data may help sell advertising space or beef burgers, or win elections, but I doubt its ability to identify terrorists. We must instead be smarter and take lessons from, among others, the Israelis, who rely on old-fashioned human capabilities. At Israeli airports there is far less reliance on electronic systems, and more on intelligent border guards who ask crucial and effective questions. These are not low-paid dullards from some private sub-contractor firm either, but people with backgrounds in the armed forces and security services. The Israelis spend more time observing human behaviour for signs of agitation or controlled anxiety, and far less dutifully going through rote procedures. You don’t have to remove your shoes at Ben Gurion airport, by the way. In my case, they checked me out by simply asking how to pronounce the surname in my passport – something few foreigners would guess. In Britain, we have moved away from this approach. I would like to see the return of the police Special Branch, with its focus on infiltration and subversion. Despite having been founded in 1883, the branch was abolished in 2006 by Sir Ian Blair, and absorbed into S015, the counter-terrorism command. Much local expertise, and the proverbial ‘copper’s nose’ of experienced detectives, was lost in the process. It is true that other countries have seen more terrible atrocities. But we should not congratulate ourselves on the fact that Khalid Masood killed four people and no more. We must act now. We should review the people and systems we have in place to see what can be improved. We should be wary of resorting to cheap and low-grade private subcontractors.We need more local bobbies and a revived Special Branch to deal with extremism and subversion where it thrives on the ground.

TWe need to be smarter and learn from others, like the Israelis

HERE is no point inflating the ranks of MI5, because it takes so much time to train people properly. Do not pass more laws – enforce the plethora of laws we have already.

We still need boots on the ground – this time here in our towns and cities. But – and this is crucial – they must be worn by educated, intelligent, committed officers.

It is time to get to grips with our ports, with our airports, our schools, our university bars, our crumbling prison cells, and that anonymous world of shabby flats and houses in the rootless urban areas that have been such magnets to terrorists in Belgium, France and now in Britain, too.

Above all, we need to embolden our Muslim compatriots to stand with us in Churchillian defiance. To use his words, we must not flag or fail.

For while the time and context of our finest hour might now be rather different, the threat we face is very real indeed.