Terror in Vienna: Austria’s home-grown jihadists
In surveys, Vienna consistently ranks as the world’s most liveable city, said Alexandra Föderl-Schmid in Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich). It is culturally rich, has a relaxed atmosphere, and is sufficiently safe that even Austria’s highest-ranking politicians frequent its many coffee houses without worrying about security. And though it has seen political violence in the past – Carlos the Jackal held Opec’s oil ministers hostage there in 1975 – it had largely avoided the terrorism that has “menaced” other European capitals in recent years, said The Economist – until last week. On 2 November, a 20-year-old Islamist rampaged through the city as people enjoyed a final evening out before a new lockdown came into force. Armed with an assault rifle, a pistol and a machete, he killed four people and injured 23 others before being shot dead by police. He was named as Kujtim Fejzulai, who had Austrian and North Macedonian citizenship, and had been previously jailed for trying to join Islamic State.
The terror attack follows a flurry of others in Europe. On 16 October, a teacher was decapitated near Paris; two weeks later, three people were murdered in a church in Nice. And it has set off a furious blame game in Austria, said Stephan Löwenstein in
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Ministers are angry that Fejzulai was released eight months into a 22-month sentence, and that warnings by police in Slovakia that he had tried to buy ammunition there went unheeded by Austrian police. Austria has failed to tackle a growing problem with jihadism in recent years, said Guido Steinberg in Der Standard (Vienna). Hard-line imams have operated in Vienna for decades; arresting them seems only to have driven their followers underground, making them harder to monitor. Some 300 jihadists from Austria joined Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq between 2012 and 2017 – among Europe’s highest per capita totals. This attack was “no surprise”.
We tend to see radical Islam as an external threat, said Walter Hämmerle in Wiener Zeitung. But Fejzulai wasn’t a refugee or a recent migrant. He was born in Austria to parents with Albanian roots, and he was radicalised here too; most of our home-grown radicals are second-generation immigrants from Turkey, the Balkans or Chechnya. This attack raises all sorts of questions for the authorities. But it also shows that “the fight against radicalisation and extremism must be carried out and won in Austria. With, not against, the country’s Muslims.”