IT’S WHEN, NOT IF, THE EXTREMISTS HIT BRITAIN

RAMADAN is a time of fasting and reflection for Muslims everywhere. It also seems to be the time when terrorist groups strike, as they did in France, Kuwait and Tunisia yesterday.

The attacks reflect a pattern of atrocities with discernible strategic aims.

They were designed to show that IS and its affiliate groups – for while they had claimed responsibility only for the attack in Kuwait by last night, the other two bore their horrific hallmarks – are capable of striking at all points of the compass.

They also showed that, far from being confined to some distant Syrian desert, the terrorists can easily strike in the playgrounds of British holidaymakers, and are creeping ever closer to our own shores.

With so many of their battle-hardened fighters from Syria now back in Britain, it can surely only be a matter of time before they strike here.

IS-inspired atrocities in France are now becoming very frequent, though leaving a severed head with Arabic slogans on it attached to a fence – as happened in yesterday’s attempt to blow up a US-owned gas manufacturing plant near Lyon – is undoubtedly a new low.

That a gas plant was chosen as the target is deeply worrying too.

Did the terrorists hope to unleash a chemical gas attack on the French town – akin to the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India where thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands maimed as a result of a gas leak at a pesticide factory – by blowing up the plant?

Whatever the case, our ally and neighbour France is being targeted because its armed forces are currently engaged against Islamists on the ground in Mali and in the air over Syria and Iraq, and because its mandatory secularism which bans the wearing of the burka particularly offends those who wish to impose Sharia law.

France also has a huge North African Muslim population, many of whom live in the depressed ‘banlieues’ areas of major cities. Several hundreds of them have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight with IS or other terror organisations, and they do not cease being lethal when they return home.

A senior IS commander, Abu Muhammad al Adnani, recently enjoined those supporters who could not fight in Syria and Iraq to kill ‘disbelieving Americans, Frenchmen, and any others’ by knifing them, running them over, or by poisoning and strangulation.

It is clear that followers in France are taking him at his word.

IS supporters in Tunisia are not hard to find either. The country supplies more of the terrorist group’s foreign fighters than any other nation.

Tunisia is the sole surviving poster boy for the Arab Spring of 2011, the place where the spring’s ‘democratic revolution’ started and the one place where it has yet to unravel.

The country has a democratically elected, secular government, but is riven between the well-to- do elite on the coast and the much poorer inhabitants of the country’s interior. More significantly, it attracts 6.1million tourists a year, who contribute 15.2 per cent of the country’s GDP and provide work for 473,000 Tunisians.

So if IS is seeking to destabilise Tunisia, a strike against the tourist industry’s innocent beachgoers is a good start. In this sense it is a repeat of the tragic attack at the Bardo Museum in March, where tourists were also gunned down.

Tunisia may have one of the highest GDPs per capita on the African continent and a young adult literacy rate of 96 per cent, but it also has 40 per cent youth unemployment in its dusty towns and villages.

Their inhabitants provide useful cannon fodder for the local thousand-strong Islamist group Ansar al-Sharia, which is affiliated to IS. Its banner shows a finger pointing skywards with AK-47s on each side. It has attacked TV stations, museums, and tourists as manifestations of secularism, as well as assassinating politicians and soldiers.

TUNISIA borders both Algeria, whose remote south is the operating ground of a particularly vicious Al Qaeda affiliate, and Libya, where IS and other terror groups have established themselves amidst two rival governments and hundreds of armed militias.

Libya is awash with assault rifles and heavier weapons, as well as remote jihadi training camps, and both guns and men can move freely across unpatrolled borders.

That is where the homegrown Tunisian terrorists who struck yesterday would have got their weapons.

As for the bomb attack which killed at least 25 and wounded 202 worshippers in a Shia mosque in Kuwait, this was part of a deliberate attempt by IS’s extreme Sunni Islamist groups to provoke a massive sectarian war in the greater Middle East.

Several Shia mosques have recently been attacked by IS inside Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province as well as in Yemen, but this is the first attack on the small and rich Gulf state of Kuwait.

These three related attacks – all significantly on the same day – are intended to show the global reach of Islamist fanatics. A reach that is increasing at a terrifying speed.