Attackers’ ease of travel alarms experts.
Six assailants in Paris had gone to Syria and easily returned
LONDON — One of the militants in the Paris attacks traveled to Syria from his hometown in France and back, officials said, even after his passport had been confiscated and he had been placed under judicial oversight. So did another, despite having been arrested eight times in petty crimes and having been listed as a national security risk in France.
Even the man suspected of organizing the massacre on Friday, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a well-known figure in the Belgian jihadi scene, is believed to have traveled between Islamic Statecontrolled territory and Europe a number of times — including for an attack plot in Belgium in January.
The synchronized attacks on Friday, in which 129 people were killed with guns, grenades and suicide bombs at six sites, have sharpened the focus on the inability of security services to monitor the large and growing number of young European Muslims traveling to Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State or to spot terrorist plots in their early stages, even when the participants are well known to them.
It appears so far that as many as six of the assailants in Paris were Europeans who had traveled to Syria and returned to carry out attacks, precisely what security officials have been warning about for the past two years.
“This is the attack everyone was worried about, and it finally happened,” said Louis Caprioli, who was the deputy head of France’s domestic anti-terrorism unit from 1998 to 2004. “A high-casualty attack on multiple soft targets executed with apparent military know-how.” Warnings validated
The failure to detect the plot despite warnings has raised old questions with new urgency: Is Europe’s informal system of intelligence sharing adequate in the face of such threats? And do intelligence services need even more resources and surveillance powers?
The latest attacks, the deadliest ever in France, appear to validate concerns that both in scale and scope, the conflict in Syria represents a novel security threat to Western countries and Europe in particular. The number of Europeans drawn to fight jihad there has swelled to more than 3,000 in a little over two years. And the vast territory controlled by the Islamic State offers militants the opportunity to train in combat and bomb-making.
More than 1,000 French citizens and 600 Germans are believed to have traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. More British Muslims have joined the Islamic State — about 750 — than are currently enrolled in the British armed forces, according to Shiraz Maher, a senior research fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London.
Not all volunteer fighters returning from conflict become terrorists. Some academic research suggests that 1 in 10 do, while other sources say the ratio is as high as 1 in 4. Either way, the end result is a terrorist threat expanding at a rate that alarms security experts.
“The threat we are facing today is on a scale and at a tempo that I have not seen before in my career,” said Andrew Parker, the director-general of Britain’s domestic security service, MI5, in a lecture last month. Over the past year, his service has foiled six attacks in Britain alone. ‘Issue of volume’
Intelligence officials frequently complain that their ability to eavesdrop on suspects is increasingly being abridged by concerns about personal freedoms. The problems have only increased, with the availability of sophisticated encryption technology in instant messaging services like WhatsApp and iMessage.
Others bemoan a lack of trust and intelligence sharing in Europe. One senior Belgian counterterrorism official said that Turkey routinely failed to respond to requests for information, and suggested that this might have played a role in suspects’ slipping through the cracks. A Turkish official, however, said that his agency had twice told France the name of one of the Paris attackers, most recently in June, but did not hear back until after the massacre.
“What we need is the systematic sharing of information in real time,” said Caprioli, the former counterterrorism official.
The biggest challenge, counterterrorism experts and officials said, was not so much identifying those who represent a potential threat, but knowing whom to put under the tightest surveillance. In France alone, about 3,000 people are considered a potential threat, officials said.
“It’s an issue of volume,” said Raffaello Pantucci, the director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute. “The system is overwhelmed. There are so many individuals and cases they are worried about by now, historic and current, that they cannot keep up.”