EUROPE is, yet again, the theatre of a terrorist attack, with Spain as the target this time around. The country, until now, had appeared comparatively safe from such incidents, having last experienced a terrorist attack in 2004, when near simultaneous explosions on board four commuter trains heading towards Madrid killed around 190 people and injured over 2,000. Not any longer. On Thursday, a white van careened into crowds strolling along Las Ramblas, Barcelona’s pedestrian street that is popular with locals and tourists alike. At least 13 were killed and more than 100 injured. Then, a few hours later, a car carrying multiple attackers rammed into people in Cambrils, a city 120km from Barcelona, which resulted in injuries to six. Police shot the assailants dead before they could cause more carnage. The militant Islamic State group has claimed that the first attack, in connection with which a number of arrests have been made, was carried out by its ‘soldiers’.

The wave of terrorist attacks in Europe, which began in mid-2014 with a shooting inside the Jewish Museum in Brussels, Belgium, illustrates how events in one part of an interconnected world have an impact elsewhere. The situation in the Middle East, where the civil war in Syria and Iraq provided the crucible for IS to evolve, has drawn Europe inexorably into its ambit. For one, France which is in the forefront of the war against IS has been repeatedly targeted by terrorists linked to that outfit. Secondly, hundreds of citizens from various European countries also joined the group. There was thus always the risk that these individuals would turn on their own countries, a fear realised in its entirety after the terrorist organisation began to crumble under the weight of coalition-backed military assaults and the fighters began returning home. In fact, IS’s leadership urged its ‘soldiers’ to carry out attacks in their own countries using low-tech means including knives, vehicles, etc in the absence of access to explosives or firearms. Vehicle attacks such as the recent ones in Spain have thus spiked of late, and they are equally terrifying because they are so difficult to pre-empt. Thus even in the twilight of its territorial existence, IS continues to wreak a trail of destruction across Europe, not to mention many other regions of the world. Nothing so devastatingly illustrates that the fight against extremist ideologies cannot be won by military force alone.

Published in Dawn, August 19th, 2017