Europe takes action against jihadi cells after Paris terrorist attacks

BERLIN – After years of watching and worrying about the prospect of terror attacks as hundreds of residents returned from Syria with fresh combat skills, security officials across Europe moved Friday to roll up jihadi cells they’d apparently been monitoring for months.

In other words, officials have declared game on in the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks.

Over 48 hours, police in France, Austria, Belgium, England, Germany and Slovakia arrested or killed more than two dozen terrorism suspects. Investigations have stretched into several other European nations.

“In the security services, it’s been known for a while that it was only a matter of time before all hell broke loose,” said Magnus Ranstorp, an international security expert at the Swedish National Defense College. “Paris was the moment it happened.”

After Paris, security services across the continent were under enormous pressure to make sure there were no repeats, no copycat attacks. At the same time, the attention the attack brought to the jihadist narrative increased pressure on cells to act, as well.

“Expect this to continue for a long while,” Ranstorp said. “Expect arrests, plots or attacks every couple of weeks.”

EUROPOL, a Europe-wide policing organization, said 5,000 Europeans were thought to have traveled to fight in Syria or Iraq, either with the Islamic State or other terrorist organizations. That number is up from an estimate of 2,000 made in June, and experts caution that such estimates are likely minimum numbers, since official counts comprise only those people whom security services know about. Many more sneak by without notice, they say.

The reasons are well-known: There’s a generation of disaffected youth growing up at a time when the European economy is retracting. There’s increasing xenophobia on the continent, with anti-immigration groups growing, from France’s Front National to Germany’s Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West.

There’s a generation of young Muslims in a post-9/11 world who’ve grown up consuming propaganda that the West is at war with their faith. And there are estimates in Germany that a full 10 percent of so-called “jihadi tourists” are recent converts to Islam and immediately opt for extremism and violence, as a way to take part in something greater than their normal lives.

“Getting invited to Syria is like getting invited to play in the Super Bowl,” Ranstorp said. “We’re looking at a perfect jihadi storm.”

In Belgium, police reported Thursday evening they’d foiled a plot aimed at killing police officers throughout the country. When they raided the building in Verviers, near the German border, they found weapons, explosives and police uniforms. They killed two men known to have trained in Syria and arrested a third.

Belgian prosecutor Eric Van der Sypt said at a news conference that the suspects had been stopped only hours before launching their plan.

“This group wanted to kill police officers on the streets and in police stations,” he said. “They were planning attacks all over Belgium.”

He noted Belgian police had carried out 11 other raids.

In Germany, Berlin police spokesman Stefan Redlich said one of the arrests there had targeted an organization dedicated to recruiting and sending new fighters to Syria. Seized was the self-appointed emir of the organization, who, in keeping with German privacy laws, was identified as Ismet D., 41.

Arrests elsewhere included an 18-year-old woman in London, a 14-year-old in Austria who’d talked about his bomb-making skills and desire to travel to Syria, and Hamzat Sh., 32, suspected of terrorist acts in Russia, who was arrested in Slovakia as he was trying to cross the border into Ukraine with a Swedish passport.

As was the case in Belgium, German police said there were no direct connections between the arrests and the three days of terrorist attacks last week in Paris that left 17 victims and three terrorists dead. Those attacks began 11:30 a.m. Jan. 7 with an assault on the French weekly satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo that left 12 dead.