Experts: Terror Alerts Are The New Normal

Experts: Terror Alerts Are The New Normal

A French soldier patrols the Part-Dieu shopping mall in Lyon as part of the "Vigipirate" security plan after last week's Islamic militant attacks, January 16, 2015. France deploys 10,000 soldiers on home soil and posts almost 5,000 extra police officers after the killing of 17 people by Islamist militants in Paris last week. REUTERS/Robert Pratta (FRANCE - Tags: POLITICS CRIME LAW MILITARY)

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Following the 13 November attacks in Paris, terrorism analysts in the United Kingdom and Europe say the continent’s intelligence and security services have accepted the reality that ISIS appears not only to have the intention to continue to attack targets in Europe, but also the capability professionally to plan and execute such attacks, according to Homeland Security News Wire.

The signs of this growing awareness were evident on New Year’s Eve. Munich was partially evacuated following a terror threat on New Year’s Eve, and different events in other European cities were cancelled or scaled down owing to security concerns.

“For the last fifteen years there have been terrorist organizations who have wanted to carry out attacks in crowded places, so in that sense this is nothing new. And since the attack in 2008 in Mumbai we have been aware of the possibility of the marauding multi-site gun attacks,” said .Margaret Gilmore, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute

“But what is new now is that ISIS has proved they are capable, after Paris, of carrying out terrible attacks beyond its traditional arena of the Middle East.”

She added that the attack on the French capital had demonstrated how quickly the group had grown. She said security services in each country would still have to evaluate each threat on its merits, but the knowledge thatISIS has the capability to carry out large-scale attacks would mean more security — and potentially more cancellations of high-profile events.

“It is clear from what we saw in Paris that they are capable of controlling the process — able to train, plan and execute these attacks — and that is something that the security services across Europe will be taking very seriously indeed,” she said.

Prof. Rik Coolsaet, a terrorism expert at Ghent University in Belgium, said that although there was nothing new in terrorist groups wanting to attack high-profile public gatherings such as New Year’s Eve, ISIS’s appeal meant Europe was entering a new era.

He told the Guardian that the group had become the “object of all kinds of fantasies for all kinds of individuals, from thrill-seekers to the mentally unstable,” who wanted to be part of the ISIS, and that made the security services’ task much harder.

“In the months ahead we are going to be facing a new normal,” Coolsaet said. “One day the hype surrounding Isis will have vanished, but until that happens I fear there will be more threats, more disruption, more houses raided and more arrests as countries come to terms with the scale of this group and its intentions … It is something we will have to get used to.”

He also warned there was a danger of people conflating the refugee crisis Europe is facing with the growing terror threat.

“What I do fear is the combination of these two things into something near hysteria. We must not confuse these two separate issues and we must be wary of any politicians who try and do that for their own ends, to the detriment of the very fabric of our society,” he said.