On Monday 22 May, at around 10.30pm, a jihadist terrorist suicide bombing at the end of an Ariana Grande concert in the concourse between the Manchester Arena and Victoria train station killed 22 people, including several children, and injured more than 100 others. The attack followed a pattern that has become grimly familiar in Europe and, to a lesser extent, the United States. A single terrorist with Middle Eastern roots but born in his host country – radicalised by travel to a ‘field of jihad’ as well as local events; known to counter-terrorism authorities but not considered a serious threat – chose a ‘soft’ target and caused mass casualties while taking his own life. He was inspired by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. As of the date of publication, it remained unclear whether the suicide bomber planned the attack himself.
Like the recent attacks in Paris and Brussels, the Manchester attacker exploited the enjoyments and vulnerabilities of modern, middle-class urban life in an effort to destabilise public interaction and shatter public confidence in the government’s capacity to protect the populace. As ISIS comes under increasing military pressure in Syria and Iraq – which will probably culminate in its battlefield defeat – the group and perhaps al-Qaeda are likely to amplify their incitement of, and assistance in, terrorist operations against soft targets in the West in an effort to maintain their overall threat and political salience.
The culprit
The perpetrator, 22-year-old Salman Abedi, was born and grew up in Manchester, and was a UK citizen. His parents had fled Libya in 1991 after supporting Islamists seeking to overthrow Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi. After the NATO coalition dislodged Gadhafi’s regime and insurgents killed Gadhafi in 2011, Abedi’s father, Ramadan, an Islamist, took him and his two brothers back to Libya to join in the military reclamation of Tripoli. Other Libyan refugees residing in Manchester also made the journey. Although the Abedis’ precise activities remain unclear, they appear to have been involved in some fighting; Ramadan photographed Salman’s brother, Hashem, holding a machine gun, publishing the image alongside the caption ‘Hashem the lion … training’. Ramadan subsequently divided his time between Libya and Manchester. The three sons lived in Manchester with their mother, although they periodically visited Libya with their father. Ramadan became a more fervent Islamist, cheering on jihadists in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries.
The Libya experience changed Salman. Whereas he had been a shy and quiet schoolboy, teased and sometimes bullied, he started drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana and fighting. Salman had regularly attended religious services at the Didsbury Mosque with his father, but his attendance became less frequent after his father returned to Libya. In 2015 he angrily objected to a sermon opposing ISIS that the imam at the mosque had delivered, and was banned from the mosque. Shortly thereafter, at least two members of the congregation reported Salman’s outburst to the authorities via the counter-terrorism hotline.
By 2015, the Libyan branch of ISIS had established a stronghold in Sirte, the elder Abedi’s hometown. It was there, according to Libyan and US officials, that during a visit with his father Salman met Abdul Baset Ghwela, a radical preacher whose son had died fighting in Benghazi. In parallel, back in Manchester, Salman connected with ISIS recruits, including Raphael Hostey. Law-enforcement officials believe Salman revered Hostey, who reportedly died in a strike by an unmanned aerial vehicle in Syria in May 2016. A week later, Abdalraouf Abdallah, a Manchester acquaintance of Salman’s, was sentenced to nine years in prison for terrorism offences. One day after that, Abdul Wahab Hafidah, a friend, was hit by a car and then stabbed to death in what police labelled as a gang-related incident.
If Salman Abedi’s experiences in Libya appear to have partially radicalised him, these three rapid-fire events likely completed the process and triggered his intent to commit an act of terrorism. He opened a bank account in which he deposited the proceeds of student loans that went unused after he dropped out of the University of Salford, where he had briefly enrolled to study business management. Now worshipping regularly at a different mosque in Manchester, Salman grew increasingly intolerant and combative. Even his father became alarmed at this change in Salman’s behaviour, and briefly confiscated his passport during one of his trips to Libya.
Salman used the money in the bank account to buy what he needed to build the bomb from two local hardware stores, including nails and screws that functioned as lethal shrapnel, and to rent the apartment where he assembled the device. He had last returned from Libya only four days prior to the attack. A few minutes before the bombing, he made a brief phone call to his mother, asking her forgiveness for anything he did wrong.
Counter-terrorism indicators and responses
British investigators quickly established the identity of the suicide bomber by way of closed-circuit-television footage that recorded his movements around the attack site. Ascertaining whether the attacker acted alone or with the help of a network was a priority. While individuals often act on their own, the popular term ‘lone wolf’ is usually misleading, as even basic prerequisites such as fashioning a suicide vest or backpack – notwithstanding online instructions – call for skill and experience that most impulsive loners do not possess.
Investigators believe that Abedi received substantial training in Libya. The backpack, shrapnel and battery used in the Manchester bomb reflected considerable expertise and planning, and the operative explosive was probably triacetone triperoxide, or TATP – also used in the London, Paris and Brussels attacks – which requires some delicacy to mix and handle. Furthermore, carrying an impulse initially stimulated by news or propaganda forward into action may require the emotional and ideological reinforcement of friends, family members or acquaintances who are aware of a would-be perpetrator’s radicalisation and violent intentions, even if they are in the dark about operational details.
Accordingly, the UK authorities’ early assessment was that a sophisticated cell probably supplied Abedi with logistical, technical and emotional support. But the complicity of others does not always make it significantly easier for law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, which, if involving only a small circle of operatives, can still be planned and executed below the radar.
While ISIS claimed credit for the Manchester attack through its semi-official propaganda arm Amaq, it remained unclear, as of the date of publication, which ISIS members or supporters had contact with the attacker, what training or other facilitation he received, and where and how he received it. The group often retrospectively claims credit for attacks that it merely inspires, and practically has little or nothing to do with, to maximise perceptions of its operational reach and tempo.
The United Kingdom’s response was robust. Following the attack, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) raised the terror-threat level to ‘critical’, the maximum, for only the third time in the country’s history. Around 1,000 officers were mobilised, initially working 14-hour shifts, and were tasked to execute more than 1,500 separate actions. The threat level signified that the authorities believed that another attack could be imminent given that Abedi did not use all of the materiel he had purchased, and indicated that, in light of the relative sophistication of the backpack bomb, they suspected he had accomplices.
In fact, within less than a week of the bombing, the British police had taken 14 suspects into custody and were searching several locations. Although hundreds of soldiers were deployed at key sites to reinforce police protection, public events proceeded as scheduled. On Saturday 27 May, because the arrests were regarded as having degraded any terrorist network that might carry out a second bombing, JTAC downgraded the threat level from ‘critical’ to ‘severe’. The police believed that most of those in Abedi’s network had been apprehended, but stressed that some participants could still be at large.
Enforcement quandaries
The attack in Manchester reflected a vexing and persistent reality of counter-terrorism enforcement: the perpetrator was previously known to the authorities as a potential terrorist but deemed too negligible a threat to merit the level of attention that would have alerted them to his operational activities and enabled them to prevent the attack. While the Security Service (also known as MI5), the UK’s primary domestic-intelligence service, had been apprised of Abedi’s extremist attitudes at least three times and included him on the list of 3,000 persons of interest, he was deemed not to be dangerous after an investigation and removed from the list. Thus, his file was closed and all security alerts removed – with the result that none would have arisen when he showed his passport at border controls.
The UK authorities were understandably annoyed by early US disclosures of details of the Manchester attack, including forensic images of the bomb apparatus, which they believed impeded their investigation. To an extent, this rift reflected transatlantic differences in counter-terrorism approaches: the United States seeks to roll up terrorist networks as quickly as possible; the UK to wait before shutting them down to glean maximum intelligence. UK courts also are more inclined to deem pre-trial disclosure of information prejudicial at trial. The episode broadly suggested that inter-governmental coordination and cooperation on counter-terrorism could still be improved.
The overall ability of law-enforcement and intelligence services to continually track and interdict the activities of violent extremists has flagged in recent years. Potential threats have increased as conflicts fuelling jihadism in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere have burgeoned, showing little sign of appreciably diminishing in the short or medium term. These conflicts serve as fodder for propaganda about radical Islam’s embattlement and defiance for dissemination to domestic extremists through local recruiters and online efforts. Such recruiters target individuals aggrieved by social disadvantages and prejudice in their host countries, who are encouraged and recruited to travel to these ‘fields of jihad’ for ideological indoctrination and operational training in urban terror techniques.
The UK security services have generally performed well. At the time of the Manchester bombing, MI5 reported that it was handling around 500 active investigations relating to 3,000 persons of interest and had thwarted 18 terrorist plots of varying degrees of seriousness since 2013, including five since March 2017. Yet the capacity of agencies to assess and prioritise these threats has largely remained static against expanding Middle Eastern conflicts, their radicalisation and training efficacy, and the increasingly refined and resilient ideology of jihadism. Concerns that jihadists would take advantage of the civic disarray produced by the Manchester attack to stage more attacks – based in part on the Paris and Brussels experiences – drove the UK’s decision to raise the terror-threat level. The large number of potential terrorists among domestic populations in Europe ensures that this level will remain high indefinitely.
The task of sifting a large collection of potential terrorists to determine which ones warrant the allocation of limited intelligence and enforcement resources remains intractable. Nevertheless, the UK security services are assessing whether they could have spotted Salman Abedi more readily, and they will incorporate any lessons they have learned into best practice. A possible positive takeaway from the Manchester tragedy may be its illumination of the utility of interdicting foreign travel – which appears to have been key to Abedi’s radicalisation – by suspected prospective terrorists. But this remains a significant challenge, operationally and politically, even for sophisticated and well-resourced intelligence services such as the UK’s. Meanwhile, since ISIS lost its stronghold in Sirte, the potential return of foreign fighters from Libya to the UK and other European locales has become a more salient issue. Outflows of foreign fighters from Iraq and Syria in the wake of the group’s expulsion from Mosul and Raqqa respectively raise similar concerns.
Historical and strategic considerations
One of the most disturbing aspects of the Manchester attack is the diabolical effectiveness of the evolving and iterative ISIS operational model. At least to its ‘far enemies’ in Europe and the United States, al-Qaeda initially posed the threat of an occasional but massive attack, calibrated to the prohibitively high standards of shock and carnage it set with 9/11. ISIS now threatens to conduct more frequent, less operationally demanding urban-warfare operations.
The large-scale, coordinated attacks with which al-Qaeda hoped to trump 9/11 never came because the US invasion of Afghanistan disrupted the activities of the group’s headquarters and hobbled its planning and command-and-control capabilities. In reverting to old-fashioned terrorist tactics involving soft targets, as in Bali and Madrid, al-Qaeda appeared ready to embrace them as more realistic means of achieving its grand objectives by raising a second-generation army designed to wage traditional urban warfare. The Times Square car-bomb attempt in May 2010 and several subsequent thwarted plots in Europe seemed to mark the end of al-Qaeda’s post-Afghanistan retreat and its commencement of a new urban-warfare strategy. But the United States’ killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 and al-Qaeda’s subsequent disarray again forced the group to retrench and focus on the greater Middle East rather than Europe and the United States.
Having arisen from the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq and spawned a notional caliphate in blood in Syria in Iraq, ISIS has effectively picked up where al-Qaeda stalled. Its leadership has embraced urban warfare of the sort pioneered by terrorists decades ago: Provisional Irish Republican Army-style operations in densely populated areas, using both conventional military weapons (such as assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades) and standard terrorist weapons (such as improvised explosive devices), but turbocharged to cause mass casualties. And ISIS has not imposed tight command and control on its followers, encouraging them to act on their own. Repeated close-quarters confrontation with the general population is nearly as daunting as the more novel apocalyptic terrorism that the strikes against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center appeared to herald.
Outlook
Insofar as its rising out-of-area attacks reflect its increasing beleaguerment in the Middle East, ISIS is becoming weaker as an operational fighting force. From the standpoint of Western security, however, solace in this reality is misplaced. Ongoing war in the Middle East – regardless of who wins – increases the opportunities for Muslims inclined towards violence to become fully radicalised and blooded, even if many also die on the battlefield. Moreover, compared with comprehensive insurgency aimed at securing territory, urban warfare is easy to execute. It involves fewer and cheaper resources, less exacting planning and coordination, relatively inconspicuous preparation (mainly requiring readily concealable small arms and dual-use items) and fewer operatives. Even if militarily disabled in the Middle East and elsewhere, ISIS can panic and disrupt Western society the old-fashioned way, on a global scale.
A sustained campaign could also eventually bring about an ongoing, direct, ground-level armed engagement by Western security forces. Recall Belfast or Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s. That could ultimately create the political impetus for increasingly rigid security measures; produce a backlash that divides Muslim and non-Muslims in Europe, the United States and elsewhere; and crowd out democratic governance and liberal norms. These are ISIS objectives.
Indeed, the centrality of lurid and generally distorted visions of terrorist infiltration to the UK vote to leave the European Union (‘Brexit’) and the election of an illiberal and anti-Muslim US president suggests that jihadists have already made some headway in this effort. UK counter-terrorism experts have grown concerned that the Trump administration’s incendiary rhetoric and draconian homeland-security measures might only further antagonise jihadists. And the administration may use the Manchester attack to stoke its aggressively confrontational position.
Against this discomfiting background, it is important to acknowledge that Western law-enforcement and intelligence cooperation has so far kept ISIS and other jihadist groups from striking with sufficient frequency and geographical breadth to rise to the level of a true global insurgency. The best, albeit unspectacular, way forward is to continue to extract operational lessons from tragic incidents such as the Manchester bombing, to resist militarising homeland security and to incrementally improve and refine the law-enforcement and intelligence approach to counter-terrorism that has largely prevailed so far.
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