Why no human or place can be considered safe from ISIL attack

NICE // Another day in western Europe brings another attack perpetrated by men claiming to act on behalf of ISIL. A priest of 84 is savagely murdered while celebrating mass at his own church and another person is left "between life and death", to translate the French phrase to describe the critically injured.

A church in a small town in rural France may seem the softest of targets and among the most vile of locations for terrorists to visit their evil on innocents.

But there is nothing new in the tactic of causing death and injury in places of worship, as countless Muslims know whose mosques – along with their faithful – have been bombed or shot at by men purporting to act on behalf of Islam. Indeed, France has already experienced a determined attempt to cause bloodshed among churchgoers.

In April last year, just three months after the French-Algerian Kouachi brothers murdered 12 people at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, a 24-year-old Algerian student was arrested as he allegedly prepared to kill worshippers at one or two Catholic churches in the suburb of Villejuif. Juif means Jew in French and some analysts suggest the name appealed to the would-be assailant, or those directing him, as a symbolic target.

July has been a particularly active month for those linked to ISIL or, at the very least, seeking to carry out crimes that would self-evidently please the terrorist organisation.

The carnage of Bastille night in Nice on July 14, when 84 people died and more than 300 were injured by a man who ploughed a 19-tonne lorry into helpless crowds on the Promenade des Anglais, was followed by the train and music festival attacks in Germany.

There was also the highly suspicious, if as yet officially unexplained, attempt by two men described as “of Middle Eastern appearance” to kidnap a British serviceman as he jogged outside a Royal Air Force base in the eastern English county of Norfolk. Before that, it had been the turn of the United States, most recently last month’s slaughter at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in which Omar Mateen, an American of Afghan descent, killed 49 people, proclaiming an allegiance to ISIL that the group willingly adopted.

The lesson is as simple as it is bleak. No human target, no gathering in public or private can be considered safe from attack by ISIL or its sympathisers, or by similar groups (the Kouachi brothers claimed to be serving Aqap, Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch). Similarly, no act can be seen as so depraved as to be beyond these desperate but acutely dangerous private armies. ISIL is especially intent on exporting death and destruction as it loses ground in Syria and Iraq.

Consider the Nice mass murderer, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the first terrorist attacker on French soil in recent years to be wholly unknown to the intelligence services as a suspected extremist. Lahouaiej Bouhlel, killed by police at the end of his rampage, was the father of three children aged five and under. He presumably had no way of knowing whether their playmates would be on the promenade for that night’s fireworks display; even his estranged wife, questioned at length before being released without suspicion, was said to have originally planned to take their own children.

No courage is needed to attack a small group in a church, killing an elderly priest and terrorising others including two nuns. But while such an act reveals deep cowardice, it is also effective. It spreads fear of the unknown, an unnerving awareness that menace now clouds the most mundane of everyday pursuits.

The peoples of the West, and this includes millions of Muslims trying to live law-abiding lives, must learn to accommodate this threat. They must develop a peacetime version of the Blitz mentality, the spirit of resilient defiance that saw the people of Britain through grim events of the Second World War. Habits will have to change. Security needs will place additional, often disruptive restrictions on much of what they take for granted.

ISIL will score other “victories” for a cause that finds no favour among serious Islamic scholars, and it will admit responsibility for crimes it has no prior knowledge of but are the work of opportunists willing to die in some spurious reflected “glory”.

But it has become pointless to mock the basic criminality, fecklessness and even boozy, drug-taking womanising of many of those attempting to kill or maim in the name of religion. Just as no violent deed is regarded by ISIL as a step too far, no personality defect or innate streak of wickedness is an impediment to becoming one of its so-called “soldiers of Islam”, offensive as those three words will be to most Muslims.

In France, Germany, Britain and other western countries in ISIL’s firing line, more attacks will be foiled by the skilled work of security forces, or by luck, than succeed. But the future is uncertain and, sadly, will deliver more loss of life, more heartbreak. The West will endure its share of the suffering that also afflicts parts of the Middle East, Indian subcontinent and Africa.

France’s president, Francois Hollande, says his country must wage war against ISIL “by every means” within the law. In south-eastern Germany, the Bavarian federal premier Horst Seehofer acknowledged that “Islamist terrorism has arrived in Germany”.

Among the many challenges that lie ahead for society as a whole, and notably for such leaders, is to rise and remain above unsubstantiated sweeping conclusions. We are all, or should be, in this together and must find the moral strength to resist the ugly voices of racial or cultural prejudice.

foreign.desk@thenational.ae