Six people, including passengers and security agents, were stabbed this month in the Parisian Gare du Nord, the most populous train station in Europe, by someone who was heard shouting “Allah Akbar,” according to early press reports. The suspect, immediately arrested by the police, was identified first as an Algerian and then as a Libyan illegal immigrant who overstayed a police order to leave French territory. Though the episode was dismissed quickly as mental illness and promptly disappeared from the news cycle, it immediately brought back the “years of lead” when jihadi terrorism, in its Islamic State (IS) form, sowed fear in European societies from 2012 onward, causing hundreds of deaths. France was the main target then with 271 casualties in the decade up to 2022.  

But the number of deadly attacks significantly dropped to a couple of occurrences last year and only one in 2021. Does that mean that Islamist terror is now extinct for good in the Old Continent, or has the phenomenon temporarily morphed before it returns with a vengeance? That is the question that keeps security agencies busy across Europe, as many were caught unaware in the 2010s for lack of sound analysis and capacity to anticipate and prevent the threat to social peace and cohesion that IS had projected from the Levant battlefield toward the northwestern shores of the Mediterranean.  

Assessing the present situation necessitates gauging the causes and modes of action of the terror tidal wave of the past decade. It was but the last moment of a dialectical cycle of jihad that knew three different phases. The first, from 1979 to 1997, was the Afghan jihad and its copycat aftermath. The ousting from Kabul in February 1989 of the invading Red Army, thanks to Sunni mujahideen (jihad fighters) subsidized by Arabian Peninsula monarchies and trained and equipped by the CIA, led to the demise of the Soviet system, with the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9 of that same year. But it also became a signature for “jihad” — a term that was largely unknown in the West before — as a legitimate use of violence in the name of Islam against any social or political evil. Hence after 1989, so-called Afghan-Arab veterans fought their jihad anew against the “nearby enemy” at home, such as Egypt, Algeria, Chechnya and Bosnia, but by 1997 they had all been defeated for lack of international support.

The lessons learned from that failure gave rise to the second phase (1998 to 2005), that of al-Qaeda, with Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden targeting their “faraway nemesis,” the United States. It culminated in the “blessed double raids” on New York City and the Pentagon of 9/11, which shocked the world, and aimed to convince Muslim masses that the West was weak and to gather them “under the Prophet’s banner” (to quote Zawahiri’s manifesto). But al-Qaeda failed in Iraq after the US invasion of 2003, beaten by an ad hoc coalition of local Shiite and Western forces.