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.
