Europe is increasingly vulnerable to terrorist attacks because of the changing terrorism landscape. Especially troublesome is the uptick in lone wolf attacks, particularly those that are ISIS-inspired, which may have been the case in Nice last Thursday, when 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove through a crowd of people celebrating Bastille Day, killing 84 and injuring hundreds.
As Patrick Skinner – Director of Special Projects for The Soufan Group and former CIA Case Officer – told The Cipher Brief, “These are real, credible threats and the way our systems are set up, our current counterterrorism measures are not designed for this. They are designed to detect cell-based attacks, communications, and travel. These mechanisms are not designed for this type of one-person attack. Local police aren’t designed to handle this. Nothing is.”
However, there are contributing factors that make France more likely to be the target of an attack. For instance, Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) chief spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani identified France as a top target in September 2014.
Experts agree that France is at an increased risk because of its involvement in the anti-ISIS coalition. However, that is not the whole story – why would France, as opposed to any of the other anti-ISIS coalition members, be especially called out by al-Adnani?
Will McCants and Chris Meserole of The Brookings Institution offer one explanation: French political culture. Their research finds that “four of the five countries with the highest rates of radicalization in the world are Francophone, including the top two in Europe (France and Belgium, both recent victims of terrorist attacks).” They say this is possibly because “the French approach to secularism is more aggressive than, say, the British approach.”
McCants and Meserole go on to cite the example of France and Belgium being the only two countries in Europe to ban the full veil – which many Muslim women wear – in public schools. They also mention that high youth unemployment and urbanization appear correlated to radicalization. Youth unemployment is a huge problem in France, at around 25 percent, says Senior Associate at Jones Group International and Cipher Brief expert, Jeff Lightfoot.
On the other hand, Michael O’Hanlon, also from Brookings, says, “The argument that France has partly brought these tragedies upon itself – perhaps because of its policies of secularism and in particular its limitations on when and where women can wear the veil in France – strikes me as unpersuasive.”
Rather, he says, France is not unique in being a Western target of terror attacks. Moreover, criminal networks tend to overlap with terrorist networks in continental Europe, making all countries in the region vulnerable. “This point may be irrelevant to the Nice attack, but more widely, extremists in France or Belgium can make use of illicit channels for moving people, money, and weapons that are less available to would-be jihadis in places like the U.K.,” says O’Hanlon.
Still, one cannot deny that France has a large immigrant population from North Africa and Turkey. “With something like ten percent of France’s entire population being Muslim, that’s a large population to be concerned about even if only small numbers are attracted to ISIS’ ideology,” Mitch Silber – Senior Managing Director at FTI Consulting and Former Director of Intelligence Analysis at the NYPD – tells The Cipher Brief.
This could explain why in comparison to other European countries, France has “by far the most citizens who have gone abroad to Syria and Iraq,” says Silber. About 1,700 French citizens have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight, according to Silber, with a couple hundred likely returning.
A broader explanation to this trend is poor integration of the immigrant community in France. National Defense University’s Steven Kramer explains that France has been unsuccessful in this endeavor due to “high levels of unemployment in the country as a whole, and even higher levels among the immigrants and especially young people who have just gotten out of school.”
The structure of the French of economy – which makes it difficult to fire employees, awards government workers with generous benefits, is relatively uncompetitive, and results in high levels of unemployment – has been a persistent problem. However, efforts to overhaul the economy are typically met by protest from people afraid of losing their jobs. “It’s an incredible problem – one of the major problems – in France today,” says Kramer, who also served as the Policy Advisor to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs from 1996 – 2002.
There is another factor contributing to an influx of French foreign fighters pledging allegiance to ISIS or other terrorist organizations. “The people that are radicalized are criminals for the most part […] So it’s not so much an ideological draw as it is just a sense of belonging. It gives their purposeless life some purpose, and most people want to do something with their life, even psychopaths,” explains Skinner.
That’s why calls for reform to the intelligence community within France – which may be valid – will not solve the entire problem. Indeed, Kramer notes that Bouhlel – the man behind Thursday’s attack in Nice – was a single individual with a background of petty criminality who would not have been known to the counterterror community.
“The problem of dealing with terrorism is not the result of a fundamental defect in the French state, but rather it’s the inherent difficulty of dealing with this kind of problem, at a time when France has become the number one target of jihadists,” says Kramer.
Kaitlin Lavinder is a reporter at The Cipher Brief.
