The UK may be home to “tens of thousands of potential jihadists” who have now had the "spark" they were waiting for after recent ISIS attacks, says a defence expert.
Europe has been stepping up its security with analysts believing that ISIS has now turned its attention to the region and is targeting sporting events. It comes after 133 people were killed at the Crocus City Hall concert venue in the suburbs of Moscow, with US officials saying ISIS-K (a branch of Islamic State) were responsible.
Last month Jeremy Hunt said the UK “absolutely” needed to be concerned about the threat from ISIS and we have to “remain vigilant”. Prof Anthony Glees, a security and intelligence expert at the University of Buckingham, has warned the UK has seen “two sparks” after it was claimed by a police chief that there were thousands of potential terrorists.
“We must of course worry about copy-cat attacks here in the UK," Prof Glees told The Mirror. "Mark Rowley said last autumn there were 'tens of thousands' of potential jihadists in the UK waiting for a spark. Well, they've had two sparks, first the October 7 slaughter of Israelis by Hamas (who are Shia Muslims and therefore the enemies and rivals of ISIS-K, a key point) and now the Crocus Hall attack in Moscow.
Prof Anthony Glees is a security and intelligence expert at the University of Buckingham“In their crazy thinking, these mass terror attacks destabilise the great democracies of the West and make it easier for Sunni Islamists to instal Islamist and Sharia hegemony over the world. Of course this is mad. But they are mad, that is the problem. We've learned from the Bataclan attack in 2012 and the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 that terror attacks on young people enjoying themselves is a fixation of these fruitcakes. In 2006 British Al-Qaeda terrorists, led by Dhiren Barot planned an attack on the Ministry of Sound nightclub in London for that very same reason.
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"However, and it's a big however, for one thing we listen very attentively indeed to the terror warning coming from our American allies - they clearly have excellent secret sources inside ISIS-K - and we act on them; and, second, we have an excellent domestic security service, MI5 unlike the poor Russian people who have to rely on the corrupt and incompetent brutes in the FSB.”
The specific threat appears to come from ISIS-K, which takes its name from the Khorasan Province, and began with several hundred Pakistani Taliban fighters who took refuge in Afghanistan after Pakistani military operations drove them out of their own country. Its fighters have repeatedly carried out attacks in Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power in 2021.
Prof Glees continued: “ISIS-Khorasan are bidding to replace the now destroyed Al-Qaeda network and IS jihadists in Syria and Iraq as the global leaders of Sunni extremism and terrorism. Khorasan is the name for a once and future state comprised of Afghanistan, Iran, and the 'Stans' – Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan - that is where they see their future base, with their affiliates extending everywhere that Al-Qaeda and the ISIS reached. That means Europe, the UK and the USA. We must of course worry about copy-cat attacks here in the UK.”
But at the same time, Prof Glees said it would be much harder for ISIS to carry out in the UK an atrocity like that in Moscow. "I think we need to be very alert right now but I don't think we need to batten down the hatches as of today," he said.
"I think it'd be much harder for UK Islamists to get hold of the sort of weapons ISIS-K used in Moscow, it's one reason we've seen so many knives being used in the UK. Even with a car, the chances of the sort of mass casualty attack we saw in Moscow are very slim over here, thankfully. MI5 has not raised the threat level - it is still substantial, so half way up the scale. Yes, MI5 has got this wrong in the past, has raised the level after an attack rather than before it."
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