Last week began with a bombing that took 13 lives and injured dozens on the St Petersburg subway on Monday. It ended today, Palm Sunday, with twin bombs in Egypt that killed at least 40 people, many of them children, at Coptic Christian churches north of Cairo and in Alexandria. The news arrived as Sweden was coming to terms with the deaths of three adults and a child in a truck attack in Stockholm on Friday. That same day, the Metropolitan police had confirmed that last month’s attack in Westminster had claimed a fifth life, with the death of tourist Andreea Cristea in hospital.
Such a cluster seizes attention but does not automatically indicate increased risk overall. Much about the attacks remains hazy, even where arrests have been made or perpetrators identified. Islamic State has claimed that one of its groups carried out the bombings in Egypt. In the other cases, Islamist militancy is suspected or known.
Whatever the president of the United States believes, such threats cannot be eradicated by bars on entry (Khalid Masood, the Westminster attacker, was British) nor by bombs elsewhere. Put aside for a moment concerns that civilian deaths in airstrikes by the US-led coalition against Isis, rising under the Trump administration, will turn sentiment in Iraq and Syria against it and contribute to radicalisation. Analysts have warned that driving Isis out of Mosul – and in due course Raqqa – is likely, in the short term, to produce an upsurge in attacks elsewhere, primarily within the Islamic world. Long-standing conflicts, in unstable countries with a history of Islamist militancy – such as Yemen, Libya and Afghanistan – will be galvanised. There have been hundreds of terror attacks globally this year. Most received far less attention than this week’s even when many more died (as in Sindh, Pakistan, where 88 were killed in February).
Others will take place further afield. Some are likely to involve fighters who have returned home or moved to third countries with the caliphate’s disintegration. In other cases, attackers may come from communities that previously produced Isis fighters. Some may be structured or commissioned by Isis, others merely inspired by it. And with all this will come the broader shaking out of jihadi groups and networks – most obviously those linked to al-Qaida, but lesser known or still embryonic organisations too. Nor is the only risk from Islamist terrorism. There has been a surge in far-right activity. It is just a few months since six were shot dead at a mosque in Quebec; the man charged has been described as a white supremacist.
There are no simple ways to avert these threats, and no guarantees they can be prevented. Part of the challenge is to resist easy conclusions about who poses a threat and how they relate to others who may do so. Dull, slow, bureaucratic work by security services will be critical. Masood had been identified as a potential extremist; the man arrested in Sweden was known to authorities.
Then there is the broader policy context. The British prime minister, Theresa May, wisely resisted kneejerk announcements following the Westminster attack. But a revised and expanded version of the controversial Prevent strategy to identify and tackle radicalism awaits. As London mayor Sadiq Khan and others have pointed out, it has a toxic reputation within Muslim communities and needs to be fundamentally overhauled, not just rebranded.
Alongside these issues lies a less tangible one: reassuring communities that they can withstand attacks. In Mr Khan’s words, decades of terrorism have made Londoners “not blasé, but resilient”. It is both possible and necessary to acknowledge the terrible human cost – in the promise unfulfilled by those who have died, in the trauma that survivors endure, in the lives that must be lived without husbands or mothers or children or friends – and still to believe that life, overall, should continue broadly as it has done.
Barely noticed amid so much grim news this week was the Basque separatist group Eta’s announcement that it was giving up all its arms after half a century of violence. Whether it has met that commitment in full remains to be seen, and there are concerns that hardliners may form a splinter organisation. But the broader lesson to be drawn is that the threats we face ebb as well as flow. Force is not the same as strength. Communities can endure longer than those who seek to divide or destroy them. Terrorists seek to inspire not just fear, but an overwhelming sense of paralysis or despair. We need not and must not submit.
