The British security agencies worry that Islamic State is plotting large-scale terrorist attacks in the UK by coordinated commando-style groups similar to those in Brussels and Paris.
Isis propaganda videos have frequently identified the UK as a major target and intelligence officers have repeatedly said, as a caveat, that it is only a matter of time before there is a successful attack in the country, whether lone wolf-style or a large-scale assault.
The agencies stopped seven plots last year but have emphasised again and again that they do not believe their luck – and operational efficiency – is going to hold forever.
The threat level in the UK is “severe”, meaning an attack is designated as “highly likely”. That sounds alarming but it would need specific information to raise that to the next and highest category, “critical”, and the agencies have no such intelligence.
Raffaello Pantucci, who focuses on counter-terrorism and radicalisation issues and is director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said he did not think the British security services could be accused of complacency but there were a number of significant differences from continental Europe: “There are realities on the ground that make it harder in the UK [to mount an attack] than on the continent.”
First, it is harder to get weapons and ammunition in the UK than, say, Belgium. “You can make a bomb instead but that needs expertise and it is harder to sneak in and out. To make a bomb yourself, you have to practise and if you practise you attract attention,” he said.
Pantucci also identified a shift in Islamist terrorism. The heart of global jihadism had been in south-east Asia, with close connections to the UK, but has shifted to the Levant, with connections to Arab communities in continental Europe.
UK ports provide a barrier and though they have proved more porous than the agencies would like, security is still better than on continental Europe, which has a direct land link to Isis-controlled territory, he added.
Pantucci said the British security services also tended to be “proactively aggressive”, clamping down at an early stage of investigations into plots.
This ability to intervene early is due to the security services, having learned one of the biggest lessons from the attacks on London in 2005, establishing good networks in communities with large Muslim populations across the UK. Resources were shifted out of London to the Midlands, the north of England, Wales and Scotland. Another lesson was that the old barriers between the domestic agency MI5, the overseas agency MI6 and the surveillance service GCHQ were partly broken down, with increased coordination and staff seconded to work with sister agencies.
Another consequence is better collaboration between the intelligence services and the police, a change that contrasts sharply with Belgium where lack of coordination between the two branches of security has been cruelly exposed.
The British security services would also claim they enjoy a significant advantage as a result of the amount of raw data being hoovered up by GCHQ and its US counterpart, the NSA, though this is disputed by privacy campaigners. Although there is some intelligence sharing between the UK and other European countries, it is not on the scale of the cooperation between the “Five Eyes”: the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
One of the world’s leading counter-terrorism experts, the Australian David Kilcullen, who was an adviser to the US military and state department, offers a bleak assessment of the future, regarding the west as being in a conflict that looks set to last at least a generation and one that the west is losing.
In a recent interview with the Guardian, Kilcullen said the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris last year marked a shift from spontaneous actions by one or two individuals to more coordinated, sustained tactical assaults – what he referred to as Mumbai-lite, the 2008 attack by gunmen that created mayhem in India’s financial capital.
He was speaking after the Paris attacks but before Brussels and his words proved prescient. “The evidence is that this is here to stay and will not go away any time soon.”
Kilcullen, author of the newly published Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror, acknowledged that the UK appeared to be a little more secure than continental Europe.
“We are protected by the Channel a little bit. But that is not a complete protection. The ability to move things by boat and even to move things and people in containers is still there. I think the risk is a bit less for the UK but for the rest of Europe it is pretty serious.”
Since the 7/7 bombings, there have only been a handful of fatalities from terrorism in the UK. Fusilier Lee Rigby was murdered in a spontaneous attack in London in 2013; the Muslim pensioner Mohammed Saleem was stabbed to death by a Ukrainian white supremacist the same year; and only last week, the prison officer Adrian Ismay died in Belfast from a bomb planted by dissident Republicans.
There are at least four potential kinds of attacks in the UK. One is from returning volunteers, which Kilcullen thinks is overblown. An estimated 800 British volunteers have returned to the UK from Syria and Iraq but Kilcullen argues that the attrition rate among foreign fighters is high, with many killed on the frontlines.
The second is the kind of “spectaculars” favoured by al-Qaida and which Isis also engages in, such as bringing down the Russian plane in Egypt. But the Isis bomb was a crude device, one that would be harder to smuggle on to a plane in the UK.
That leaves the spontaneous lone wolf attacks influenced by Isis propaganda and the coordinated urban guerrilla-style attacks seen in Brussels and Paris. Pantucci sees this a worrying combination. “A threat picture going aggressively in two ways at the same time,” he said.