Jihad went global when Osama bin Laden declared war on the “far enemy” and drew other extremist groups, fighting more localised battles, to join forces with al-Qaeda. Two decades later and five years since bin Laden’s death, the tactics of terrorists are morphing on the global stage in ways that are more difficult to pre-empt and combat.
Ahead of the recent Euro 2016 football matches in Nice, French security services prepared for many contingencies — including nuclear and biological attacks. What they did not, and perhaps could not, anticipate was that a young man known to police as a petty criminal but not to intelligence services, could wreak such carnage by hiring a truck and ploughing through seafront crowds. The atrocity left 84 people dead and 202 injured.
The Bastille Day attack is the more shocking for the brutal simplicity of its design. It comes after a string of terrorist incidents this year across the world from Bangladesh to Belgium. Since bin Laden outlined the contours of a coming war between jihadis and the west in an interview in 1998, Islamist extremism has atomised, and spread.