Islamist Terrorism. Analysis of Offences & Attacks in the UK

Islamism-inspired terrorism remains the principal terrorism threat to both the United Kingdom (UK) and British interests overseas. At the end of 2016, terrorism directed, approved or inspired by Islamic State posed the predominant threat to national security, while al-Qaeda and affiliate groups continue to aspire to attack Western interests. For more than two decades, militant Islamist groups have successfully recruited UK-based individuals for terrorist facilitation and training overseas, as well as directed or inspired involvement in terrorism at home.

Islamist Terrorism: Analysis of Offences and Attacks in the UK (1998–2015) (link) provides information and statistical analysis on the manifestation and development of the threat to national security from Islamism-inspired terrorism.

In the forward by David Anderson QC, he says, 'Islamist terrorists in the UK have scored a single major victory: the London tube and bus bombings of July 2005, in which four suicide bombers took the lives of 52 innocent members of the public and injured over 700 more.

The past 10 years have seen the death of a suicide bomber in Glasgow and the barbarous killing of Private Lee Rigby in Woolwich, a toll equal to that inflicted by the extreme right-wing terrorists Pavlo Lapshyn and Thomas Mair – the killer of Jo Cox MP – over the same period.

Yet these figures do not tell the whole story. Islamist atrocities averted only by acute intelligence and policing include the airline liquid bomb plot of 2006, credibly aimed at multiple transatlantic airliners and described by the judge presiding over a subsequent trial as “the most grave and wicked conspiracy ever proven within this jurisdiction”. The lure of Da’esh may be on the wane: but its legacy remains in the shape of hardened terrorist fighters, some of them already back in Europe. And as organised Islamist attacks in neighbouring countries have recently reminded us, ideologically-inspired fanatics aim not only to kill, but to strike at the tolerance, pluralism and broad-mindedness on which democracy itself depends.

Terrorism uses emotional shock in order to confuse and to divide. An important tool in understanding and defeating it is a reliable and dispassionate account of its perpetrators, their characteristics, their offences and their networks. Precisely such an account is provided in the latest edition of this encyclopaedic work. It profiles and analyses the 269 people convicted of Islamist terrorism offences (or killed as suicide bombers) in the UK between 1998 and 2015.

It comes as no surprise that most Islamist terrorists in the UK are British men aged 18-34. But the reader learns also that 16% of o enders were converts, 76% were known to the authorities prior to their terrorist offences and 26% had prior criminal convictions. Trends noted include rises in travel-related offending and in intended beheadings and stabbings. And while individual offending and online radicalisation have both increased, this work reveals the extent to which offenders – even if convicted alone – tend still to be in real-world networks with partners, siblings or long-standing friends.

This impressive resource will be of particular value to policy-makers, law enforcement, researchers, NGOs and journalists, both in the UK and abroad. I commend it to all who wish to ensure that their opinions on this subject are securely founded on the facts.