After three jihadist attacks in as many months, the United Kingdom is facing a protracted insurgency – not mere terrorism
It’s happened again. This time the target was the heart of London. Last night shortly after 10 p.m., weekend merry-making was shattered when a van careened wildly across London Bridge, running over innocents. After the van came to a halt, three men emerged, brandishing large knives which they proceeded to plunge into as many people as possible.
Eyewitnesses report the men, adorned with fake suicide bomb vests, were shouting “This is for Allah” as they ran foot-long blades into people walking along the trendy Borough High Street. Saturday night partiers barricaded themselves in pubs to save their lives. Eight minutes after the horror started it ended in gunfire. Armed police arrived at the scene and shot the three terrorists dead.
Now the police are following their standard procedure: Talking to eyewitnesses, gathering evidence from crime scenes, and rounding up anybody who might be involved, even peripherally. Several potential suspects have been taken into custody after police raids in East London, while at present the casualty count stands at seven dead (not including the terrorists) and 48 injured, many seriously.
This atrocity comes only 12 days after the horrific bomb attack in Manchester, at the end of an Ariana Grande concert, which slaughtered 22 innocents – many of them children – and maimed more than a hundred. The killer there, who blew himself up with an improvised explosive device loaded with nuts and bolts to inflict maximum shrapnel wounds, was Salman Abedi, a 22-year-old British national.
Born in Manchester to Libyan refugee parents, Abedi fits the clichéd profile for homegrown jihadists in the West: a failed assimilation case, a ne’er-do-well dropout who got caught up in drugs and hooliganism, only to turn his life around by embracing the jihad. Abedi’s fervent radicalism made him notorious at his mosque. He was viewed by his community, rightly, as a troublemaker headed for nothing good.
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