A major terror attack in Europe is almost inevitable as European members of so-called "Daesh" [ISIL] return from Syria and Iraq, according to senior European Union [EU] officials, The Guardian reported on Friday.
The European Union officials said the EU bodies and its 28 governments were under intense pressure to get to grips with the menace represented by thousands of European citizens fighting in Syria.
"It is pre-programmed," said a senior official involved in the policy and security debate over the chances of an attack. "We have clear signals that this is what the foreign [militants] are doing. This is the main threat we are facing."
"The home affairs council is very aware and very frightened of this ... The colleagues in the police administration just don't know how to cope. They all fear this could be totally out of control. It may already be too late," the senior official told the Guardian and five other European newspapers.
Meanwhile, interior ministers from the 28 countries are to meet in Luxembourg for two weeks to try to come up with a concerted policy.
In a separate interview, Gilles de Kerchove, the Belgian EU official who coordinates the union's counter-terrorism policy, said executives from the big social media providers, including Twitter, Facebook and Google, would attend the interior ministers' meeting in Luxembourg in an EU attempt to deprive Daesh propagandists of their highly effective exploitation of the internet.
"We want these companies to develop a counter-narrative. There will be a big discussion with the internet players," said De Kerchove.
He put the number of EU citizens fighting in Syria at around 3,000. "We don't have harmonized statistics. But the flow of [militants] has not dried up. It's a significant number and it has not stopped," he said.
Additionally, senior US intelligence and homeland security officials have been attending recent meetings of EU policy-makers, alarmed that some of the European fighters could be easily infiltrated into the US.
"The Americans are very worried about Europeans entering freely under the visa waiver programme. They are looking into this very seriously," said De Kerchove.
Furthermore, a Foreign Office spokeswoman said the UK authorities believed "more than 500 UK-linked individuals have now travelled to Syria and Iraq since the uprising began. Obviously, it's very difficult to give precise numbers on this."
De Kerchove said he had asked Theresa May, the home secretary, and had not received precise figures. Nor was it clear how many had returned from Syria or Iraq to Britain.
According to the French authorities, the number of native extremists in Syria and Iraq has soared from 555 to 932 this year [2014]. Of those, 118 have returned to France. According to experts consulted by European officials involved in the effort, an estimated one in nine of those returning represents a terrorist threat.
Moreover, the number of EU nationals fighting in Syria is put at 3-4,000.
Two Dutch nationals of Turkish origin were also arrested by the Belgians last month [August] on their return from the Middle East, with Dutch television reporting at the weekend that they were plotting an attack on the headquarters of the European commission in Brussels, while the officials said there was no evidence to support this.
On Thursday, the mayor of Brussels, Yvan Mayeur, said the threat of returning extremists "is not virtual for us, it is concrete, it is real."
He said he was examining 14 files on the issue of suspected extremists from Belgium, which is believed to have the highest per capita rate in the EU of fighters in Syria.
Confronted with these dilemmas, EU interior ministry, intelligence and police officials are meeting regularly in various combinations. However, the attempts to come up with a coherent policy and instruments are dogged by institutional, national and departmental rivalries and differing priorities, senior officials said.
Source: Agencies
