Daily Express Monday, September 2, 2019 13DX1STVIGILANT: Spooks at MI5, above, and MI6 track terrorists like Jihadi John, inset left, and Russians who poisoned Skripals, belowBy John Ingham
Defence Editor
F
AR FROM the public eye,
Britain and her Allies are
locked in a shadowy
life-and-death struggle
with enemies of the state.
At times our security
services must feel as if they are
playing a secret version of
fairground game Splat the Rat,
albeit with far higher stakes.
Smash Islamic State in its self-
proclaimed caliphate straddling
Syria and Iraq, and up pop its
fanatics in Afghanistan or Yemen.
Weaken Al Qaeda on the Pakistan-
Afghan border, only for it to
appear in North Africa.
The most recent reports from the
Middle East indicate that IS is
regaining strength just five months
after it was ousted from its last
stronghold in the area. IS fighters
have staged guerilla raids across
Iraq and Syria while trying to
recruit new members. Sleeper cells
are said to have carried out
assassinations and sniper attacks
on security forces.
This is a battle which security
services in the West must fight
constantly and, for all our sakes,
win. The relentless struggle is
taking place in an arena far
removed from civilised debates
about political correctness, a world
where hand-wringing has no place
and hard choices are made daily.
Take the British recruits to IS or
one of the other extremist Islamic
groups scattered across the Middle
East. The conservative estimate is
that about 900 flocked to the black
banner of IS and other factions.
Of this ragtag army, about half
have returned, some sickened by
what they saw, others fanatical,
battle-hardened and biding their
time to strike in the country that
raised them.
About another 135,
or 15 per cent, are
dead. They include
murderers such as
Jihadi John, real name
Mohammed Emwazi,
the IS executioner who
revelled in his
worldwide infamy
before being taken out
by a drone.
The rest, about 300-
plus, remain in the
Middle East, still fighting
or living in closely
guarded refugee camps.
A
MONG them is Shamima
Begum, who fled Britain
to join the caliphate as a
schoolgirl, aged 15, and is now a
19-year-old jihadi wife, stripped of
her British citizenship.
She says she wants to return
home but has expressed little
remorse for her support for the
murderous regime that is IS.
More troubling still are the
children of these British jihadis. All
are still in the camps where
radicalisation is the order of the
day – and where opposition to
IS’s extreme take on Islam can
prove fatal.
Small wonder some suspect that
in about 15 to 20 years Britain’s
terrorist watch lists will contain
the names of many of these
children.
So the dilemmas facing Western
governments are endless. Is it
better to bring
this jihadi tribe
back home
where we can
keep an eye on
them and,
where possible, lock them up
for terrorism?
Or is it better to leave them to
rot in the Middle East they
professed to love so much,
knowing that the jihadis among
them are likely to slip away to
another lawless spot, such as
Africa’s Sahel or Asia’s badlands?
Just suppose for a moment that
we showed them a decency they
have not shown us, and took them
back. The odds of convicting many
of them of terrorism are slim.
Despite having joined a
proscribed group, despite their
pronouncements in online jihadi
recruiting campaigns, the UK
threshold of evidence is so high
that many, if not most, would
probably get off. Gathering
evidence of criminal activity in
one of the most dangerous places
on Earth is next to impossible.
That would mean turning these
terrorists loose on the streets of
Britain, leaving our securityservices with the nightmare
job of keeping an eye on them.
I’ll set out a few figures here
and let you do the maths.
In Britain now there are
about 3,000 “subjects of
interest” for the police and
security services.
MI5, despite having
expanded to meet the growing
threat, is only about 5,
strong, and that includes
support staff.
To monitor just one suspect
24/7 takes a lot of manpower- officers to physically watch him
or her, bosses to oversee the
operation plus support services, all
carried out over three shifts.
This is without considering the
other threats faced by Britain.
The Novichok nerve agent
assassination attempt on Russian
former agent Sergei Skripal and his
daughter Yulia in Salisbury last
year shows the lengths to which
President Putin, himself a former
KGB agent, is willing to go. The
Cold War never really went away.
Meanwhile, North Korea and
China – like Russia – pose a
serious cyber threat.
When IS terrorists kill a handful
of people on UK streets, the world
reacts with horror, as it should. But
if a cyber attack were to shut down
the NHS, the death toll could run
into thousands.
For most of us, this is a case of
out of sight, out of mind.
China is also in the Premier
League for industrial espionage,
threatening our economic futures
with online subterfuge.
GCHQ and the National Cyber
Security Centre are battling many
of these threats but it is impossible
not to believe that their resources
are pretty stretched.
Then we have our own home-
grown terrorist threats, includingthose from Republican hard-
liners in Northern Ireland and
twisted Right-wing extremists.
Various IRA factions
have become more active in
recent months while our
Right-wingers are thought to
use the dark web to liaise
with murderous fanatics around
the world – including in the
nation where Nazism started,
Germany.H
OWEVER, the prob-
lem with the Right-
wingers is, that though
they are often not well organised,
they are driven by an ever-changing
mixture of ideologies which makes
them harder to second-guess.
But then, predicting what the
enemies of the state will do is
never easy. And that is why we
should be grateful to the security
services. They may be too few in
number and too short on resources
but they are still brave, dedicated
men and women doing their best
to stay ahead of those determined
to do us harm.THE PERILS OF
KEEPING US SAFE
Think it’s all gone quiet
in the War on Terror?
Not for the silent
heroes playing
‘Splat the Rat’
with those who
would see Britain burn
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