Five suspected Islamic State operatives were arrested in Spain, Belgium, and Germany, which could represent the tip of the iceberg for ISIS’s European network.
Four of the detained men were Spanish citizens, and the other was from Morocco. The five men were not discrete, using a Facebook page (Islam En Espanol) with 32,000 followers to disseminate ISIS propaganda.
Spanish authorities accuse the group of commissioning attacks, radicalizing other youth, and acting as facilitators for other terrorists across Europe. The shared nationality of the group, and their dispersion across Europe represent a troubling security challenge for European counter-terrorism authorities.
The New York Times revealed the existence of an elite ISIS operations network across Europe in August. The network is called Emni and reportedly identified foreign fighters upon their arrival to Iraq and Syria. The group’s leaders would then try and recruit these western passport holders for terrorist operations abroad.
Emni provides support for networks via training, money, and communications for would-be terrorists throughout a given domain. A captured German ISIS fighter told TheNYT that Emni has sent “hundreds” of foreign fighters, and that ISIS wants, “to have loads of attacks at the same time in England and Germany and France.”
Emni represents the enduring threat of ISIS terror, despite the Obama administration’s insistence in defining success against ISIS in terms of territory seized in Iraq and Syria. “It’s as if we’ve decided by taking territory back, they won’t be terrorists anymore,” Director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute Dr. Frederick Kagan previously told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
ISIS itself is preparing for the loss of its core caliphate, by increasingly focusing its resources and messaging on its terrorist capability. ISIS’s weekly newsletter Al Naba carried an editorial in July acknowledging it may lose its caliphate in Iraq and Syria, but touted its “provinces” in countries like Libya, Afghanistan, and Egypt as proof the group would live on.
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