Is a “revolutionary jihadist climate” forming in Germany?

On Friday 25 June, in Wurzburg, Germany, a Jihadi armed with a knife went on a sudden rampage and started stabbing and slashing passersby. His attack left 3 killed and 5 wounded. Bavaria’s Interior Minister said the Wurzburg terrorist yelled “Allahu Akhbar” as he killed his innocent victims.

On 28 June, a similar attack occurred in Erfurt, Germany, leaving two innocent pedestrians wounded.

Over the past decade, attacks in the West have taken the form of either organized, planned attacks directed from terrorist leaders overseas or inside Europe or America, or attacks carried out by individuals described as “inspired” by jihadist ideology.

Ironically, Western media and government officials too often take comfort from the revelation that a deadly attack was the work of an individual unconnected to an organized cell or affiliate of a known jihadist group.

Yet both the Islamic State and Al Qaeda have both explicitly ordered such attacks in videos, audiotapes and online digital magazines, raising the question of whether these recent attacks in Germany are really isolated incidents or the precursors to yet more attacks.

No jihadist group issues membership cards or uniforms. Given that jihadist organizations use media methods to propose potential targets, provide strategies and techniques, and provide ideological justification, classifying an attacker as either “inspired” or “directed” is increasingly a distinction without a difference.

In 2005 Al Qaeda ideologue Abu Musab al-Suri issued “The Call to Global Islamic Resistance” emphasizing the ideological and strategic value of individual jihadist attacks:

“Successful jihad will only happen within an ummah [Islamic nation or community] in which the fighting creed is firmly established and clarified. This must happen in order to attain the “Revolutionary Jihadist Climate” that will spontaneously give rise to instruments of resistance.

Violent jihad is as an individual duty obligatory upon every Muslim. All the ulema have said this…”

Unfortunately, American and European experts have largely failed to properly identify the nature of the threat. Western vernacular describes what Al-Suri calls an “individual duty” as a mere “lone wolf.”

The term “lone wolf” does not appear in Islamic doctrine, nor is it part of any Jihadist group’s ideology. What is part of Islamic doctrine and Jihadist ideology is the concept of Jihad as an individual obligation.

What we see around the world are individual terrorist attacks that are based on a doctrine of jihad which has been accurately articulated by terrorist leaders as the preferred strategy. Given the basis for these attacks, they should not be understood as mere “senseless violence.”

While it is the case that terrorist cells, such as the 19 hijackers who carried out the September 11 attacks, or the 9 attackers who carried out the November 2015 Paris massacres, have often carried out more spectacular mass casualty attacks, individual acts of jihadist terror trade a possibility of a high body count for a lower probability of detection and a greater frequency or operational tempo of attacks.

So which flavor of jihad is more dangerous? If you are on the receiving end of an attack, it makes no difference to you.

A case can be made that individual jihadists pose a greater challenge for our intelligence and law enforcement communities.

Cells must recruit, organize, train, and communicate, which provides opportunities for detection and even infiltration. Individual jihadists don’t offer any of these potential vulnerabilities. How does one infiltrate a cell of one, like the 2015 Chattanooga, Tennessee shooter, the 2016 Orlando shooter or the 2017 vehicle jihad attacker in New York City? If the individual jihadist isn’t communicating with others and no one is aware of his or her plans, how do intelligence and law enforcement assets detect them “left of bang,” that is prior to the attack?

The steady drumbeat of individual attacks which kill or wound a handful of victims is part of a deliberate effort by jihadists to build what Al-Suri called the “revolutionary jihadist climate.” Is such a revolutionary climate now sprouting in Germany? Are the two recent knife attacks just the beginning? These are questions that German and allied law enforcement and intelligence agencies need to be taking very seriously.