Dutch Police Raid Averts Terror Attack

The Dutch police have arrested seven people suspected of planning a major terror attack. The raid, carried out on Thursday in the small town of Arnhem, resulted in the arrest of seven men ranging from 21 to 34 years old. Officials say that the men planned to attack an unspecified large event using explosives and assault rifles with the aim of causing massive casualties. Three of the seven men have previous terrorism convictions, all from foreign travel to fight for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). These arrests conclude a seven-month investigation that began when Dutch intelligence received information that a 34 year old man of Iraqi descent, reportedly the ringleader, would be targeting “a large event in the Netherlands where there would be a lot of victims.” The Dutch police acted once they determined that the group’s plan was in an advanced stage. According to Minister for Justice and Security Ferd Grapperhaus:  “They weren’t so far that it was a danger to society, in the sense that it was nearly too late. But they were quite far in their preparations.”

The Netherlands have had a different experience with terrorism compared to their European counterparts. Close neighbors such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have suffered numerous high-casualty, high-profile attacks since 2010 such as the Bataclan, Nice and Berlin lorry, and Westminster attacks. In contrast, the last recorded attack in the Netherlands was the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a member of the Hofstad Network, a terror organization composed mainly of radical, young Muslim immigrants. Attacks on Dutch soil are rare but citizens who have left the country to fight in the Middle East are not. According to the Counter-Extremism Project, at least 280 Dutch nationals have traveled to either Syria or Iraq as foreign fighters.

Homegrown radicalization is the largest terror threat issue facing the Netherlands. Since 2010, there has been a significant growth in domestic radicalism as a result of widespread preaching by adherents of the doctrine of Salafism: the return to a “pure”, theocratical Islamic society characterized by an extreme intolerance of dissent where the worship of Allah is prioritized over all else. Recruiting has been described by GISS (Dutch intelligence) as decentralized, flexible and mobile, making it hard to combat. As in other European states, the use of social media by Jihadis has amplified their reach tremendously.

The Dutch government has responded by targeting extremist recruiters and monitoring anyone returning from the Middle East. The overall Dutch strategy to combat terrorism has been to try to prevent radicalization using methods such as rehabilitating individuals they deem to be at a high risk of radicalization and monitoring school computer networks for keywords associated with radicalization. Legislation increasing outreach to Muslim immigrant communities and revoking citizenship for foreign fighters has also been enacted by the Dutch Parliament.