Ready to roll: armed police prepare to raid a house in Fallowfield, Manchester, following Monday’s bombing
You know something has gone very wrong when the national terror threat is raised to critical and troops have to free up armed policemen guarding key sites. This might not technically be like France’s ongoing state of emergency but the feel on our streets will be similar.
The fact that a powerful bomb packed with shrapnel was used in the Manchester Arena attack is one reason Britain is now on the highest state of alert for precautionary reasons.
Thanks to the assiduity of the security services, we have not witnessed a bomb attack for 12 years. The difficulty in acquiring the necessary chemicals, as well as the skill required to weaponise home-cooked materials, and the vulnerability of the resulting logistical trail, we are told, led to terrorists resorting to everyday items such as cars, trucks or kitchen knives to cause mayhem. The second threat was from gun attacks by roving jihadist assault squads of the kind we saw in Paris, though, we are told, the difficulty of getting an AK-47 in Britain made that unlikely.
Since a proficient bomb-maker is a valuable asset, he or she is unlikely to squander their own life, which raises the distinct possibility that more suicide bombers are primed to go, while as countless Israeli studies have shown, such attackers require careful grooming to get them to the reality of blowing themselves up. So now we have more than a “lone wolf”, though even the loneliest wolf is convinced they are acting on behalf of the global billion-strong Muslim umma.
What can usefully be said about this atrocity? Although Islamic State opportunistically claims responsibility for every terror attack, there was something peculiarly revealing, as well as repugnant, about a “statement” which conflated murdering pubescent girls at a pop concert with “a crusader gathering” and a “shameless” one to boot. The combination of this cartoon ideology about relations between the West and a “Muslim world” (whose demographic weight is not even in the Middle East but in India and Indonesia) with a prurient moralism about a pop concert is striking, as is the rebranding of Salman Abedi, the murderer of eight- year-olds, as a “soldier”.
We know enough about Abedi to wonder why he was not on several radars. His Libyan father was a known anti-Gaddafi activist who having earlier been granted asylum here, left his job as an airport security worker and returned to the struggle which overthrew the colonel in 2011. Presumably our security services only belatedly caught up with the fact that not all of Gaddafi’s opponents were biddable secular liberals — though their murky role in rendering one of the Islamists back to Libya from Thailand in 2004, when the Blair government suddenly regarded Colonel Gaddafi as a potential ally, suggests otherwise?
Since the colonel’s overthrow, Libya has disintegrated into a chaos of armed militias, where both al Qaeda and IS have established a presence. Theoretically they are enemies, divided over when to proclaim a physical caliphate and the role of high theological authorities which IS discounts, but in Libya their affiliates are co-operating. Whether these factions are represented among Libyans in Britain will be a major line of inquiry.
But what of the bomber himself, who it seems travelled back and forth to Libya with impunity even though it is a warzone. We have had the usual guff about him being a normal Mancunian lad, playing war games on PlayStation, drifting in an out of an IT course at Salford, and, the clincher, a fan of Manchester United.
That last one is really off the mark since Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the IS leader, was known as “Maradona” for his skill on the pitch, inside the huge US holding camp Bucca, where in the mid-2000s thousands of jihadists and former Ba’athist intelligence officers got together to create IS.
We know enough about Salman Abedi to wonder why he was not on several radars
We are told that the consensual British policing model relies on having uniformed officers on the streets to whom eager local “communities” will report anything untoward. This model manifestly failed to work. Abedi’s attendance at his Salford IT course was fitful. He seems to have been a scowling presence at the Didsbury Mosque, in 2015 objecting to an anti-IS sermon to the point where he was physically threatening, with “a face of hate”. He grew a beard and began chanting Arabic prayers in the street a few weeks before the attack on Monday.
We are also told that even if the security services cannot feasibly follow every suspected extremist, their online activity is being monitored. Well, in this case, Abedi’s brother has been posting comments sympathetic to IS on its websites, while a sister attended the school from which two twins left to live in the paradise that is Raqqa. A lot to work with for the spooks, one might imagine.
Flooding our streets with more masked and heavily armed men is a case of shutting the door after the horse has bolted. We could more usefully inquire into how our liberality towards asylum seekers and refugees has been abused by the entire Abedi family, and doubtless by incoming “Syrians”.
It might also be helpful to ponder whether our physical security at public events or in around public buildings is best guaranteed by dozy private sector security personnel and mechanical detectors, let alone by pairs of policemen who always seem to be in private conversation, rather than by more focused efforts by people trained in psychological profiling.
Finally, the “community” policing model seems to have failed in this case, since no one reported Abedi’s transformation into a mass murderer, presumably because the Libyan “community” was hermetically sealed off from the Manchester Muslim community of South Asians, which in turn is impermeable to other Mancunians.
