ISIS struck again on Tuesday, this time slitting the throat of an 85-year-old priest in France after two attackers stormed a church and took hostages before police shot the attackers dead.
The terror group took credit for the strike – the latest in a string of ongoing violence directed against Europe and the U.S., which is likely to get worse before it gets better.
With ISIS losing territory in its Middle East strongholds amid a U.S.-led bombing and ground campaign, the terrorists feel the need to prove they are still relevant, and are striking civilians in the West in a bid to prove this.
France has been a frequent target, with the country seeing more than 100 deaths in terror attacks over the last several months, and dozens more in smaller hits that don’t grab as much attention in the global media.
The question the French government needs to deal with now is how to combat the gloom-and-doom ideology that not only drives ISIS, but also inspires many so-called “lone wolf” attackers – those who are inspired to carry out murder in the name of radical Islam via Internet propaganda and chat rooms.
Many of these attackers have never met an ISIS operative face-to-face, but some have received guidance online on how to carry out attacks.
Experts said getting to the root of how to prevent radical ideology from taking hold of individuals may take decades.
“In all instances of terrorism in the past, it takes years to remove the underlying causes,” Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Fiona Hill told Borderless News Online.
“France has only just started to experience this kind of wave of problems from ISIS,” she said.
“This is a very long term issue we’re going to have to deal with,” she said, adding that it could not only take years but rather generations.
Still, France has for decades had a disaffected population of ethnically Arab people who’ve had trouble integrating with mainstream French society. Many live in ghettos and the thinking that pervades these groups – rightly or wrongly – is that opportunities are reserved for ethnically French people.
Many feel a sense of not belonging, of not being fully integrated with French society and at the same time cut off from their parents’ homeland – a sentiment that ISIS preys upon to recruit new foot soldiers.
Critics note that this problem has been going on for decades but contend that France’s government has failed to adequately deal with it. Indeed, such populations have been fertile recruiting grounds for ISIS, with ISIS and al-Qaeda before them preaching that their brand of extremist Islam is the answer to all their problems.
While French authorities are paying more attention to this issue now with the dramatic and sudden rise of ISIS attacks, some experts say it will take some time before a solution is found.
“I agree that there could have been more attention paid to this – they’re paying attention to this certainly now – but you don’t solve these problems overnight,” she said.
ISIS has no political grievances and is not making any demands. The doomsday radicals are simply declaring that it’s God’s will that they carry out such attacks, as they believe it gets them closer to their goal of re-establishing the caliphate – an Islamist-ruled empire across a vast swath of territory of the Middle East.
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