Consciously Running a Risk

"We run a huge risk: seeing people leave prison at the end of their sentences who will not have reformed at all, who are potentially even more extreme as a result of their time inside."
Paris prosecutor François Molins 

"The stakes are much higher for government because people are focusing on this issue."
"Now the government is much more afraid than before."
Farhad Khosrokhavar, sociologist, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales  

"If you look across the globe, the cohesive nature of the enterprise for ISIS has been maintained. There's not been any breaking up, at least not as yet."
"I worry about very seasoned fighters who will pop up periodically."
"It does appear that the possibility of this kind of use [inciting to violence through social media sites, along with recruiting for jihad] is growing. [Including floating the use of chemical weapons and other poisons, in jihadist attacks]. And that is a concern to all of us."
Russell Travers, acting head, National Counterterrorism Center, United States

Many people convicted in France on terrorism-related charges are set to be released this year and next. Djamel Beghal, pictured here on his way to court in 2007 after being jailed on an earlier terrorism conviction, was released on Monday; French media reported he was to be sent to his native Algeria. Photo: Stavel Christian/Maxppp/Zuma Press

France, acting in a spirit of forgiveness -- hoping for positive outcomes on the release of radicalized jihadis, perhaps banking on gratitude to France for their release will indemnify the nation from attack and the focus of hatred will turn elsewhere -- may be in the throes of delusion. Hoping as well that their already overtasked security services will be able to keep track of and react to impending violence to keep the country safe seems to reflect a kind of stunned oblivion to the very real nature of jihad's influence on the faithful committed to martyrdom.

In any event, French authorities have committed themselves to the release of some fifty individuals currently serving sentences linked to terrorism crimes along with an additional 400 candidates classified as being 'radicalized' while imprisoned. The end of 2019 is to see the conclusion of a program for their release, according to the French Ministry of Justice. France has, at the present time, over five hundred individuals incarcerated for crimes linked to Islamofascist terrorism representing a threefold increase in such prisoners in four years.

As though those numbers aren't sufficiently impressive, an estimated 1,200 additional prisoners are considered as having been radicalized, a figure representing an increase of 70 percent since 2015, government data reveal. It isn't quite that French authorities are indifferent to the dangers involved in releasing these hard-core jihadis. They have no illusions about their threat to France. Anti terror authorities have braced themselves for the likely resurgence of a violent security threat deemed to be on the low end since European Islamic State terror cells were disrupted.

As a cautionary but wholly necessary reaction to the release of these jihadis, police in France have taken steps toward the formation of a new monitoring unit attending to former inmates' activities. French security will have its work cut out in staying abreast of the terrorist threat increase resulting from these incomprehensible releases. These are, after all, dedicated Islamists, totally focused on their hatred of non-Muslims, their governments and their goal of intercepting jihadi threats. So luck will be as important as vigilance in apprehending threats.

The public will not be aware for the most part that plots are constantly being hatched which intelligence agencies have the good fortune to detect and prevent from occurring. Both in France and in Germany terrorist plans in the use of the deadly poison ricin have been thwarted. Even while Islamic State appears in final retreat under assault by Kurdish militias and the national military in Iraq and Syria, new recruits are rising elsewhere, in Yemen, Somalia and Libya. While ISIS has a diminishing presence on the battlefield, its long tentacles stretch to recruit elsewhere.

"Europe faces an intense, unrelenting and multidimensional international terrorist threat", according to Andrew Parker, head of Britain's MI5. Social media has helped Islamic State immeasurably in its sophisticated presence around the globe, now using Bitcoin and encryption communications in their underground conspiracies to attack the West in all its vestiges of governmental and social life. Having most of its territory lost in Iraq and Syria, it yet remains in control of some 2,600 square kilometers of territory.

And though many of ISIS's senior commanders have been eliminated, European officials caution the group is hugely successful through its social media campaigns with adherents responding to agree to take on attacks wherever they happen to be, throughout Europe. Although thousands of the estimated 40,000 jihadis who streamed out of some 120 countries to fight alongside Islamic State since 2014 were killed many more are thought to have been fighting in Libya, Yemen or the Philippines, while some remain in Turkey, and yet thousands more have returned to their European countries of origin.

Wherever they remain apprehended, rounded up as prisoners of war as in camps operated by Kurdish militias in northern Syria, those camps have become virtual breeding grounds similar to prison environments in the West, for extremist recruitment and sharing of experiences from which it is entirely possible yet another barbaric group such as Islamic State might be formed and go on to distinguish themselves as a serial copy of al-Qaeda and ISIS, drawing greater numbers to their campaigns of conquest.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique and Tanzania are all showing signs of jihadi contamination, with groups similar to al-Shabab, linked to ISIS, being formed to raise alarm among those they target for attacks. In France, authorities intercepted a ricin plot by an Egyptian-born student when social media messages caused an alert. In Germany, their intelligence service received a warning from their U.S. counterpart that enabled them to arrest a Tunisian planning to make and use ricin in an attack.

So yes, Mr. Travers, you're perfectly right, global intelligence must take note of this new direction, new series of ongoing threats and remain not only vigilant but actively involved, stretching their inadequate resources past their limits in interests of self-protection from the threat that has no intention of dissolving its virulent appeal among the Muslim faithful.

Smoke rises behind an Islamic State flag after Iraqi security forces and Shiite fighters took control of Saadiya in Diyala province from Islamist State militants, November 24, 2014.. © REUTERS