2025
Safety Foresight 03
A combination of shifting allegiances, ongoing conflicts and perceived complicity in anti-Muslim actions have made more countries vulnerable to IS’s reach. Locations that have not traditionally been targeted by Islamic State (IS) or other extremist groups in recent years are expected to be at greater risk of terrorist attacks in 2025.
Locations at risk of IS-style attacks now include smaller cities and towns, aside from major cities which have been perceived as the most likely terror targets.
Multiple IS-claimed operations in 2024, including the Kerman, Iran, suicide bombings in January, the Crocus City Hall massacre in Russia’s Krasnogorsk in March, a deadly mass shooting in Oman’s Wadi Kabir in July and a stabbing spree in Germany’s Solingen in August, showed that perpetrators were more focused on causing as many casualties as possible in their operations. Authorities in locations that have little or no history of Islamist militancy may be unprepared and unable to prevent these attacks. These tactics include bombings using improvised explosive devices and homemade bombs, vehicle rammings, as well as lone-wolf knife and gun attacks, aside from combined shootings and suicide bombings.
The threat of further possible IS-claimed and inspired attacks, which since the defeat of the IS “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq in 2017 fluctuated in scale, as well as those by other radicals and extremists, has prompted multiple countries including France, Australia and New Zealand to raise their terrorism threat levels.
While IS considers the conflict between Israel and its neighbours to be a distraction from the larger global jihadist struggle, it can draw on anti-Israel and anti-Western hostility generated by the conflict to recruit new adherents. Additionally, increased militant activity in countries like Oman, Ghana and the Maldives, which were once considered insulated from significant extremist threats, will rise.
The growing strength of both IS and al Qaeda-affiliated movements in central and West Africa shows the medium- and long-term risks of these groups’ reconstituting themselves outside the Middle East. Former Western security partners in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso have cut ties with their backers but have proven incapable of staving off the militants’ advances; most of the highest casualty IS attacks in recent years have taken place in these countries. The collapse of state authority in wide swaths of the Sahel may eventually herald the coming of a new declaration of a “caliphate”.
Editor: Paul Mutter
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