Is Great Britain about to face a long, drawn out battle involving homegrown terrorists — the equivilent of an Islamic “insurgancy” within its borders?
According to the Independent, intelligence chiefs are warning Tony Blair that he should brace himself for a long term problem not due to outside forces as much as an inside insurgency:
Intelligence chiefs are warning Tony Blair that Britain faces a full-blown Islamist insurgency, sustained by thousands of young Muslim men with military training now resident in this country.
The grim possibility that the two London attacks were not simply a sporadic terror campaign is being discussed at the highest levels in Whitehall. Fears of a third strike remain high this weekend, based on concrete evidence supplied by an intercepted text message and the interrogation of a terror suspect being held outside Britain, say US reports.
NOTE: Readers should take this kind of report with a grain of salt. You don’t know the sourcing on it. Also, sources sometimes have their own motives for leaking info. So stick it in your mental file cabinet. MORE:
As police and the security services work to prevent another cell murdering civilians, attention is focusing on the pool of migrants to this country from the Horn of Africa and central Asia. MI5 is working to an estimate that more than 10,000 young men from these regions have had at least basic training in light weapons and military explosives.
A well-connected source said there were more than 100,000 people in Britain from “completely militarised” regions, including Somalia and its neighbours in the Horn of Africa, and Afghanistan and territories bordering the country. “Every one of them knows how to use an AK-47,” said the source. “About 10 per cent can strip and reassemble such a weapon blindfolded, and probably a similar proportion have some knowledge of how to use military explosives. That adds up to tens of thousands of men.”
That’s a scary quote. Except: how does this source KNOW that “every one of the” knows how to do that? The key message is that there is potential for an ongoing problem. But we have absolutely no proof that “every one of them” can do what this source says they can do. MORE:
Even though the vast majority had come to Britain to escape the lawlessness of their homelands, the source added, there remained an alarmingly large pool of trained men who could be lured into violent action here.
This threat had been largely neglected while attention focused on British-born militants who had been through training camps run by al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan.
So you have a disturbing report and what can we make out of this?
- There is a potential threat from immigrants and security forces clearly feel that it needs to be better monitored.
- Many of the immigrants come from areas where they may be knowledgeable on weaponry.
- A segment of the government wants to crack down on them.
Of course, we don’t know from this whether this source and others allied to him/her have pressed for a crackdown on immigrants before and if other factors besides security contribute to that.
We DO know there is a large Ismalic population and it’s clear some within the government feel that if steps aren’t taken it could be Great Britain’s Achilles Heel…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.