Sydney siege draws on killings in Canada: ‘One terrorist attack galvanizes others’

Analysis

There is a link between the murder of two Canadian soldiers in attacks near Montreal and in Ottawa in October and Monday’s terrorist drama in Australia where a phoney Muslim cleric armed with a black Islamic flag and a rifle was killed along with two of the hostages he had seized 16 hours earlier at a Sydney café.

What happens is that “one terrorist attack galvanizes others to try to do the same thing,” said Tobias Feakin, who is the in-house expert on terrorism at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Would-be terrorists in Australia would have known plenty about the tragic deaths of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent and Cpl. Nathan Cirillo. Their murders were celebrated by militants of Islamic State, which used them to urge young Muslims to join their cause. And they received heaps of empathetic coverage in Australia, where the media got a stark answer Monday to its question: “When will it happen here?”

Feakin talked with me for more than one hour about the daunting security challenges that Australia faces from homegrown Islamic jihadists during a visit I made a couple of weeks ago to ASPI’s offices in Canberra. At the end of that conversation, Feakin predicted that more such attacks were coming.

“Do I see bombs going off in western states? I am not sure,” Feakin said at the time. “But you will certainly see more of what you saw in Ottawa. That is, individuals carrying out attacks with hand weapons and knives.

“Tactics are changing from the spectacular — such as huge bombings — to those that aren’t. It is individuals acting alone that are scaring the hell out of governments. It is these unknown, sudden attacks that send them into a complete panic.”

The attacks in Ottawa and Sydney produced dramatic videos that transfixed the world. But they will also be used by ISIS, as a recruitment tool for those thinking of carrying out such barbaric acts themselves.

Among the other common threads that connect the two Canadian attacks and the one in Sydney on Monday is that the perpetrators had mental health issues, patchy work records and appeared to have acted alone. The perils posed by lone wolf terrorists, and the extreme difficulty that democratic societies have in stopping such rogues before they can commit murder and mayhem is a dilemma without an easy solution.

“Governments always have trouble responding to the softer elements and this is where Canada and Australia can really help each other,” said Feakin, who was a frequent visitor to the security agencies in Ottawa when he worked the terrorist file as an analyst with the London-based Royal United Services Institute.

“Canada and Australia are already sharing hard [intelligence] data and some of their methods and techniques but they must also share information on what works to divert people and turn them away from doing this.”

What particularly bothered Feakin was that despite many dire warnings from the security agencies, there had been “no buy in from the political level” in Australia until Vincent was run over by a car and Cirillo was gunned down as he stood in a kilt at the National War Memorial.

As the result of the Canadian attacks, Australia quickly added layers of security around its Parliament and other key government buildings, rushed to enact and enforce stronger laws to combat terrorism and tapped into $500 million in fresh funding for security agencies obliged to keep much closer tabs on a growing number of terrorists and potential terrorists.

Among the new tools are the legal means to permit Australian security agencies to listen in to cellphone communications, intercept computer network information and keep metadata.

The RCMP is investigating about 90 Canadians as threats to national security including several dozen men who are believed to be fighting for ISIS. That is more than trouble enough for those trying to trace their whereabouts and figure out their plans. But Australia confronts even more homegrown jihadists.

Police counted more than 100 of them two years ago, according to Feakin. It is now guessed that their numbers have swelled to 250 or more.

As I wrote not long ago in this space, the most notorious of the terrorists from Down Under at the moment is Khaled Sharrouf. The 33-year-old Australian became a global social media sensation after he tweeted a photograph from Syria of his seven-year-old son holding a severed head with the caption, “That’s my boy.”

Sharrouf, a diagnosed schizophrenic, also received lots of publicity for writing on social media that Sept. 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 people were murdered when two jetliners crashed into New York’s World Trade Center, had been “the best day of my life.”

The terror that has been unleashed this year in Canada and Australia and the ghastly images posted to the world by Sharrouf will undoubtedly provide fresh inspiration to those who admire such savagery and who lack the means or the gumption to become “martyrs” in the Middle East. It is impossible to escape the gloomy feeling that ISIS will soon be encouraging more diabolical attacks on vulnerable spots such as cafés, malls, theatres or sports venues.