The coordinated attacks of the 'lone wolves'

Benny Avni:

Coordinated multi-arrest raids in Spain and Morocco this week indicate that it’s high time we do away with the “lone wolf” theory when fighting terror.

Madrid and Rabat coordinated their simultaneous raids, and I’m told they acted partially on information from Paris. All in all, 14 men were arrested on various charges related to recruitment of fighters for ISIS.

The raids followed last week’s much-publicized train incident in France, which could have become one of Europe’s bloodiest, but for the heroism of four Americans and several other train passengers who bravely disarmed the would-be terrorist.

Everything in that incident screamed “lone wolf,” and indeed that’s how it was initially reported.

The “wolf” in question was Ayoub El-Khazzani, a Moroccan-born 26-year-old who has lived in Spain and other European countries since 2007, where he was radicalized.

He first pumped himself up watching ISIS-produced propaganda in the bathroom of a high-speed train traveling in Europe. When he finally emerged from the lav, he was shirtless and brandished several weapons, including an AK-47, with 270 rounds of ammunition to assure a long fight on the defenseless train.

Khazzani’s AK-47 jammed at first, counteracting whatever weapons training he’d apparently received from ISIS figures in Syria and Iraq, where he’d recently traveled.

And hence the instinct to brand him a lone wolf — one of those crazies influenced, but not directed, by extremists who then decided to leave his home one morning and commit some heinous act of blind faith.

That theory essentially says, “Move along, not much to see here.”

Yet, how did Khazzani obtain his AK-47 and other arms on a continent where weapons are more restricted than in the United States? And how does a drifter of poor means get his hands on 149 euros to finance first-class train travel, even forgoing an opportunity for a discount fare?

Maybe he wasn’t all that lonely after all.

“We have to stop talking about the lone wolf,” says Ben Hammou Mohammed, president of the Moroccan Center for Strategic Studies, a leading think tank on security issues. “I call it ‘individual company,’ ” Mohammed told me. “Either in the virtual side or the real side, there’s contact somewhere. I don’t believe in individual act. Usually, there are other persons somewhere. We are facing groups, and not only individuals.”
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The Israelis speak of "the infrastructure of terror."  They are talking about the support operatives who groom the terrorist and provide the terrorist with weapons and plans for the attack.  ISIL is apparently providing that infrastructure and the arrest suggest is is not as small as firs thought.   As Avni avers this suggest that stopping these attacks is not a hopeless task,