The first incidents of jihadist terrorism occurred in France in 1995 when a network with ties to Algeria carried out
a string of bombings in Paris in retaliation for French involvement in the
Algerian Civil War. Since 2014, more than 20 fatal attacks have been carried out in Europe. France saw eight attacks between January 2015 and July 2016; this included the
January 2015 Île-de-France attacks, the
November 2015 Paris attacks, and the July 2016
Nice truck attack. The United Kingdom saw three major attacks carried out in a span of four months in early 2017 (
Westminster attack,
Manchester Arena bombing, and
London Bridge attack). Other targets in Europe have included
Belgium,
Germany,
Russia, and
Spain. The transcontinental city of
Istanbul also saw both bombings and shootings, including in
January 2016,
June 2016 and
January 2017. In 2015, the
Islamic State, which in 2014 had claimed that all Muslims were under a religious obligation to join it, declared that the only excuse for Muslims to not join the group in territories under its control was to perpetrate terrorist attacks in their current place of residence. According to Europol's annual report released in 2017, the Islamic State exploited the flow of refugees and migrants to commit acts of terrorism, which was a feature of the 2015 Paris attacks. In 2016 attack planning against Western countries took place in Syria and Iraq. Groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIL had the intent and capabilities to mount mass casualty attacks with volunteers. However, Swedish news agency
Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå reviewed attacks in Western Europe between 2014 and 2017 and stated that most attackers radicalize as a result of personal contact rather than online. In 2017, the EU Counter-terrorism Coordinator
Gilles de Kerchove stated in an interview that there were more than 50,000 radicals and jihadists in Europe. In 2016, French authorities stated that 15,000 of the 20,000 individuals on the
list of security threats belong to
Islamist movements. After the Manchester Arena bombing in May 2017, British authorities and
MI5 estimated they had 500 ongoing investigations into 3,000 jihadist extremists as potential terrorist attackers, with a further 20,000 having been "subjects of interest" in the past, including the Manchester and Westminster attackers. According to
Lorenzo G. Vidino, jihadi terrorists in Europe mobilized by ISIL have tended to be second-generation immigrant Muslims. Consequently, countries such as Italy and Spain with a smaller demographic in this category have experienced fewer attacks than countries in Central and Northern Europe such as France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Belgium.
ICSR argues for a connection between terrorism and crime: up to 40% of terrorist plots in Europe are part-financed through
petty crime such as drug-dealing, theft, robberies, loan fraud and burglaries, and most jihadists have been imprisoned for petty or violent crime prior to radicalisation (some of whom radicalise while in prison). Jihadists use ordinary crime as a way to finance their activity and have also argued this to be the "ideologically correct" way to wage 'jihad 'in
'lands of war'. According to German anthropologist
Susanne Schröter, attacks in European countries in 2017 showed that the military defeat of the Islamic State did not mean the end of Islamist violence. Schröter also compared the events in Europe to a jihadist strategy formulated in 2005 by
Abu Musab al-Suri, where an intensification of terror would destabilise societies and encourage Muslim youth to revolt. The expected civil war never materialised in Europe, but did occur in other regions such as Libya, Syria, Iraq and the Philippines (
Battle of Marawi). ==List of attacks==