From home-grown killers to camps where fanatics were trained to slaughter
Daily Mail
January 30, 2017
Several countries around the world are protesting at the executive order signed by President Donald Trump which suspends the entry into the US of all nationals from seven countries, all of which are overwhelmingly Muslim.
Trump has denied it is a ban on Muslims and had insisted the nations on the list – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia Sudan, Syria and Yemen – 'are the same countries previously identified by the Obama administration as sources of terror'.
But how are these countries linked to terror attacks in Europe?
Mail Online has analysed all the terrorist attacks in Europe, including Turkey, since 9/11.
No individuals from five of the countries on the list - Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen - had been linked to any terrorist attacks in Europe in the last 15 years, although some could be linked to Islamist bases and training camps in Libya, Somalia and Yemen.
Raffaello Pantucci, a counter-terrorism expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London, told Mail Online: 'Most terrorist attacks in America are carried out by Americans.
'This list contains countries like Iran and Sudan, which have long been accused by the US of state sponsorship of terrorism, but have not been involved as individuals. And why are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia not on this list?
'There is not a lot of logic behind this but it's a lot of politicking.
'He signs a shiny executive order, which makes life difficult for a few people, and makes the international community upset, but at the end of the day he doesn't get elected by the international community.'
So how many individuals from each nation have been involved in terror attacks in Europe since 9/11?
Syria - 3 (possibly 4)
In 2007 Loa'i Mohammad Haj Bakr al-Saqa, a Syrian, was convicted of masterminding the November 2003 truck bombing of two synagogues in Istanbul, which killed 57 people. Several other Turkish men, with links to al-Qaeda, were also convicted.
One of the men who carried out the Paris attacks in November 2015 was believed to be Syrian. Ahmad al-Mohammad, 25, blew himself up at the Stade de France stadium. A Syrian passport was found near his body, although the authorities said they believed it was fake. The Paris prosecutor's office said later his fingerprints matched those of a man who arrived on the Greek island of Leros in October, purporting to be a Syrian refugee.
Another of the Stade France suicide bombers was identified as M al-Mahmod, who had also arrived in Leros among refugees. He may have come from Syria although his identity and nationality were never conclusively proved.
In July 2016 Mohammad Daleel, 27, blew himself up outside a wine bar in Ansbach, Germany. Fifteen people were injured. Daleel was a refugee from Syria who had arrived in Germany in 2014 seeking asylum.
Iran - 0
But in 2012 a suicide bomber killed six Israeli tourists as they got off a coach in Burgas, Bulgaria. Earlier this year Australian citizen Meliad Farah, 32, and 25-year-old Canadian citizen Hassan el-Hajj Hassan were named as the bomber's accomplices. They are believed to have been agents of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia group with close ties to Iran.
Libya - 0
But earlier this month US jets bombed an ISIS training camp near Sirte, Libya - the former home town of the late dictator Colonel Gaddafi - after intelligence linked it to Anis Amri, the Tunisian refugee who killed a lorry driver and 11 people at a Christmas market in Berlin last month.
Iraq - 2
In December 2010 Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, an Iraqi-born Swedish national, blew himself up in a botched suicide bombing in the centre of Stockholm. Witnesses said al-Abdaly, who had come to Sweden as a child and later lived in Luton, England, 'shouted something in Arabic' before detonating the bomb. Several other bombs failed to go off and he was the only fatality in the attack.
On September 17, 2015 Rafik Yousef, a 41-year-old Iraqi national, was shot and killed when he tried to stab a policeman in Berlin. Astonishingly he had been released from prison after plotting to kill the Iraqi prime minister during a visit to Germany in 2004.
Somalia – 0
But on 5 December 2015 a Somalia-born man, Muhaydin Mire, stabbed three people during a high-profile attack on the London Underground at Leytonstone after shouting: 'This is for Syria, my Muslim brothers'. Mire and his family had arrived in London from Somalia when Mire was 12. He was jailed for
life in August last year.
Sudan - 0
But in November last year an ISIS commander, known as Abu Nassim, was arrested in Sudan. Abu Nassim, who was born Moez Fezzani, was deported from Italy in 2012 but was later convicted and jailed for five years and eight months in jail for recruiting terrorists in Milan. Abu Nassim is also wanted for his role in the massacre of 21 tourists at a museum in Tunis in 2015.
Yemen - 0
But the Daily Telegraph reported in 2015 that Saïd Kouachi, one of two brothers who killed 12 people during an attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, had been to the Yemen in 2011 and may have met Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born preacher who specialised in radicalising Muslims in the West. Al-Awlaki was killed by an American drone strike a few months later.
The vast majority of the terror attacks in Europe have come from home-grown terrorists, especially from France and Belgium.
Terrorist attacks in Russia - of which there have been many - usually emanated from Chechnya or other rebellious and overwhelmingly Muslim parts of the North Caucasus.
While in Turkey, which has seen an upsurge in attacks recently, the bombers have been mainly Turkish nationals, often from the Kurdish minority.
Britain's two major terrorist attacks - the 7 July 2005 bomb attacks on buses and Tube trains in London and the horrific beheading of off-duty soldier Lee Rigby in May 2013 - were carried out by British-born extremists. In the case of Corporal Rigby, the killers were brought up as Christians and converted to Islam as adults.
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