Renewed Fears Attacks Like Nice Are the Future of Jihad

尼斯再次遭遇恐怖袭击恐与圣战组织存在某种关系

Jeff Seldin

July 16, 2016 1:04 PM

As investigators in France began sifting through the devastation of the attack on Bastille Day celebrations in Nice that killed 84 people, some Western intelligence officials were already alarmed.

They feared the initial investigation could fail to show any definitive links between the suspect, a 31-year-old Tunisian-born Frenchman named Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, and any known terror group. But they also feared that Bouhlel’s profile would fit with an emerging trend.

Increasingly, these officials said, the Islamic State terror group seems to be seeking out petty criminals and the mentally ill to quickly turn them into weapons.

So far, that appears to be how Bouhlel’s story is playing out.

The IS-linked Aamaq news agency said Saturday that the terror group was responsible for the deadly attack on Nice, claiming Bouhlel as a “soldier of the Islamic State.”

Evidence was still being gathered, but French officials were not ruling out the possibility.

"It seems that he was radicalized very quickly," French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told reporters Saturday in Paris.

Just a day earlier, French prosecutor Francois Molins had said that while Bouhlel was known to police and had been involved a violent altercation, he was “completely unknown” to French intelligence.

“This is the future of their jihad,” Malcolm Nance, a former counterterrorism and intelligence officer, said of IS. “All of these little absences of radicalization themselves are actually a sign of radicalization.”