Throughout 2015, the height of the current migration crisis in Europe, an average of nearly 3000 people a day arrived via the Mediterranean āmost of them travelling in rickety boats packed far beyond capacity.1 The vast majority were fleeing from conflict in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the migrants came from far and wide and for a variety of reasonsāmany simply seizing the opportunity to pursue dreams of economic prosperity. Whatever their reason for coming, many were in possession of fraudulent documents or simply had no paperwork at all, and even when there was time to take fingerprints, many refused to cooperate.2 The āhotspots ā in Greece and Italy were overwhelmed. The result was that tens of thousands of people were able to enter Europe without being fingerprinted, registered or subject to security checks.3 Even when such checks were performed, they would only yield results if the people in question were registered in European or Interpol databases. This would be unlikely for foreign nationals emerging from the midst of civil war and insurgency, where law and order were largely absent. Such a chaotic situation is clearly ripe for exploitation, but it is also extremely perilous and thousands of migrants lose their lives each year trying to reach European shores.4 Yet despite the risks involved, terrorists were quick to seize the opportunity to slip into Europe undetected.
The first public indications that this might be happening date back to October 2014 when the German tabloid, Bild am Sonntag, claimed that US intelligence services had learned that ISIS was planning to dispatch operatives to Europe hidden within the flow of migrants from Turkey.5 The article even went as far as to specify that the terrorists would travel in teams of four and would be equipped with falsified passports.6 There was, however, a caveatāthere was thus far no evidence that such attack teams were already on the way. As it turned out, they were just getting ready.
In the aftermath of the attacks in Paris in November 2015, it soon emerged that two of the attackers, believed to be Iraqis, had come to Europe posing as refugees, entering via the Greek island of Leros on October 3rd that year.7 Both men had been photographed and had their fingerprints taken, but with no indication of connections to terrorism they had been allowed on their way. It would later emerge that all of the Paris attackersāwith the apparent exception of Brahim and Saleh Abdeslamāhad similarly infiltrated the migrant flows to (re)enter Europe beginning in the summer of 2015.8 Leaving little to chance, the operational leader of the group, Abdelhamid Abaaoud , had taken care to dispatch a handful of scouts to travel the migration trail in advanceāthe first of whom were in position in Greece by late December 2014ālittle more than two months after Bild had raised the alarm.9 Of course, ISIS had been planning this for months. As a former hostage of the group who was held from March 2013 until May the following year revealed to Italian investigators, ISIS interrogators had asked ālots of questions about the refugees who sought asylum in Europeā¦ [and] wanted to know how the procedure workedā.10
Including Abaaoud , at least twenty-seven ISIS operatives connected to the Paris attacks network (eleven of whom were European residents or citizens who had left to join the jihad in Syria) managed to infiltrate Europe posing as refugees before being arrested or killed.11 In addition to the assault on the French capital, they were responsible for the narrowly thwarted Thalys train attack of August 2015 and the bombings in Brussels on March 22, 2016. In total, they claimed 162 lives and hundreds of injuries. These individuals were thus by far the most deadly group of terrorists to infiltrate the recent migrant flows to Europe. However, they are certainly not the only ones to have done so, nor were they the first. In fact, there are cases that date back to the very beginning of the crisis in 2011 when the wave of Mediterranean migrants first began to swell in response to the uprisings in North Africa. The first person to be prosecuted under Italyās new āanti-foreign fighterā legislationāa Tunisian drug dealer named Louati Noussairāhad come to Europe on a migrant boat which arrived at the Italian island of Lampedusa on March 20, 2011.12 His countryman, the now infamous Anis Amri , who drove a 40-tonne truck through the Breitscheidplatz Christmas market in Berlin in December 2016, travelled the same route, arriving on April 4th.13 Less than three months later, a seasoned al-Qaeda (AQ) operative named Ibrahim Harun āa man of āmurderous zealā intent on attacking the Westāwas apprehended by Italian authorities after arriving on a boat from Libya.14
Since then, the number of āterrorist asylum-seekersā in Europe has risen quite rapidly andāat the time of writingānot a month goes by without a new case being discovered. Focusing on those who migrated or claimed asylum since 2011, they have so far been responsible for at least thirteen attacks in seven European countries, while some two dozen additional attack plans have been thwarted.15 They have further engaged in a variety of other subversive activities including recruitment, distribution of propaganda, fundraising and facilitation. Many of these individuals were trained operatives sent to infiltrate migration flows by foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) . As already noted, some of these operatives were in fact long-time European residents and citizens (i.e. returning āforeign fighters ā) who were well known to authorities and could not risk regular means of travel for fear of being detected. The majority, however, have been foreign nationals with no previous ties to Europe for whom there would be little way of knowing they were members of FTOs . Othersāsuch as the aforementioned Tunisians, Louati Noussair and Anis Amri ātravelled as more or less legitimate migrants only to radicalize and be drawn to terrorism after their arrival.
In the light of these facts, there is legitimate cause for concern. Yet unsurprisingly, given the collision as it were, of two issues as politically charged as terrorism and migration, confusion and hyperbole abound. It has been suggested, for instance, that at the height of its powers ISIS had orchestrated a āTrojan horseā strategy āsimultaneously driving migration flows while systematically infiltrating them in order to destroy Europe from within.16 Indeed, a number of self-professed ISIS supporters and collaborators have endorsed this theoryāmost notably an unnamed individual who met with reporters from Buzzfeed in southern Turkey in January 2015. Stipulating that āthere are some things Iām allowed to tell you and some things Iām notā, he claimed to have already sent 4000 fighters to Europe posing as aspiring refugees.17
As was noted at the time, this number seemed āimprobably highā and could have been a ploy to āboost the groupās stature and spread fearā.18 Importantly, just a few months later, IS...