ROME, Oct. 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The jihadist threat may be silent, but that does not mean it is dead. This is what emerges from the Special Report issued by the Med-Or Foundation, titled ‘The Silent Enemy: Presence and Evolution of the Jihadist Threat in the Broader Mediterranean’, presented at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. The report, overseen by the Director of Institutional Relations at the Foundation, Andrea Manciulli, analyses the current state of threats linked to terrorism and jihadist radicalism in the geopolitical and geographical space of the enlarged Mediterranean.
The jihadist threat “is not an imminent threat but an immanent one, meaning that it can resurface at any moment,” said Marco Minniti, Chairman of the Med-Or Foundation. “Today, international terrorism has two major incubators. One is in Asia, particularly in Afghanistan, where we have a significant and important presence of both Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in conflict with each other. […] The other incubator is Africa, where we have all the national variants of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State”.
According to Alfredo Mantovano, Undersecretary of State to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, the key to averting Islamist threats is not repeating past mistakes: “A dramatic mistake was thinking that the military dismantling of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq between 2016 and 2017 had ended the Islamist threat”. “On the contrary,” Mantovano observed, “the fragmentation of the Islamic State has resulted in a massive exodus of jihadist militants streaming from the Middle East to Africa, without the West fully grasping the magnitude of the situation, without the adoption of effective and coordinated measures and with a progressive withdrawal of military contingents from sensitive areas”.
Keeping attention high is also the call issued by Lorenzo Guerini, President of the Parliamentary Committee for the Intelligence and Security Services and for State Secret Control (COPASIR), according to whom we must “understand that the fact that the threat is silent does not mean that it is absent”. Guerini drew attention to the danger posed by so-called ‘void areas’ where terrorism could find fertile ground. These “are places where terrorism can thrive, and we must pay attention, reflect, and above all, work together. When it comes to Africa, this means European cooperation. Europe must put the situation in Africa at the top of its agenda in many areas of work, from supporting local governments and local realities to create better security conditions and counter terrorism, to a real, concrete, ambitious plan for Africa and its development”.
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