RPT: Italy's Migration Policy To Blame For Terrorist Tracking Failure - Security Expert

GENOA (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 17th November, 2020) Lapses in detecting would-be terrorists like the Nice attacker are caused by the flaws in the migration policy and not in the work of the intelligence and security services, Marco Lombardi, director of the Italian Team for Security, Terroristic Issues and Managing Emergencies (ITSTIME), told Sputnik in an interview.

The 21-year-old Tunisian man who stabbed dead three people in the Notre-Dame church in Nice on October 29, Brahim Aoussaoui, arrived from Tunisia on the Italian island of Lampedusa in September along with other migrants. On October 9, he was ordered to leave the country, since he had no right to ask for asylum, but he managed not only to stay in the country but also to move across the whole territory of Italy and reach France.

"When illegal immigration is so high, once it arrives in your country it is too late to contain it; you must contain it outside the national border. Consequently, it is possible that a person like this escapes, and that there are no control centers when he arrives and eventually he goes where he wants. At that point, the information is lost," Lombardi, who is also member of the Governmental Commission on Counter Radicalization and of the Strategic Policy Committee of the Italian foreign ministry, said.

He stressed that the lax control over the movement of migrants into and across Italy is mainly to blame for potential terrorists making their way into the rest of Europe.

"So in this case we cannot speak of intelligence errors, we cannot speak of police errors, we can speak of errors in the management of migration flows into our country, in a sense that we cannot manage immigration in this way, because it will happen again that anyone who decides to escape will be able to escape and get lost in some corner of Europe. The problem is not security agencies, the problem is the inability of Italian governments to govern immigration," he continued.

Tunisia is not considered to be an unsafe country, therefore migrants arriving to the Italian shores from there are not eligible for asylum. Most of the arriving migrants are illegal, Lombardi noted, but given the high number of people, controls are very slow and inefficient. Identification process usually starts on cruise ships, where they are put for quarantine in the current circumstances of the pandemic.

"What happens given such a large number of people is that, if a hundred arrive every day, at least ten run away every day. They escape from the centers where they are placed, they climb over the fences, but there is little to do," Lombardi said.

On November 13, EU home affairs ministers held a video conference to discuss the fight against terrorism and the contentious new pact on migration in Europe � as the EU officially linked the rise of terrorism with the migration crisis that the bloc has been totally unable to settle since 2015. At the final press conference, German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said the EU should optimize protection at the borders.

Soon after the attack in Nice, multiple shootings took place in Vienna, resulting in the death of four people and 22 injured. The gunman was later identified to be an Austrian citizen of ethnic Albanian descent and a supporter of the Islamic State terrorist organization (IS, Deash, banned in Russia).

After the attacks in Nice and Vienna, Italy decided to intensify controls at the nation's borders. Italian and French interior ministries agreed that the two countries' police forces would form joint border patrol brigades. However, the level of terrorist alert was not changed.

"I don't think that after Paris, Nice and Vienna, the situation has changed for Italy. For years we have had a real threat that is brought by those called 'lone wolves.' This type of threat has been present for some years and it is very difficult to intercept, because when an organization is missing, you lack the signals that you can detect and understand, like those that an organization leaves before making an attack.

An organized structure always gives signals of what it is about to do," Lombardi said.

The expert said the shift in terrorism from organized groups to lone wolves arose after the defeat of IS in the middle East.

"We have no longer have an organized structure for years, but we have terrorists who tend to act alone. It does not mean that the threat is less; the organizational dimension has changed. Lone wolves are as dangerous as Daesh was. In some ways they are more dangerous because it is more difficult to intercept them. But this is the situation we have been in for three or four years. Since 2017, Islamist terrorism has become more linked to lone wolves than to the organizational structures and therefore nothing has changed as a threat level to Italy," he continued.

According to the researcher, what happened in France and Austria was linked to a certain extent to geopolitical interests in which both France and Austria are more involved than Italy. Those attacks can be seen as part of a hybrid warfare, in which France, Austria and Turkey are involved.

France and Turkey have been embroiled in a diplomatic row since late October, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lambasted French leader Emmanuel Macron for the latter's pledge to get tougher on "radical Islam," fight Islamic "separatism" in France and spur the rise of an Islamic "enlightenment" following the October beheading of history teacher Samuel Paty near Paris. Paty, who reportedly showed caricatures depicting the Islamic prophet Mohammad in class, was beheaded by a Muslim man of Chechen origin in mid-October. Erdogan said Macron should check his mental health over his obsession with Muslims and accused the French leader of infringing on the freedom of religion, as well as urged Muslims to boycott French products.

In early November, France outlawed the "Grey Wolves" organization, a far-right militant movement affiliated with the Turkish Nationalist Movement Party. Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said the Grey Wolves were responsible for inciting hatred and committing violent acts. Turkish foreign ministry said it considered unacceptable for France to ban the movement's symbol, a wolf and an Islamic crescent, and stated the step hurt freedom of expression.

"Vienna is also important because in June the Austrian government began to close mosques, it closed 6 or 7 mosques linked to the Turkish extremism that praised the Grey Wolves. They intervened very harshly saying that the political islam that recognizes itself in the Muslim Brotherhood had to be cut off and the mosques that were linked to Turkey were closed. Vienna is a major location for the Grey Wolves," Lombardi said.

However, Italy is not standing in the way of the Turkish national interests, the researcher noted.

"What happened in France and Vienna were terrorist attacks, but this terrorism was pushed by national interests, in particular, by Turkish interests. At this moment I do not think that Turkey has a particular interest in using terrorism to attack Italy," Lombardi said.

To a certain extent, it is even counter-productive for potential terrorists to destabilize Italy, because Italy often serves as a pathway to reach other countries, he noted.

The approaching religious holidays, like Christmas, also do not increase the attack risk, Lombardi believes.

"Over the past years since Daesh was created, we have had declarations by the Islamic State, the threats to make Christmas a bloody day and the New Year a bloody day, but it has never happened. So I expect the threat to be made, but I do not think that the threat corresponds to a necessary increase in the capacity for intervention, I think it all stops at the level of threats," he said.

Moreover, Italian domestic policy in fighting terrorism in quite efficient, the researcher noted. Being used to fighting mafia and organized crime for a long time, Italian security structures have learned how to effectively infiltrate an organized criminal unit.