The head of Britain’s MI5 home espionage service mentioned the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan would offer a “morale boost” to extremists plotting assaults elsewhere, and will give them a base to function once more as they did on 9/9. Did it for 11. Friday.
The Director General of the Security Service, Ken McCallum, identified by the initials Military Intelligence Section 5, informed the BBC that the risk to Britain from terrorism was “a real and permanent thing”.
“We face an ongoing global struggle to defeat extremism and counter terrorism,” McCallum mentioned in an interview on the eve of the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 assaults on the United States.
Taliban troopers stand guard in Afghanistan’s northeastern Panjshir province on Wednesday, September 8, 2021. (AP picture)
Britain final suffered main assaults in 2017, when an attacker attacked a live performance in Manchester and knife-wielding males attacked two bridges in London. McCallum mentioned that in 4 years, the police and intelligence providers had disrupted 31 late-stage conspiracies to assault Britain. Such terrorists will probably be impressed by the success of the Taliban.
“Overnight you can get a psychological boost, boost the morale of extremists already here or in other countries, so we need to be vigilant,” McCallum mentioned. “There is no doubt that the recent events in Afghanistan may have excited and encouraged some extremists.”
The Taliban have promised that they won’t enable Afghanistan, the place Osama bin Laden was final in energy, to plot the 9/11 assaults, once more as a haven for terrorists planning to assault the West. But McCallum mentioned there was a threat that this could truly occur.
“As well as the immediate inspiring effect, there is also the risk that terrorists reorganize and once again put us in the way of the well-developed sophisticated plots that we faced in 9/11 and the years that followed.”
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With inputs from TheIndianEXPRESS
