Counterterrorism in the European Union

The Jihadist Terrorism report was interesting to note that the most successful attacks were likely to be lone wolf attacks while the ones to fail would involve group effort. This honestly does make more sense as the lone wolf can become spontaneous and randomly attack people - though with a lower potential body count. It also seems that ISIL is more accessible for people to join its ideology and mission rather than Al-Qaeda with its more complex attack planning, thus more ISIL activities being reported. My question though is what domestic policies were in place that makes some member states more vulnerable or successful than others? The EU most likely will have to address this unequal state of affairs in their agencies they assigned (addressed in the documents preceding this one).

Bringing up Buddhists as perceived to be attacking Sunni Islam made me remember that Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese doomsday cult responsible for the Tokyo subway sarin attack (killed thirteen people and injured more than a thousand), had self-perceived itself to be Japanese Buddhism offshoot. I was a bit confused for the indicators this report used to measure its failed and complete attacks though. Why did the May 24 France attack fail when it injured 13 people via IED (page 36)? The attack did successfully go through, it just didn't kill anyone. The succeeding paragraph also confused me for the same reason. The male IT specialist working for a police intelligence unit is the prime example of what I had meant in a previous post with "ghost skins" for Europe. They needed to address that in their reports for investigation and not just mention the abuse of private and nonprofit sectors' services.

The mental illness distinction seemed to be very important, as according to Bruce Hoffman, it's important to distinguish motive due to terrorism being perceived by the actor as righteous and inherently unselfish compared to other types of criminal acts.

Overall, it seems the general trend for the profile of a terrorist that I can gather from this report is usually male, young in their 20s, and used either blades or IEDs. I was surprised not to see the use of vehicles as much, though I may have conflated past news reports with the EU's situation from 2015 to 2019.