Afghanistan crisis: MI5 fear Taliban victory will inspire young UK extremists to travel abroad

MI5 fear that the collapse of the Western-backed government in Afghanistan will prove an inspiration for young extremists from the West.

The defeat of ISIS in Syria has left jihadists struggling to find a ‘victory narrative’ that is attractive to those seeking to travel abroad or launch attacks here.

But the security services have believed from some months that Afghanistan was likely to end up with a Taliban government of some sort and that could hand a boost to Western-based extremists.

Ken McCallum, director general of MI5, said last month: ‘It must surely be likely that extremist groups of various sorts, including UK-based groupings who have no meaningful connection themselves to Afghanistan, will seek to portray this to potential people they are trying to recruit or radicalise, as a victory for extremist Islam.’

The leadership of terrorist organisations put out inspirational and instructional material and then invite others to ‘have a go under their own steam,’ he said.

He warned that the ‘inspired effect’ is ‘at least as much of a challenge’ as the ‘directed’ threat from terrorist commanders commissioning and instructing individuals.

‘It tends on the whole to result in activities and attack plots of lower sophistication but the difficulty is they tend to be harder to detect because there is much less in the way of investigate-able activity up front – clues that my teams could piece together.’

MI5 also believes that there is still a demand for people who want to travel abroad and that Afghanistan is more attractive to individuals who might struggle to fit in in Somalia or Yemen.

The Security Service has spent years trying to monitor individuals who have travelled abroad and return after instruction on how to build bombs and handle firearms and with the motivation to attack the West.

Mr McCallum added: ‘From my perspective, what I think is likely to happen is something we’ve seen happen in various places around the world, which is where you have ungoverned space because of a civil war or some other political circumstance.

‘Non-state actors, such as terrorist groups will often seek to make use of that ungoverned space to advance their agenda.

‘In respect of Afghanistan, we would be rash to make confident predictions, but you might imagine, that if pockets of ungoverned space open up, some terrorist groups might seek, for example, to re-establish some training facilities there, as we’ve seen in the past.’

He said it did not ‘automatically follow’ that they would then seek to direct terrorist attacks against Britain but ‘that is clearly a possibility to which we must be alert.’

MI5 is aware that al-Qaeda planners such as Rashid Rauf, a Birmingham baker’s son who helped plan the 7/7 bombings and a series of other foiled plots, including one to blow up seven trans-Atlantic airliners, ran an ‘external operations’ unit from the Pakistan border area with Afghanistan.

Mr McCallum added: ‘Clearly, through extended parts of my own career the travel of UK based extremists out to South Asia, Pakistan and Afghanistan has been a huge factor, which has given rise to some fairly sharp risks, and indeed, some awful tragedies in the UK.

‘And so, MI5 is not taking lightly in any way, shape, or form, the risks that terrorists seek to rebuild in Afghanistan.’