The head of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 warned Tuesday of a “worsening threat” from ISIS and other Islamic terrorists amid a changing landscape fueled by online activity.
In a rare public speech setting out the major threats to the U.K. from both foreign states and militant groups, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said more than a third of his agency’s priority investigations in the past month had “some form of connection” to overseas terrorist organizations.
A revived ISIS, also known as the so-called Islamic State, along with hostile states and radicalized individuals have combined to create “the most complex and interconnected threat environment we’ve ever seen,” he said at MI5 headquarters in London.
“Today’s Islamic State is not the force it was a decade ago,” McCallum said. “But after a few years of being pinned well back, they’ve resumed efforts to export terrorism.”
Al-Qaeda, he added, “has sought to capitalise on conflict in the Middle East, calling for violent action.”
The resurgence of those two groups represented “the terrorist trend that concerns me most,” he said.
ISIS’s self-proclaimed caliphate across Iraq and Syria collapsed five years ago, but the group has since morphed into a broader network of terror cells spread across Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central Asia.
McCallum pointed to the attack in March on a Moscow concert hall by ISIS-K, the Islamic State’s branch in South and Central Asia, as “a brutal demonstration of its capabilities.” The attack killed at least 145 people and was the deadliest to occur on Russian soil in 20 years.
“We and many European partners are detecting (ISIS)-connected activity in our homelands, which we are moving early to disrupt,” McCallum said.
In August, Austrian authorities arrested three teenagers accused of plotting a terrorist attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna. Officials said the plot appeared to have been inspired by ISIS and al-Qaida.
The warning comes as Canadian authorities have disrupted multiple plots linked to ISIS in recent months.
A father and son from Egypt accused of planning an attack in Toronto on behalf of ISIS were arrested in July. Last month, a Pakistani citizen was arrested in Quebec as he was allegedly about to cross the border to carry out an ISIS terrorist attack targeting Jews in New York City.
Both arrests have put scrutiny on Canada’s immigration screening systems and how they did not prevent the suspects from entering the country — one of them even gaining Canadian citizenship.
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ISIS has ramped up its propaganda in recent months, translating it into more languages and disseminating it onto more channels, Colin P. Clarke, director of research at the Soufan Group, told Global News in a previous interview.
He said ISIS-K has been leading the charge at a time Western countries have shifted their attention to other national security priorities.
“The West has become super-focused on great power competition, so counterterrorism is kind of an afterthought, unfortunately,” said Clarke, a leading expert on ISIS.
Low-sophistication attacks have long been encouraged by ISIS, which a decade ago urged its followers to use knives and vehicles as weapons.
Canada has experienced eight attacks linked to ISIS since 2014, the year the terror group was formed and began calling for killings in Western countries.
MI5 has faced criticism for its failure to stop deadly attacks, including a 2017 suicide bombing that killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. ISIS claimed responsibility for that attack and a series of mass stabbings in London since 2017.
During his speech, McCallum also warned Britain is facing a “staggering rise” in attempts at assassination, sabotage and other crimes on U.K. soil by Russia and Iran, as the two states recruit criminals to “do their dirty work.”
The number of state-threat investigations undertaken by MI5 has risen by 48 per cent in the past year, with Iran, Russia and China the main perpetrators, McCallum said.
He said his agents and police have tackled 20 “potentially lethal” plots backed by Iran since 2022 — aimed at Iranians abroad who oppose the country’s regime — and warned that it could expand its targets in the U.K. if conflicts in the Middle East deepen.
McCallum said Russia’s military intelligence agency was trying to use “arson, sabotage and more” to create “mayhem” on the streets of Britain and other European countries.
Both Russia and Iran often turn to criminals, “from international drug traffickers to low-level crooks,” to carry out their illegal deeds, he said.
In January, two Canadian men with ties to Hells Angels were charged in what U.S. authorities called a “murder-for-hire scheme” allegedly coordinated by Iran.
The U.S. has also accused Iran of plotting political assassinations ahead of this year’s presidential election.
“China is different,” McCallum said, with his agents focused on disrupting Beijing’s efforts to harm or coerce Chinese nationals in Britain and political interference. He stressed the importance of the U.K.-China economic relationship but said there were “risks to be managed.”
McCallum said that since 2017, MI5 and the police have disrupted 43 late-stage terrorism plots, saving “numerous lives.”
While about three-quarters of the plots stem from Islamic extremist ideology and a quarter from the extreme right, he said those labels “don’t fully reflect the dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies we see,” drawn from a soup of “online hatred, conspiracy theories and disinformation.”
Young people are increasingly involved, he said, with 13 per cent of the subjects of MI5 terror investigations under the age of 18 — “a threefold increase in the last three years.”
The online world has made lone actors more susceptible to indoctrination and radicalization, McCallum warned, and has become the primary focus of MI5’s operations.
MI5, he said, “has one hell of a job on its hands.”
— with files from Global’s Stewart Bell and the Associated Press
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