97 / 145
97
The European Union (EU), which had already
suffered brutal terrorist attacks in Madrid (2004)
and London (2005), was the target of jihadist
fanaticism once again in 2015. The year began
with attacks carried out between January 7 and
9 in Paris on the offices of the satirical magazine
Charlie Hebdo
and a Jewish supermarket in
which 17 civilians and three of the perpetrators
died. The two men who assaulted the offices of
the magazine had links with Al Qaeda (AQ) in
the Arabian Peninsula and those involved in the
attack on the supermarket had ties to the Is-
lamic State (IS). Slightly more than a month lat-
er, on February 14, an IS sympathiser attacked a
cultural centre and a synagogue in Copenha-
gen, wounding five people and killing another
two before dying in a shootout with police. Is-
lamic radicals carried out a number of other at-
tacks in France in the name of jihad during 2015
with varying degrees of success. On February 3,
three policemen guarding a synagogue in Nice
were injured in an armed attack. On June 26, an
Islamic fanatic decapitated the manager of an
Air Products plant in San Quentin Fallavier, a
town near Lyon. In another incident that took
place on August 21, a heavily armed man was
prevented by passengers from committing a
massacre on a Thalys train in Pas de Calais. In
spite of the strong security measures imple-
mented following the January attacks, several
others were carried out simultaneously on No-
vember 13 in Paris and Saint Denis in which at
least six armed attacks and three explosions left
351 wounded and 130 dead in addition to nine
of the perpetrators –all of whom were affiliated
with IS– who either blew themselves up or were
killed by police. The story has continued una-
bated in 2016. On March 22 another attack re-
lated to the events in Paris was perpetrated in
Brussels in which various explosions in airport
facilities and a metro station claimed the lives of
at least 31 people in addition to those two at-
tackers, who were on this occasion as well, IS
followers.
Nevertheless, Europe did not have the dubi-
ous honour of being the sole, or even the hard-
est-hit, target of such attacks in 2015, even
though the majority of the victims of attacks
The European Union’s
response to jihadist terrorism
and the Syrian conflict
Enrique Ayala