The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is likely to have “emboldened” terrorists and means that the threat of a 9/11 style terrorist attack remains alive, warned Britain’s spy chief on Friday.
MI5 Director General Ken McCallum told the BBC that there was greater need to be vigilant as there could be a “morale boost” for extremists as a result of developments in Afghanistan as the US-led NATO troops withdrew last month. He also revealed that the UK’s police and intelligence services had foiled 31 “late-stage” terror attack plots against the country in the past four years.
“The big concern flowing from Afghanistan, alongside the immediate inspirational effect, is the risk that terrorists reconstitute and once again pose us more in the way of well developed, sophisticated plots of the sort that we faced in 9/11 and the years thereafter,” said McCallum.
“Overnight you can have a psychological boost or morale boost to extremists already here, or in other countries. So, we need to be vigilant – both for the increase in inspired terrorism, which has become a real trend for us to deal with over the last five to 10 years, alongside the potential regrowth of Al Qaeda style directed plots, that we saw more commonly some years ago,” he said.