Paris Olympics faces twin terror threats of ISIS and teenage extremists

Games will feature vast security operation to keep 15 million visitors safe as radicalisation spreads, not least though short viral videos

Soldiers patrol on the Seine river as security is stepped up ahead of the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. AP

Police officers in the French capital check people's credentials near the Louvre. AFP

Barriers and checkpoints have been installed as part of Paris were locked down on July 18. AFP

The Olympics has prompted fears of extremists looking to exploit the high-profile sporting event to commit acts of violence. AFP

French security forces began locking down large parts of central Paris on July 18, ahead of the hugely complex security operation for the Olympic opening ceremony on the Seine on July 26. AFP

The opening parade, which will be held along a 6km stretch of the river, has led to the closure of central riverside districts to most vehicles. AP

French soldiers from the Operation Sentinelle patrol on Petit Pont - Cardinal Lustiger bridge with the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral. AFP

A French police officer talks to a man as the security perimeter for the opening ceremony is deployed near the National Assembly ahead of the Paris Olympics. Reuters

Paris is facing the threat of terrorist attacks during the Olympics from a branch of ISIS resurgent in Afghanistan as well as teenagers radicalised on social media, experts have told The National.

A major security operation is under way in France to protect the Games from extremists looking to use the high-profile world sporting events to commit acts of violence.

Terror expert Peter Neumann estimates that a “couple of dozen [known operatives] are still at large”, which alongside youthful radicalisation is the most potent threat authorities have faced.

There have been 60 arrests for terror-related offences over the past eight months in Europe “and two-thirds of those arrests were of teenagers”, said Prof Neumann, who founded the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King's College London.

“And in many instances, they were not 19-year-olds but 13, 14 or 15-year-olds who had [been] radicalised online and were willing to do stabbings or drive cars into crowds.”

Casting a shadow over the Olympics are decades of extremist violence in France, including the November 2015 attacks on Paris, which killed 130 people and began with a bomb being detonated at the Stade de France, the main venue for this year's Games, which open on July 26.

Security experts believe the presence of the event in Paris and the French prestige riding on the Olympics provide a powerful incentive for terrorists.

For Islamist extremists, France could be considered an enemy due to its colonial history in Algeria, military campaigns against them in Africa and the Middle East, and the country's recent ban on Islamic clothing.

With the issue of the war in Gaza added to the mix, “this will be a real test”, said Prof Neumann, who believes the group most capable of carrying out a mass-casualty terrorist attack is the ISIS branch based in the Khorasan province of Afghanistan, called ISIS-K.

It attacked a concert hall in Moscow in March and has been “very active in western Europe over the past two or three years”, explained Prof Neumann.

“They have attempted five attacks and are clearly very ambitious and aggressive,” he said.

“Many of them have fought in Afghanistan and even in the Syrian conflict. They want to be known as taking over ISIS after it left Syria and Iraq.”

Prof Neumann said about 30 ISIS-K supporters have been arrested over the past three years in western Europe.

These include seven in Belgium in May, most of whom are ethnic Chechens, suspected of plotting a terrorist attack. Later that month another Chechen, aged 18, was arrested over a plan to attack a football stadium that will be used during the Olympics.

Major sporting events are an attractive target for terrorists but protecting the 15 million visitors expected to crowd into Paris for the Games will present a security headache for the French authorities from day one.

French security forces began locking down large parts of central Paris on Thursday ahead of the hugely complex Olympics opening ceremony next week on the river Seine.

It will be the first opening ceremony held outside the main Olympic stadium, with 326,000 spectators expected to line the river.

Many central Metro stations will also be closed until the day after the opening ceremony, which will see between 6,000 and 7,000 athletes sailing down the Seine on around 100 barges and boats.

Security consultant Alexandre Rodde, a terrorism and mass casualty incident analyst who is also a reserve officer in the Gendarmerie Nationale, a branch of policing in France, also believes the main threat comes from Islamic extremism.

“We’ve seen a number of signals that the threat was going up again and what happened with [the outbreak of the Gaza war] on October 7 has put more energy into the machine and created more incentive to attack,” he told The National.

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“The movement is trying to find any crisis it can to motivate its supporters. We’ve seen a growing number of threats and a growing number of plots. With the Olympics we are worried about having such an attack.”

Mr Rodde said the capacity of home-grown French extremists to carry out large-scale attacks, such as the Nice Bastille Day lorry attack in 2016, has diminished.

“We are not in the era of 2015 and 2016 mass attacks. The terrorists don’t have the capacity that they used to have,” he said, but conceded extremist tactics remain a danger.

Mr Rodde, a visiting fellow at the Protective Security Lab at Coventry University in the UK, said any attack will “probably not be at the stadium where the events are but in the surrounding areas in hotels, bars and restaurants”.

Insider threat

Mr Rodde referred to the rejection of applications from 1,000 people who wanted to volunteer for the Olympics, including 250 known to have extremist links.

While the authorities being able to weed out extremists is a “good sign”, on the other hand “the number found is a concern”.

About 35,000 police and gendarmes are expected to be mobilised each day during the Games, with a peak of 45,000 expected for the opening ceremony. A total of 1,750 officers from Spain, the UK, Germany and the UAE, among others, will help patrol the streets of Paris.

“We have a lot of police officers, gendarmerie and troops who are on the ground at the moment, but there is still the challenge of the biggest opening ceremony ever organised in the history of the Olympics and the first one to be outside the stadium,” said Mr Rodde.

Massive security

The scale of the security operation will reflect the fact that the Paris Olympics is the “biggest physical security threat landscape for an Olympic Games since it was held in London 12 years ago”, said Matt Mooney, of threat intelligence company Recorded Future.

Mr Mooney said ISIS-affiliated media outlets and a group of supporters have recently launched a campaign to promote terrorist attacks in sports stadiums in Europe, including venues that will be used during the Olympics.

ISIS “almost certainly” seeks to target Paris to demonstrate its external operations capabilities to replicate the organisation’s 2015 attack on Paris and the 2016 ramming in Nice, said Mr Mooney.

But he believes that “due to the pervasive security footprint that is being established prior to the games, and the complex logistical, financial and operational challenges they face”, such an attack by ISIS is “very unlikely” to be successful.

“This is almost certain to result in individual ISIS supporters attempting or plotting to conduct low-sophistication, lone-actor attacks targeting Olympics,” he said.

This could include the use of drones adapted to carry out attacks. Instruction manuals on how to do so have been circulating on pro-ISIS websites.

“The French are going to be blanketing the area with a kind of drone technology and then certainly are going to be having people on the ground using that massive manpower to identify potential threats ahead of time and seek to disrupt them,” Mr Mooney said.

As part of that effort, the French police’s RAID anti-drone unit has brought in special UK-made web-flinging guns to tackle the threat.

While a mass-casualty attack is a worst-case scenario, experts believe the extent of planning needed to carry one out gives the police and security services an opportunity to act, said Prof Neumann.

“The trade-off is that if you have bigger groups that are capable of doing more spectacular attacks, that also requires a lot more communication, and groups like ISIS-K are known to intelligence services.

“If you have a knife attack, there might be one fatality or you have a [single] car or a truck driven into a crowd, you can probably think of dozens of casualties, but not hundreds.”

Prof Neumann also expressed concern that a number of social media platforms are being used by terrorist groups for spreading propaganda that could lead to attacks by lone individuals during the Paris games.

“These are small-scale attacks that ISIS has been promoting for many years,” he said. “But they wouldn’t be capable of a mass-casualty event on the scale of [the] Bataclan.”

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an anti-extremism think tank, last year found ISIS propaganda was being shared on the TikTok platform, as well as other material that appeared to encourage knife attacks.

The report said ISD research “indicates that official [ISIS] content is being repurposed for TikTok and is not only evading the platform’s moderation efforts but seemingly getting worse”.

TikTok has removed thousands of items of terrorism-related content from its platforms in Europe in a police operation to tackle online extremism.

TikTok said the ISD report was now more than a year old and since then it had acted to remove all the accounts referenced in the research. It added that other reports showed extremist content present across social media platforms.

French police in the city of Tours arrested a 15-year-old boy of Chechen origin last month after he posted pro-ISIS material on TikTok.

Concern has also been expressed in France that other social media platforms have been used in terrorist activity.

A 16-year-old was arrested in France in April after he posted a message on Telegram that he wanted to “die a martyr' for ISIS during the Olympics.

Telegram has been approached for comment.