While there was still blood on the streets, attackers on the loose, and victims of the terrorist event in Barcelona who had not yet succumbed to their ultimately fatal wounds, President Donald Trump went public with his half-baked thoughts on the matter. As is so often the case, those thoughts were crude and callous—implying, as he had on the campaign trail, that an apocryphal tale involving the defilement of Muslim corpses is illustrative of practices America should embrace. Political observers were fixated on those comments, not on the attack or its aftermath, as they should have been. It was, in truth, fans of the president who ignored the fact that Trump’s first impulse amid an ongoing terrorist attack was barbarous who don’t have their priorities straight.
Once the shock of the president’s comments had abated, though, it was incumbent on the country to do what the president did not: turn their attentions to Spain. 14 people are dead today. Over 80 are injured. Many nationalities are represented among the fatalities, including one American, as the terrorists targeted a popular tourist boulevard.
This was no low-tech event conducted by lone wolves. Hours after the attack in Barcelona, police in the city of Cambrils 70 miles south of Barcelona tracked down terrorists preparing to mount a companion attack. Four suspects were killed in the ensuing gunbattle with a fifth dying in hospital.
All told, 130 people were injured as a result of these attacks, 17 of whom are in critical condition.
Those would-be terrorists were wearing explosive belts that turned out to be fake, but that is only a stroke of good luck. On Wednesday night, hours before the van attack in Barcelona, a bomb went off in a house in the city’s southwest suburbs. One was killed in the process of making improvised explosives, which, had they been successful, would doubtlessly have been used in this coordinated set of attacks.
“As you look at the chronology, this was a fairly large cell, had to have been in place for a while — pretty good planning,” said George W. Bush administration homeland security advisor Fran Townsend. “If these guys had successfully executed on the explosives you can imagine instead of just – I don’t want to minimize it – using the car as the weapon, imagine if the car had exploded.”
This attack represents the first successful mass casualty terrorist event in Europe claimed by ISIS since the de-facto capital of the Islamic State, Raqqa, began to fall into the hands of liberating forces. As of last week, 50 percent of the city had been retaken by coalition forces. The beating back of ISIS from the strongholds in Iraq and Syria it once occupied has compelled the terror group to change tactics. They’ve advised would-be recruits to stop making the effort to come to the Middle East and to try instead to execute terrorist attacks in their home countries. ISIS leaders have been preparing to transition the organization into a more traditional terrorist group along the lines of al-Qaeda as the territory it controls shrinks.
ISIS-led operations in the West will become more urgent as ISIS’s “caliphate” dissolves, and this deadly event in Spain is likely indicative of a forthcoming trend. The Spanish weren’t ready. If Donald Trump’s bloody revenge fantasies are any indication, he is not treating this threat with the sobriety it merits either.
