The Era of Jihadi Amateurism Might Be Over
When it comes to terrorist plots, Britain has been lucky more than once.
In 2007, two car bombs planted in the West End of London failed to go off. Two militants linked to those bombs then drove an explosive-laden Jeep into Glasgow Airport the very next day, but again failed to kill anyone. A year later, a Muslim convert targeting a restaurant in Exeter prematurely detonated a suicide vest in the bathroom.
談到恐怖分子的攻擊計畫，英國不只一次幸運躲過。
2007年，兩枚置於倫敦西區的汽車炸彈沒有爆炸。與這些炸彈有關的兩名好戰分子就在第二天駕著一輛滿載炸藥的吉普車闖入格拉斯哥機場，又沒能殺死任何人。一年後，一名改信伊斯蘭教的穆斯林鎖定攻擊艾克斯特一家餐廳，卻在洗手間太早引爆自殺炸彈背心。
But last month's synchronized attacks in Paris suggest that the days of jihadi ineptitude may be numbered.
Several of the Paris attackers, who had been to Syria and appeared to be well-trained, were among the approximately 30,000 foreign fighters from 100 countries who have joined the Islamic State over less than three years.
上個月巴黎的協同攻擊卻意味，聖戰士行動笨拙的日子也許不多了。
巴黎的攻擊者中有幾個人去過敘利亞，顯然受過良好訓練，是過去不到三年間加入伊斯蘭國的三萬左右外國戰士的一員，這些戰士來自100國。
"Europe is far more vulnerable today than it was just a few years ago," said Jytte Klausen, a professor at Brandeis University.
Her research shows that even before the rise of the Islamic State, about one in every 12 returning foreign fighters had plotted attacks at home.More significant, amid fears that Islamists are coming back to Europe, she found that plots were twice as likely to succeed when the perpetrators had spent time on jihadi battlefields.
布蘭代斯大學教授克勞森說：「今天歐洲遠比幾年前更容易受攻擊。」
她的研究顯示，即使在伊斯蘭國崛起前，每12 個返國的外國戰士，就有一個曾計畫在國內發動攻擊。更重要的，在擔心伊斯蘭激進主義者返回歐洲的同時她發現，行凶者若在聖戰戰場待過，攻擊陰謀的成功率會加倍。
Jihad is a source of networks, training and brutalization, said Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King's College London.
The last conflict to mobilize foreign fighters on a similar scale was in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s. Some 20,000 went. But that covered a whole decade, and the share of Westerners was much smaller.
倫敦國王學院國際激進化研究中心主任彼德．紐曼說，聖戰提供網絡、訓練和殘暴化。
上一次動員類似規模的外國戰士的衝突是1980年代在阿富汗對抗蘇聯。約有2萬人前往。但那是整整十年的人數，而且西方人的占比少得多。
Still, the Afghan jihad represented a chilling precursor: Veterans from that conflict have popped up on battlefields from Bosnia to Algeria to Iraq. They have been involved in establishing jihadi movements like al-Qaida and plotted against the West for the past two decades.
"It is no coincidence that Osama bin Laden began his terrorist career as a foreign fighter," said Neumann, whose center has a database of about 700 Western jihadis in Syria. "All the big plots in Europe have involved people who have trained abroad. That's why it's so important to avoid the safe havens for training, because training makes them 'better terrorists."
儘管如此，阿富汗聖戰仍然代表著令人不寒而慄的先驅：那場衝突的老兵已在從波士尼亞到阿爾及利亞到伊拉克的戰場出現。他們參與建立凱達之類聖戰組織，並在過去20年間陰謀對抗西方。
紐曼說：「奧薩瑪．賓拉丹從一個外國戰士開始他的恐怖分子生涯並非巧合。所有在歐洲的大陰謀都有曾在國外受訓的人參與。這是何以避免受訓的避風港如此重要，因為訓練使他們變成「更厲害的恐怖分子。」紐曼的中心有大約700名在敘利亞的外國戰士的資料庫。
（Katrin Bennhold, 紐約時報, 田思怡譯）
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