The Most Dangerous Phase of Jihadism Has Begun

The claim that jihadism is in retreat relies on a dangerous misreading of silence. It treats reduced visibility as reduced belief. That misreading has consequences.

What has disappeared is not the ideology, but its showmanship: The black flags over cities, the choreographed brutality, and the violence designed to dominate screens and seize attention. Those signals have faded, and with them a sense of alarm. Yet movements built on conviction do not need savage theatre to survive. They need grievance, identity, and a story that explains failure and promises meaning. Jihadism still offers all three.

For years, Western observers learned to judge danger by volume. Large-scale attacks meant strength, and territorial control meant momentum. The threats today appear at times more elusive: seemingly lone actors, loose networks, prison conversions, and online grooming that leaves little organisational trace. There are fewer signatures to intercept, and fewer plots to map. But decentralisation doesn’t weaken the movement. If anything, it insulates it by reducing exposure and shifting risk downward, onto individuals who are harder to spot and easier to dismiss.

This is why the calm feels deceptive. Violence has become more personal, sudden, and unpredictable. It appears without warning, carried out by people who are at times invisible to authorities until the final step. Such absence of coordination is a strategy, not a flaw.

European security services have been warning about this for years. Radicalisation is no longer primarily imported from distant war zones. It is happening locally, unfolding in ordinary neighbourhoods, often among second-generation migrants caught between cultures, expectations, and loyalties. Where authority retreats and parallel norms harden, absolutist ideas find place to grow.

Jihadist ideology offers clarity to those who feel suspended between worlds. It promises purpose where society offers ambiguity, and demographics compound the problem. Large youth populations, uneven integration, and religious enclaves stretch the challenge across generations. Ideologies survive through inheritance, and do not need mass support to endure, only a small, steady stream of the alienated and the angry.

A decade ago, jihadist groups relied on crude videos and online forums. Today, they are experimenting with artificial intelligence. British security services have warned that AI is now being used to recruit in the UK, refining propaganda, translating material instantly, and generating convincing imagery at speed. Recruitment no longer requires travel or training camps. It requires a phone, a perceived insult, and an algorithm that knows how to feed both. Encrypted messaging, anonymous finance, and uneven platform enforcement allow extremist content to circulate below the threshold of visibility. Intelligence agencies struggle to keep pace, constrained by law, resources, and scale. The gap between radicalisation and response continues to widen.  That lag is not abstract, but already reshaping who gets radicalised.

Across Europe, recent plots increasingly involve teenagers who have been radicalised almost entirely online. Many were unknown to security services until plans were already forming. The timeline has collapsed. What once took years can now happen in months, sometimes weeks. Radicalisation has become faster than detection.

Beyond Europe, the picture is no more reassuring. The Islamic State no longer governs territory in Iraq and Syria, but its affiliates have expanded elsewhere. In parts of Africa and South Asia, jihadist groups are growing amid weak governance, political instability, and Western withdrawal. The organisation has traded physical land for virtual networks; concrete hierarchies for malleable flexibility. It is harder to uproot.

Detention camps in northeastern Syria reveal the long view of the problem. Tens of thousands of women and children linked to fighters remain trapped in legal and political limbo. Many are growing up in dire conditions, with little education and constant exposure to extremist narratives. This is not a footnote but a breeding ground.

All of this unfolds as Western governments lose focus. Counter-terrorism no longer commands the urgency it once did. Strategic attention has shifted toward great-power rivalry and inward political fatigue after decades of foreign intervention. Troops withdraw. Funding shrinks. Coordination frays. Into that vacuum step jihadist groups, local militias, and rival powers eager to exploit disorder.

There is a deeper mistake here. Counter-terrorism and geopolitical competition cannot be disentangled. Treating them as separate is a mistake. Where governance collapses, extremism thrives. Where Western influence recedes, instability follows. Neglecting one front weakens the other.

The West hasn’t defeated jihadism. It has simply altered the conditions under which it operates. Mistaking that adaptation for retreat is not merely complacent. It is reckless, dulling vigilance, delaying preparation, and lulling societies that should be alert.

Movements built on moral certainty rarely vanish. They wait. They adjust. They return in forms that are harder to name and more difficult to stop. Declaring victory may comfort policymakers and commentators, but it does nothing to address the reality now taking shape online, in prisons, in fragile states, and across European cities. The most dangerous phase has begun.