“It was the sixth apparently extremist-motivated attack in just over ten months: on Thursday morning in Munich, an Afghan asylum seeker drove a car into a demonstration by the Verdi trade union. According to police, at least 36 people were injured, some of them seriously, including a child. Bavaria's Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) spoke of a "serious attack"... "This is not just a perceived increase, but a fact," Hans-Jakob Schindler, head of the Counter Extremism Project, a think tank for extremism research, told the Tagesspiegel newspaper. "Six attacks in around ten months - I have never experienced anything like this in my entire career." Terrorism expert Schindler believes that such connections are absurd, he says. Rather, he says that several factors are coming together. On the one hand, says Schindler, the Islamists currently see themselves as the winners and are particularly motivated: "In their logic, they drove the Americans out of Afghanistan and threw Russia and Iran out of Syria," says Schindler. "They think that nobody can harm them."”