... Individuals susceptible to recruitment “might have lost their jobs, might have had a mental health crisis, might have just concluded that however hard they’ve tried, they never belong," said Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former British diplomat who led a U.N. team that monitors Islamic State and al Qaeda. The main appeal of Islamic State is its determination to establish a Sunni Muslim “caliphate” ruled by Islamic law, unlike the Taliban, which “has sold out to Afghan nationalism,” or al Qaeda, members of which have cooperated with Iran’s Shiite Muslim-run government, he said.”

"Counter-extremism expert Dr Hans-Jakob Schindler told Metro that upheaval and war in the Middle East has strengthened ISIS’s hand, along with major social media companies failing to eradicate terror propaganda."

"While the MTI study traced the first such vehicular attack to 1963, it found that 70 per cent of these have occurred since 2014. Separately, the think tank Counter Extremism Project (CEP) in report in December 2024 noted that at least 82 vehicular terrorist attacks have been reported since 2006, which collectively killed at least 238 people and injured at least 1,278.”"

"Dr. Hans Jacob Schindler, Sr. Director at the Counter Extremism Project, says 2024 signaled a very concerning terrorism trend for 2025."

"The Turkistanis comprise many Uighurs who have fled from China and the group is said to have been founded in Afghanistan, according to the Counter Extremism Project think tank. Playing a key role alongside HTS’s operations, the Turkistan Islamic Party regularly carried out suicide bombings during the civil war and in 2018 praised the 2001 Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Centre in New York."

"The Magdeburg terror attack also poses challenges to researchers studying violent extremism. According to German terrorism expert Hans-Jakob Schindler, the case demonstrates that alongside the classic categories of Islamic extremism, right-wing extremism, and left-wing extremism, there is now a new category: individuals who create their own ideological, personalized narratives."

" Internal security was already polarizing the political debate, but it became central after the car-ramming attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg, in northeastern Germany, on Friday, December 20, 2024. Very quickly, far-right circles reacted "with very Islamophobic posts,"  Hans-Jakob Schindler, director of the Counter Extremism Project think tank, told Ouest-France.”"

""The balancing act was not perfect, but doing it any other way than it has been done so far would have been difficult," said Hans-Jakob Schindler, Middle East expert at the Counter Extremism Project (CEP).

The entire European Union substantially reduced its involvement in the Middle East conflict many years ago, and Schindler notes that since October 7, the EU and Germany have had "hardly any weight in the talks, when it came to the decisions." "So it was really an American-Israeli dialogue, and the Europeans were — at most — spectators, offering comments from the sidelines," he told DW."

"There has been “zero” contrition from those on the right who sought to capitalize on the incident, said Hans-Jakob Schindler, the senior director of the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit international group focused on radical ideologies."