Thalys attack and Spain/Morocco arrests linked
A couple of days after the botched attack on the Amsterdam to Paris high speed train, Moroccan and Spanish police announced that they had taken-down an ISIS cell focussed on recruiting and transporting would-be jihadists to Syria and Iraq: the New York Post says that the two cases are related. The links were found upon analysing the gunman's mobile phones and the interrogation of family members.&nbsp;
Coordinated multi-arrest raids in Spain and Morocco this week indicate that it’s high time we do away with the “lone wolf” theory when fighting terror.

Madrid and Rabat coordinated their simultaneous raids, and I’m told they acted partially on information from Paris. All in all, 14 men were arrested on various charges related to recruitment of fighters for ISIS.

The raids followed last week’s much-publicized train incident in France, which could have become one of Europe’s bloodiest, but for the heroism of four Americans and several other train passengers who bravely disarmed the would-be terrorist.

Everything in that incident screamed “lone wolf,” and indeed that’s how it was initially reported.

The “wolf” in question was Ayoub El-Khazzani, a Moroccan-born 26-year-old who has lived in Spain and other European countries since 2007, where he was radicalized.

He first pumped himself up watching ISIS-produced propaganda in the bathroom of a high-speed train traveling in Europe. When he finally emerged from the lav, he was shirtless and brandished several weapons, including an AK-47, with 270 rounds of ammunition to assure a long fight on the defenseless train.

Khazzani’s AK-47 jammed at first, counteracting whatever weapons training he’d apparently received from ISIS figures in Syria and Iraq, where he’d recently traveled.

And hence the instinct to brand him a lone wolf — one of those crazies influenced, but not directed, by extremists who then decided to leave his home one morning and commit some heinous act of blind faith.

That theory essentially says, “Move along, not much to see here.”

Yet, how did Khazzani obtain his AK-47 and other arms on a continent where weapons are more restricted than in the United States? And how does a drifter of poor means get his hands on 149 euros to finance first-class train travel, even forgoing an opportunity for a discount fare?

Maybe he wasn’t all that lonely after all.

“We have to stop talking about the lone wolf,” says Ben Hammou Mohammed, president of the Moroccan Center for Strategic Studies, a leading think tank on security issues. “I call it ‘individual company,’ ” Mohammed told me. “Either in the virtual side or the real side, there’s contact somewhere. I don’t believe in individual act. Usually, there are other persons somewhere. We are facing groups, and not only individuals.”

The authorities in Spain and Morocco apparently agree, discounting the “it’s one man” thesis, and looking instead to the infrastructure behind the one gunman. Hence the Tuesday arrests in a Madrid suburb and several cities in Morocco.

I’m told the security services learned a lot about the suspected ISIS recruiters from a deep dive into Khazzani’s cellphone and from interrogating his family members.

Here’s one lesson from this episode: We can no longer cop out by saying, Hey, you can’t stop every crazy man out there, so we might as well resign to living with some lone wolves. After all, we’re learning to live with people who shoot their former station co-workers on live TV.

This is different.

Attackers like Khazzani don’t just watch a video and then suddenly decide to spray bullets on the bullet-train. They’re more often than not just the tip of an iceberg, an infrastructure that’s increasingly global in nature.

Some 800 Islamist extremists are reportedly ready to strike in Europe. Here, too, their number is growing.

We must intensify cooperation between national-security services. Countries like Spain and Morocco can share more of what they glean from human intelligence in Europe and the Arab world; we can contribute by giving them more of our signal intel.

The wolf is no longer lonely, if he ever was. It’s the next stage in the war on terror, still very much global in scope, fueled by an extreme ideology and distant warlords.

Regrettably, we can’t post can-do, on-leave American military personnel on every French train. Even if we could, it wouldn’t suffice: This is war, and we’d better stop looking for excuses not to fight it.