Taliban takeover of Afghanistan could also be ‘morale enhance’ for terrorists, warns UK spy chief

The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is more likely to have “emboldened” terrorists and means that the specter of a 9/11 model terrorist assault stays alive, warned Britain’s spy chief on Friday.

MI5 Director General Ken McCallum informed the BBC that there was higher have to be vigilant as there might be a “morale boost” for extremists on account of developments in Afghanistan because the US-led NATO troops withdrew final month.He additionally revealed that the UK’s police and intelligence providers had foiled 31 “late-stage” terror assault plots towards the nation previously 4 years.ALSO READ: Many in Taliban’s interim govt listed by UN; Security Council must resolve steps on sanctions: Official“The big concern flowing from Afghanistan, alongside the immediate inspirational effect, is the risk that terrorists reconstitute and once again pose us more in the way of well developed, sophisticated plots of the sort that we faced in 9/11 and the years thereafter,” mentioned McCallum.“Overnight you can have a psychological boost or morale boost to extremists already here, or in other countries. So, we need to be vigilant both for the increase in inspired terrorism, which has become a real trend for us to deal with over the last five to 10 years, alongside the potential regrowth of Al Qaeda style directed plots, that we saw more commonly some years ago,” he mentioned.ALSO READ: Will the Taliban takeover hit J&Ok?“There is no doubt that recent events in Afghanistan will have heartened and emboldened, some of those extremists, and so being vigilant to precisely those kinds of risks is what my organisation is focused on, along with, along with a range of other threats,” the spy chief mentioned.While nearly all of terror threats got here from Islamist extremists, a rising quantity are additionally from organised far-right teams; “so the terrorist threat to the UK, I am sorry to say, is a real and enduring thing,” he added.Speaking to the BBC on the eve of the Al Qaeda-led September 11, 2001, terror assaults within the US, the British intelligence chief mentioned the Islamic State (ISIS) terror group had managed to do one thing that Al Qaeda didn’t, which was to encourage a number of individuals to try smaller scale acts of terrorism.Threats from terrorism are “part of our lives at this time in history” and can stay with us “for quite some time to come”, he mentioned.ALSO READ: A pledge binds al-Qaeda to Taliban. Why is it a fear for Pakistan?