While car-ramming attacks, like the one in Barcelona last Thursday, were first employed against Israelis in 2014, the current wave of simple, small-scale terror in Europe is the brainchild of a Spanish jihadist named Abu Musab al-Suri. Tom Wilson explains:

Suri has had a decades-long involvement in modern jihadism, and particularly with Islamist terrorism in Spain. The Spanish authorities have wanted Suri since 2003 for his role in establishing the country’s first al-Qaeda cell in the mid-1990s. However, . . . Spain also wants Suri in connection with the 1985 Madrid bombing by the Islamic Jihad Organization, in which a restaurant frequented by U.S. servicemen was blown up, leaving eighteen people dead. But it is also believed that he may have had a connection to the far more devastating 2004 Madrid train bombing, which killed 191 people. . . .

By 2005 . . . it seems that Suri had become disillusioned with al-Qaeda’s strategy [and broke with Osama bin Laden]. Al-Qaeda’s rigid, top-down structure and highly-organized, sophisticated attacks had brought about neither the desired awakening among Muslims nor the Islamist revolution the jihadists had hoped for. In 2005, Suri released his “Global Islamic Resistance Call” on the Internet. Envisaging a leaderless jihad, in which individuals or small cells would form their own organic and independent plots, [the document argues that such cells can] avoid detection by not linking to a large structured network and instead [using] the Internet to spread ideology and tactics. Crucially, Suri’s jihadist manifesto stresses the importance of ultimately capturing territory to establish an Islamic state. This obscure Spanish extremist set in motion events that would bring about the wave of terrorism being suffered today. . . .

European authorities are now engaged in trying to prevent any more of Suri’s vision from coming to fruition. But as the former head of [Britain’s] Mi5 [intelligence service] has warned us, it is a generational task we now face, and there can be little doubt that Europe is now caught up amid a new era of jihad.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.