French Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin has warned his partners in the United States that radical Sunni Islam, not the extreme right-wing, represents the single gravest threat to European security.
In an interview with AFP, published on Saturday, May 20th—which came during a two-day trip to the U.S. to discuss plans for Paris 2024 Summer Olympics—the French interior minister called on Washington to strengthen its counterterrorism cooperation with France, noting that policing and securing this major international event poses a serious security challenge to his country, the Paris-based newspaper Le Figaro reports.
Darmanin, a member of Macron’s liberal, Eurofederalist Renaissance party, insisted that the authorities in the United States must come to understand that in Europe, radical Islamism, and not far-right extremism or white supremacist ideology, poses the greatest terrorist threat to next year’s Olympic games in France.
“We have come to remind [the Americans] that for Europeans and for France, the primary risk is Sunni Islamist terrorism and that anti-terrorist collaboration between intelligence services is absolutely essential,” Darmanin told the news organization.
“At a time when the Americans may have a more national outlook concerning the threats—white supremacism, repeated shootings, conspiracy—they must not forget what for us in Europe appears to be the primary threat: Sunni terrorism,” the interior minister added.
Darmanin’s calls for a closer Franco-American security relationship come ahead of the three high-profile events set to take place in France next year: the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics (July 26-11, August 2024); the Rugby World Cup (September 8 to October 28, 2023); and the Pope Francis’ visit to Marseille on September 23rd, 2023.
Citing the Americans’ departure from Afghanistan and the Sahel region of Africa, the minister went on to highlight the persistence of the risk of Islamist terrorism, and that its exponents will more than likely target France and its European neighbors in the near future.
Darmanin described “an endogenous threat from people without networks but who, becoming radicalized, take action in a few hours, in a few days … takes a knife, goes into a bakery, and kills people.” Furthermore, he continued, there is an “exogenous risk, organized people from outside who come to France to carry out a Bataclan-style attack.”
The French interior minister’s concerns about an increased threat of terrorism in the months and years ahead are likely linked to the massive uptick in asylum seekers who reached the European continent last year. As The European Conservative previously reported, 966,000 asylum applications were registered across the European Union’s 27 member states, a figure not recorded since the height of the European migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016.
Similarly, in Germany, asylum applications in 2022 climbed to levels not seen since the 2016 migrant crisis, per figures from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF).
