Jaideep Saikia
(The writer can be reached at jdpsaikia@gmail.com)
Way back in July 2016, I produced a Handbook of Counter Radicalisation - among three other such Handbooks - for an official state agency. In the introduction, I questioned the concept of de-radicalisation. I had called it a "non-existent animal". I had propounded instead the theory of counter-radicalisation.
Let me quote a paragraph from my introduction to the aforesaid handbook.
I had written: Research has shown that a number of Saudi Guantanamo detainees that were 'de-radicalised' have returned to terrorism upon release. Although there have been arguments that de-radicalisation creates a barrier to recidivism, there is really no way to fathom or evaluate whether a thorough cauterisation has taken place. Or are there de-radicalised terrorists-disengaging because of purely instrumental reasons-who continue to harbour a radical world-view? Who determines whether the law-enforcer is erring or not by arranging theological correction of "radicalised minds" that have never actually read the Qur'an? Answers to such questions can only come to the fore where a science that "looks inside the brain" is employed. This theory applies for so-called de-radicalised terrorists as well as ones who have been thought to have been radicalised by religious injunction. After all is it not conceivable that there are extra-religious reasons or considerations that could have propelled perpetrators of crimes to adopt a nihilistic weltanschauung that led to the death and gore that have been witnessed since the "baying" from Ar-Raqqah began? Has a neurological study been ever conducted on an Islamist radical who has attempted to undertake the hijrah and have been apprehended midway?
As said above, let me examine the recent "Lone-Wolf" attack in Berlin.
On July 25, 2026 (exactly a decade after my above-mentioned Handbook), the fragile equilibrium of European urban security intelligence networks extensively documented his trajectory into violent extremism. shattered when a rented minivan ploughed into a crowd at the Christopher Street Day Pride celebrations near Berlin's iconic Brandenburg Gate. The vehicle ramming, followed by a frenzied machete rampage, left one woman dead and 29 others injured-some critically. The attack culminated the next evening in a shootout at a Spandau allotment garden, where police fatally neutralised the 21-year-old perpetrator.
Beyond the immediate tragedy, this act of violence has exposed a significant and systemic disconnect within the counterterrorism framework. It serves as a clear signal that the threat of radical Salafism has not vanished; rather, it has mutated into a decentralised, domestic phenomenon that evades traditional bureaucratic safety nets.
The perpetrator was identified as Abdul Ballout, a 21-year-old German national born and raised in Berlin to parents of Lebanese descent. Ballout's background dismantles the convenient political narrative that contemporary Islamist terrorism in Europe is purely an "imported" border-control problem. He held sole German citizenship, rendering moot any immediate populist demands for rapid deportation or naturalisation reversals.
Ballout was not an unknown entity to the state; he was a textbook example of a known wolf. His trajectory into violent extremism was extensively documented by intelligence networks.
To be sure, Ballout made multiple failed attempts to exit Germany to join the core fighting ranks of the Islamic State between 2024 and 2025. His travel pipeline went through Turkey to Mauritania and eventually to Lebanon, where he attempted to cross into Syria. He was arrested by Lebanese authorities, convicted by a military court for "inciting religious and confessional conflict", and served a brief prison sentence. Upon returning to Germany in November 2025, Ballout was arrested at the Berlin International Airport and spent months in German pre-trial detention. He had a standing conviction for "preparing a serious act of subversive violence" yet walked out of judicial custody under a suspended sentence just months before his attack.
The core analytical question surrounding Ballout's attack hinges on the nature of his links to global Salafi organisations. German federal prosecutors and investigators have established that while Ballout explicitly operated on behalf of the ISIS-the ideological ghost of the collapsed caliphate-he did not belong to a formalised, top-down terror cell. Digging deep into the intelligence findings, authorities found no evidence of tactical, two-way operational command and control between Ballout and the Islamic State's remaining external operations command (such as IS-Khorasan). There was no "handler" assigning the target, financing the vehicle, or coordinating the timing.
Instead, the relationship was entirely symbiotic via self-induced radical nourishment. However, Ballout was a consumer and a node of decentralised online Salafist communities. These virtual ecosystems utilise tailored formulaic channels to weaponise vulnerable, disaffected young Muslims.
His motivation was twofold: a deep-seated adherence to the global Salafi call to target Western infrastructure, combined with a specific, deep-seated adherence to the global Salafi call to target Western infrastructure, layered onto a targeted hatred of Western cultural institutions. Choosing the Berlin Pride celebration was highly deliberate, matching a historical pattern of IS-inspired attacks targeting LGBTQ+ symbols, which the group views as the ultimate manifestation of "Western decadence".
German security services conducted a post-attack post-mortem that exposed an alarming gap between judicial standards and intelligence monitoring. Despite the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (the German domestic intelligence agency) classifying Ballout as an active security threat, the legal system operated in a silo. Berlin's judicial authorities insisted they followed strict statutory guidelines when releasing Ballout on a suspended sentence. Yet, terrorism experts at organisations like the prestigious Counter Extremism Project point out the absurdity of a system that allows an individual convicted of preparing subversive violence to roam freely in an individual convicted of preparing subversive violence to freely roam the capital. Even though a covert camera caught Ballout leaving his apartment on the night of the attack, real-time physical intervention was absent. But in a free, democratic society, round-the-clock physical surveillance of every designated "Gefährder" (dangerous person) is legally and operationally impossible.
However, the incident has reignited structural debates at Europol regarding the absolute absence of an EU-wide unified watch list or a centralised register for tracking individuals with historical ties to terrorism across borders. It has also triggered another round of debate between de-radicalisation and counter-radicalisation.
The Berlin attack is not an isolated anomaly; it is an empirical index of what I had originally named the "Third Wave of Radicalisation". The micro-actor is an important component in this wave. My research said that whereas the "First Wave" took place during the exhibition of massive violent movements and radicalisation between 1999 and 2005, the "Second Wave" began with the "oath of allegiance" or Bay'ah to ISIS in the wake of the formation of the neo-caliphate of Abu Bakr and radicalisation between 1999 and 2005, the "Second Wave" began with the "oath of allegiance" or Bay'ah to ISIS in the wake of the formation of the neo-caliphate of Abu Bakr-al-Baghdadi. Statistically, the data compiled by the Sydney-headquartered Institute for Economics and Peace is unequivocal: 93% of fatal terrorist attacks in the West over the last five years have been carried out by lone actors.
Germany has increasingly become the epicentre of this European friction point, logging multiple low-tech vehicle and knife incidents over the 2024-2026 cycle. Several underlying indicators suggest this trend will accelerate. Hundreds of individuals convicted during the height of ISIS activity (2014-2018) are reaching the end of their prison sentences across Europe. The questionable efficacy of "de-radicalisation" programmes means a fresh pool of experienced radicals are returning to society. By utilising everyday items like rental vans and knives, attackers achieve complete tactical camouflage. They completely bypass the surveillance tripwires associated with acquiring firearms or bomb-making components. The ongoing geopolitical friction points in the Middle East act as continuous radicalisation fuel within domestic European chat rooms, shortening the window between initial online radicalisation and the physical deployment of violence.
One wonders whether my theory that de-radicalisation does not necessarily create a barrier to recidivism has been seriously researched since I first prepared the Handbook of Counter Radicalisation in 2016. But I do know that the authorities all over the world (including India) are still utilising de-radicalisation methods to cauterise radical thoughts. This approach is a big mistake.
My research indicates that the individual labelled as "radical" may have found an outlet sanctioned by an "establishment" (in this case, ISIS), but this misleads the counter-terrorism apparatus and the world into believing that a Salafist organisation drove him to a killing frenzy. Therefore, even if a de-radicalisation programme is set in motion, the most important (initial) examination that must be conducted is to clinically unearth the real motivations of the perpetrator. The simplest explanation that abounds is to term a killer "a poor Muslim" because they have misinterpreted the Qur'an. A more acceptable explanation might be to label them as psychopaths who discovered a discourse and a clear, unambiguous, audible paradigm in which their behaviour is not only encouraged but also glorified through prophetic injunctions. We still do not know the real motivation of Abdul Ballout.
After all, Dabiq was the official, flagship English-language online magazine published by ISIS between 2014 and 2016. I have closely analysed every single issue of Dabiq for an official state agency, and I found that almost all acts of barbarism receive immediate "endorsement" through a Shura. For instance, the burning alive of the Jordanian pilot Mu'adh Safi Yusuf al-Kasasibah-according to Daesh-is called "equivalent response". It quotes an ayat from An-Nahl thus: "And if you punish (an enemy), punish with an equivalent of that with which you were harmed." In other words, it says that by burning the Jordanian pilot alive and burying him under a pile of debris, Daesh carried out a just form of retaliation for his involvement in the bombing campaign. Burning the Jordanian pilot alive and burying him under a pile of debris, Daesh carried out a just form of retaliation for his involvement in the bombing campaign which resulted in the killing of countless Muslims who, as a result of these airstrikes, are burnt alive and buried under mountains of wreckage. Daesh cleverly makes use of the Qur'an to justify its ghastly acts, utilises such acts to deter other pilots and seeks to appeal to minds on the prowl for dark passageways, including "machete murders".
Abdul Ballout's rampage demonstrates that European counterterrorism is fighting a 21st-century pathological strain with 20th-century bureaucratic tools. When an ideology can, traditional defence mechanisms falter when a deviant mind born within the state can host an ideology in the cloud and download it. in the cloud and downloaded by a deviant mind born inside the state, traditional defence mechanisms falter. Until European democracies across the rest of the world bridge the gap between judicial leniency, localised intelligence gathering, neuro-psychology and digital containment, the lone-actor blueprint will remain the most elusive and persistent security threat of the decade.