UN Official: Europe Faces The Great Threat Of ISIS-K Terror After Taylor Swift's Concert Attack Planned

Police Wina Austria/ILLUSTRATION UNSPLASH/Benjamin Szabo

JAKARTA - UN counterterrorism officials say Europe is facing a greater threat from ISIS-K after the disclosure of the terror plan for Taylor Swift's concert attack in Vienna, Austria.

UN Deputy Secretary for counterterrorism, Vladimir Vorokov, said the ISIS-K threat is now real in Vienna, where three Swift concerts were canceled.

The group is considered the largest external terrorist threat to the continent, Vorokov told the UN Security Council reported by ABC News, Friday, August 9.

Terrorists from the Afghan-based Islamic State-K group killed 140 people at a Moscow concert venue in March and more than 100 people in the bombings in Iran in January.

"This is the most complex, dynamic, and, frankly, dangerous environment I've experienced in more than 40 years I've been involved in law enforcement and domestic security," said John Cohen, contributor to ABC News and former deputy minister for intelligence at the US Department of Homeland Security.

The thwarted attack in Vienna has two patterns around the extreme ideology affecting the European continent, said George Washington University Program Director Lorenzo Vidino.

The perpetrators of Taylor Swift's concert terror plan are still young, namely 19 years, 18 years and 17 years.

This is a much more unstructured scene where you look at people who radicalize themselves and gather on online platforms, sometimes also offline. But online components have grown bigger over the last few years, and they are activating themselves independently," continued Vidino.

"(ISIS) mostly operates through branches in various parts of the world, and what I think is the most successful and can be called the only one who consistently operates in the West and plans a terrorist attack in the West is ISIS-K," he said.