EU flags a second terror file: online nihilist violence, 4,340 URLs

European Union Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Bartjan Wegter told the Associated Press that Europe now faces a second terror problem beside jihadist cells: nihilistic violent extremism grown inside an online scene known as The COM. Police in nine countries mapped about 4,340 URLs tied to that scene in a disruption drive in June and July. Wegter's phrase for the motive was blunt. It is violence for the sake of violence. The interview was released on 8 September, three days before the 25th anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks.

Jihadist networks remain the larger file. Europol's 2026 Terrorism Situation and Trend Report counted 45 terrorist attacks in 10 of the 27 member states in 2025. Twenty-two were completed, 20 foiled, 3 failed. Six people were killed. Eighty-one were injured in jihadist attacks. One person died in a right-wing attack. Arrests came to 486 in 21 countries. Seventy-one percent of those arrests, 347 people, were for jihadist offences. Jihadists accounted for 24 of the 45 attacks.

The new file is younger and less ideological. Investigators describe teenagers and men in their early twenties who move through encrypted rooms, copy attack aesthetics and treat harm as a thrill rather than a programme. The COM is not a single group with a leader and a budget. It is a set of boards and channels that survive URL takedowns by opening new ones. Four thousand three hundred addresses in two months is a measure of that churn, not of a standing army.

Wegter's warning sits on top of the Europol numbers, not in place of them. A continent that spent 25 years building tools against al-Qaeda and later Islamic State now has to watch a scene that does not need a preacher in a desert or a handler in a second country. The old tools still work on the 347 jihadist arrests. They work less well on a 16-year-old who wants a video, not a caliphate.

None of the 45 attacks last year was a mass-casualty spectacular. That is the success claim. It is also the blind spot. Small plots that fail still train the next one. Foiled attacks are not zero. They are work. The anniversary this week will produce speeches about 2001. The operational sentence from Brussels is that 2001 is not the template. The template now is mixed: imported jihadist direction where it still exists, and homegrown online cruelty where it does not.

Nine countries had to pool URL lists to see the COM at all. That is the other fact. National filters miss a scene that is built to hop borders. Wegter's office exists to force that pooling. The June-July sweep is the proof of concept. It is not a cure. New addresses will appear this month because that is how the scene is built.

For city police the practical change is age. A suspect list that once skewed toward men with travel histories now includes minors with no travel and a folder of clips. Schools and platforms sit closer to the case than they did in 2001. Wegter did not claim the EU has solved that. He claimed the EU has named it. Naming is the first step that 2001 taught, late. The second step is whether those 4,340 addresses stay down longer than a week.

September 11 this year falls on a Friday. The anniversary will look backward because that is what anniversaries do. The Brussels interview was written to look at the next attack that does not resemble 2001. Both views can be true on the same weekend. Only one of them changes how a patrol is briefed on Monday.