"Jihadists in Italy with migratory flux". Alarm from The General of Carabinieri

New alarm for National Security: General Angelosanto, commander of the Ros, reports about possible terrorist infiltrations in the migrant routes

Irregular immigration to Italy has been characterized by a marked increase in flux on all sea and land routes. Since the beginning of the year, around 71.000 immigrants from the central Mediterranean route have landed on our shores and around 10.000 irregular migrants present on the national territory from other routes have been identified. Our country, in line with previous years, continues to prove to be the main gateway and transit point for irregular migrants in the European Union. The management of immigrant flux and risk mitigation involves an extension of the concept of national security also to political-social cohesion as well as territorial integrity and political independence.

This phenomenon, analyzed in a holistic perspective that includes multiple long and medium-short term push and pull factors, is also markedly facilitated by a criminal activism - of an associative or individual nature - present on all migratory routes capable of creating a huge economic impact which makes the related prevention and contrast activities more difficult.

The uncontrolled entry of illegal migrants into Italy is not only a problem in terms of its impact on the Italian social fabric but, as has often been seen and already examined, is also a problem in terms of National and European security. The last, in chronological order to raise the alarm in this regard was General Pasquale Angelosanto, commander of the Ros of the carabinieri during the conference in the Senate on illegal immigration

The officer of the military police analyzed the threats, highlighting how "“national security today has to deal with transnational criminal organizations, complex structures rooted in several states and made up of people of different nationalities which they exploit as victims forced into prostitution, into various crimes, into undeclared labour“".

Although there are no stable and structural links between the trafficking of irregular flux and jihadist-type terrorist networks, it should be highlighted that various elements who later became radicalized or even trained in the military have passed through the routes of irregular migrants.

Suffice to mention here the most striking cases: the Tunisian Anis Amri, the Berlin bomber of 2016, entered Lampedusa in 2011; the Somali citizen, linked to the terrorist organizations of Al-Shabaab, Mohsin Ibrahim Omar, arrested in Bari in 2018 because he was planning an attack on St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, arrived in Italy irregularly in 2016; the Yemeni Mohamed Fathe who in 2019 stabbed a soldier in front of the central station of Milan arrived irregularly in Italy from Libya in 2017; the Sudanese Abdallah Ahmed-Osman, perpetrator of the double murder in the French town of Romans-sur-Isère, entered Calabria irregularly in 2016; the Tunisian Brahim Aoussaoui, author of the massacre in the cathedral of Nice in 2020, entered Lampedusa illegally in 2020; the two Gambians, Sillah Osman and Alagie Touray, connected to the Islamist terrorism of ISIS, and who were arrested in the Neapolitan area in 2018, landed in Sicily in 2017.

Editorial Team