Europol: Terrorism today is more fragmented, more adaptive and less predictable

Europol’s 2026 EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report (EU TE-SAT), released today, reveals that violence has become a means of gaining identity, recognition and belonging, and that online ecosystems are reshaping the way terrorist threats emerge, evolve online and materialize offline.

“As violence, identity and ideology become increasingly intertwined, the traditional indicators that once served for the identification of terrorist threats are now becoming more complex and less predictable,” Europol said when releasing the report.

The EU TE-SAT notes that social media, encrypted messaging services, gaming platforms and decentralized online communities now serve as ecosystems where propaganda, radicalization, recruitment and planning of offline actions reinforce one another. “The online environment enables terrorist organizations to reach individuals directly,” Europol said. “Simultaneously, it gives the space to self-radicalized perpetrators to mobilize independently, often without formal membership or previously established direction.”

The report also highlights the increasing trend whereby criminal actors provide services such as money laundering, weapons trafficking, encrypted communication and online fraud that terrorists can exploit and vice versa. “Hybrid threat actors make use of organized crime and instrumentalize proxies to perpetrate terrorist offenses. The main objective of hybrid threat actors is to destabilise the society. Rather than single attacks, destabilization involves persistent, targeted and cumulative disruptions.”

Furthermore, the report’s findings show that online ecosystems enable dispersed networks, lone actors and self-initiated cells to radicalize, mobilize and act autonomously. “The result is a far more complex threat landscape in which boundaries between ideologies, and of extremely violent and terrorist acts are increasingly blurred, making threats significantly harder to identify before they materialize.”

Jihadist terrorism continued to account for the largest share of terrorist activity in the EU in 2025, with 24 of the 45 attacks and 347 of the 486 terrorism arrests recorded in 2025. More than 70 percent concerned terrorist propaganda and support activities. The only fatal attack was attributed to far-right extremism.

Interestingly, the report points out that many of the perpetrators posting online propaganda exhibit only a superficial grasp of ideology while having a fascination with violence. Europol said this shift creates a more diffuse and less predictable threat, where the accumulation of attacks by lone actors and small, self-initiated cells can produce the same psychological impact as highly coordinated operations.

In 2025, 130 terrorism suspects arrested across the EU were aged 18 or younger, with 12 years old being the youngest. Young people are increasingly becoming both victims of manipulation and perpetrators of violence, and Europol says that the lines between these two are becoming more blurred.

According to the EU TE-SAT, violence has become a means of gaining status and recognition within decentralized online communities, such as The Com network. “Rather than being united by a coherent political or religious doctrine, individual actors move fluidly between extremist narratives, misogyny, nihilism, criminality and terrorist propaganda, adopting whichever ideas reinforce their identity within the group,” Europol explained. “Violence is rewarded with visibility and social capital, and extreme behavior is driven by notoriety itself.”

The challenge for law enforcement is that it can no longer rely solely on conventional ideological criteria to identify emerging threats. “Ideology no longer acts alone, as violence itself becomes part of self-identification,” Europol said. “Motivation is more fluid, and radicalization pathways become considerably more difficult to recognize.”

Developments outside the EU continued to shape the internal terrorism and violent extremism landscape. As an example, the EU TE-SAT notes how content depicting death and destruction in the Middle East drives polarization in the EU, with anti-Semitism being a unifying narrative among diverse terrorist and violent extremist actors. “In 2025, this resulted in cases of radicalized individuals targeting Jewish interests, and the arrests of individuals based in the EU intending to join one of Iran’s proxy groups,” the report states.

Meanwhile, while Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine continued to feature in terrorist and violent extremist narratives, particularly within right-wing circles, it was assessed as being less prominent than in previous years.

Europol predicts that the threat posed to the European Union by terrorism and violent extremism will remain highly dynamic. The EU TE-SAT says that ongoing international conflicts and developments, rapid technological progress, evolving political and institutional dynamics, migration pressures, economic uncertainty and financial instability, and unforeseen crises are among the key drivers.

“Low-level terrorist attacks are likely to remain a persistent threat and may increase in frequency,” the report notes. “Their simple execution and limited planning requirements make them particularly challenging to identify and disrupt.” However, several risk factors point to the possibility of more complex or large-scale attacks. “Returning foreign terrorist fighters, together with individuals convicted of terrorism-related offenses who are being released from prison, could reintroduce actors with operational expertise and experience into the EU threat landscape. Competition for notoriety, the gamification of violence and the pursuit of attention within online extremist ecosystems, may incentivize individuals to plan more sophisticated and high-impact attacks. Technological developments combined with the rapid dissemination of technical knowledge, may also lower the barriers to more complex operations. Younger and technologically adept perpetrators may pose a particular risk in this context. Finally, structured and coherent organized terrorist groups continue to exist and may retain the resources, coordination and intent required to carry out more complex attacks within the EU.”