A series of coordinated Islamist terrorist attacks took place on Friday, 13 November 2015 in Paris, France, and the city's northern suburb, Saint-Denis. Beginning at 21:16, three suicide bombers struck outside the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, during an international football match, after failing to gain entry to the stadium. Another group of attackers then fired on crowded cafés and restaurants in Paris, with one of them also detonating an explosive, killing himself in the process. A third group carried out another mass shooting and took hostages at an Eagles of Death Metal concert attended by 1,500 people in the Bataclan theatre, leading to a stand-off with police. The attackers were either shot or detonated suicide vests when police raided the theatre.
On 13 June 2016, a police officer and his partner, a police secretary, were stabbed to death in their home in Magnanville, France, located about 55 km (34 mi) west of Paris, by a man convicted in 2013 of associating with a group planning terrorist acts. Amaq News Agency, an online outlet said to be sponsored by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), said that a source had claimed that ISIL was behind the attack, an assertion that was later validated.
On the evening of 14 July 2016, a 19-tonne cargo truck was deliberately driven into crowds of people celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, resulting in the deaths of 86 people and injuring 434 others. The driver was Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Tunisian living in France. The attack ended following an exchange of gunfire, during which he was shot and killed by police.
On 26 July 2016, two Islamist terrorists attacked participants in a Mass at a Catholic church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Normandy, northern France. Wielding knives and wearing fake explosive belts, the men took six people captive and later killed one of them, 85-year-old priest Jacques Hamel, by slitting his throat, and also critically wounded an 86-year-old man. The terrorists were shot dead by BRI police as they tried to leave the church.
The Sid Ahmed Ghlam case concerns the April 2015 murder of Aurélie Châtelain and planning of an Islamic terrorist attack against a church in Villejuif, France, by an Algerian national, Sid Ahmed Ghlam. In November 2020, he was sentenced to life in prison by a Paris court. This sentence was upheld on appeal in October 2021.
Islamic terrorism has been carried out in Europe by the jihadist groups Islamic State (ISIL) or Al-Qaeda as well as Islamist lone wolves since the late 20th century. Europol, which releases the annual EU Terrorism Situation and Trend report (TE-SAT), used the term "Islamist terrorism" in reports for the years 2006–2010, "religiously inspired terrorism" for the years 2011–2014, and has used "jihadist terrorism" since then. Europol defines jihadism as "a violent ideology exploiting traditional Islamic concepts".
ISIL-related terrorist attacks in France refers to the terrorist activity of the Islamic State in France, including attacks committed by Islamic State-inspired lone wolves. The French military operation Opération Sentinelle has been ongoing in France since the January 2015 Île-de-France attacks.
On 3 February 2017, an Egyptian national in France on a tourist visa was shot as he rushed a group of French soldiers guarding a principal entrance to the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, with a machete. One soldier was injured in the fight. The soldiers were patrolling the museum as part of Opération Sentinelle, guarding the Carrousel du Louvre, in which an underground shopping mall also serves as a gift shop, ticket sales office, and public entrance to the museum.
On the morning of 9 August 2017, a car rammed into a group of soldiers in the Levallois-Perret commune in the northwestern suburbs of Paris. Six soldiers patrolling the area as part of Opération Sentinelle were injured in the attack, three of them seriously. The driver fled the scene and, several hours later, was shot and arrested by an elite police unit on a highway near the town of Marquise, Pas-de-Calais after attempting to ram a roadblock. According to the French police the incident was terrorist-related. The attack is part of a series of similar attacks by jihadists in Western countries.
On 1 October 2017, a man killed two women at the Saint-Charles train station in Marseille, France. The women, 20-year-old and 21-year-old cousins, were attacked by an illegal immigrant from Tunisia using a knife. Patrolling soldiers, who had been deployed on national soil following an increase in Islamic terrorist threats, shot him dead at the scene. The brother of the attacker was later arrested and faced preliminary charges of suspicion of involvement in the train station attack. French police were cautious as to whether it was a terrorist attack, but it was later classified as jihadist terrorism by Europol.
On 23 March 2018, an Islamic terrorist carried out three attacks in the town of Carcassonne and nearby village of Trèbes in the Aude department in southwestern France, killing four people and injuring fifteen.
On the evening of 11 December 2018, a terrorist attack occurred in Strasbourg, France, when a man attacked civilians in the city's busy Christkindelsmärik with a revolver and a knife, killing five and wounding 11 before fleeing in a taxi. Authorities called the shooting an act of terrorism.
A mass stabbing is a single incident in which multiple victims are injured or killed with a sharp object thrusted at the victims, piercing through the skin and injuring the victims. Examples of sharp instruments used in mass stabbings may include kitchen knives, utility knives, sheath knives, scissors, katanas, icepicks, bayonets, axes, machetes and glass bottles. Knife crime poses security threats to many countries around the world.
On 3 October 2019, a police employee at the Paris police headquarters stabbed four of his colleagues to death and injured two others. He was shot dead by police at the scene.
On December 24, 2019, militants from the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara attacked the Burkinabe government military base in Arbinda, Sahel Region, Burkina Faso along with the town of Arbinda itself. The attack was halted due to French and Burkinabe air intervention, although 35 civilians were killed in the jihadists' massacre. The Arbinda attack was the deadliest incident in the jihadist insurgency in Burkina Faso in several years.
In late morning on 4 April 2020, a knife attack occurred in Romans-sur-Isère, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France, resulting in the death of two people and the wounding of five others. The attacker, Abdallah Ahmed-Osman, a 33-year old Sudanese refugee, was charged with terrorist crimes.
On 25 September 2020, two people were injured in a stabbing outside the former headquarters of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The building had previously been the site of an Islamic terrorist attack in 2015.
An ongoing war and civil conflict between the Government of Burkina Faso and Islamist rebels began in August 2015 and has led to the displacement of over 2 million people and the deaths of at least 10,000 civilians and combatants.
