Last Friday’s atrocity at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany had all the hallmarks of a jihadi attack. It was lethal, indiscriminate and utterly horrifying, transforming a boringly familiar object — a car — into a weapon of mass murder. Jihadist groups have been calling for such attacks for well over a decade now, and scores of their supporters have carried them out with deadly effect. A very similar attack to the one in Magdeburg happened in 2016 in Berlin, when Tunisian-born Anis Amri rammed a truck into a group of pedestrians, killing 12 and wounding 56 others.
