Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the The Daily Wire. The author of this post is Mary Margaret Olohan.
WASHINGTON The State Department is gathering European partners in an aggressive push to combat spikes in far-left terrorism around the world, The Daily Wire can first report.
American representatives will attend a law enforcement workshop in Europe this week focused on far-left terrorism, State Department officials told The Daily Wire, engaging other countries that are also grappling with the issue. The technical workshop will bring together officials from multiple European countries that have also seen increases in politically motivated violence tied to anarchist and far-left groups.
"We're going to talk about what this threat stream looks like," explained a State Department official,
"what kind of targets that it's engaging in, what kind of recent acts they've engaged in, what the tools are that we have to address this."
A higher-level conference on the issue will be held in Washington, D.C. later this summer and will include officials from Europe, East Asia, and the Western Hemisphere.
The move comes as officials acknowledge a sharp increase in far-left terrorist incidents in the United States and Europe since 2016, particularly in France, Germany, Greece, and Italy.
In France, far-left anarchists sabotaged a high-speed rail in 2024 before the opening of the Olympic Games, and in 2026, beat a 23-year-old man, Quentin Deranque, to death for his political beliefs. Italy faced 18 terrorist attacks from far-left militants in 2024, and in 2026, two such left-wing anarchists blew themselves up on the outskirts of Rome while making a bomb.
In Germany, the number of far-left actors grew from 10,300 in 2021 to 36,500 in 2022 - and a January 2026 Berlin power grid attack by left-wing activists caused a five-day outage for more than 100,000 residents.
In Greece, more than 80% of violent events by radical organizations involved far-left and anarchist groups, according to the ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data), and more than 20 far-left individuals were arrested in 2024 for attacks, including targeting police.
Notably, since the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists, officials have noticed an
"increased convergence" between these far-left groups and those participating in antisemitic violence, a State Department official shared. While they are very concerned about groups like Salafi jihadist terrorist groups, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS, they are also aware of the
"new and emerging threats" presented by far-left groups and actors - and how all these groups cross over.
"A lot of these pro-Hamas, very violent groups that are operating in all of our respective countries, that these different groups are starting to converge with what you could call your far-left terrorist groups or anarchist groups, right, that engage in these kinds of terrorist violent acts."
The State Department's Counterterrorism operating system needs updates to address the reality of these threats, officials said, noting that the Department risks creating blind spots by ignoring these emerging trends.
"America First means protecting our country, people, and way of life-we are leveraging counterterrorism tools and global partnerships to deter this threat before it metastasizes," the State Department official said.
On the home front, the State has already taken steps to dismantle both transnational far-left and anarchist terrorism by using visa restrictions to target individuals and designations against the Antifa aligned groups, Antifa Ost (Germany), Informal Anarchist Federation (Italy), Armed Proletarian Justice (Greece), and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense (Greece).
All of this is specifically targeting violent activity that meets the definition of terrorism, including assassinations, kidnappings, violent threats against U.S. facilities and law enforcement, attacks on critical infrastructure, military personnel, and civilians.
"Because our focus is international, we've been meeting with a lot of our partners to build a body of knowledge, so that we can better understand what this problem set looks like in their backyards, where there are transnational links, and then we're also able to explore some best practices and other types of concerns," explained the State Department official.
This specific workshop will be tailored towards far-left terrorism as a phenomenon, whether they engage in violent, terrorist, and criminal acts, particularly given that this area has become a blind spot for some law enforcement. As they take note of the rise in attacks, particularly those targeting critical infrastructure, U.S. partners are noticing that they lack the tools to address them properly.
poll#201
