Ashtyako Poorkarim, Leader of the Kurdistan Independence Movement

The deadly attack in Sydney, in the middle of a public religious gathering—where families had come together to celebrate Hanukkah—was not just a human tragedy; it was a message. Two armed attackers opened fire on a crowd attending “Chanukah by the Sea,” a family-oriented event held in a highly visible public space. In minutes, an ordinary evening became collective death, panic, and lasting trauma.

But if we reduce what happened to “two gunmen on the ground,” we end up repeating a dangerous mistake that scholars of contemporary terrorism have warned about for years: modern terrorism is rarely just a single burst of violence. It is often the outcome of overlapping forces—an ideology of hatred, facilitation networks, propaganda ecosystems, and sometimes state-linked mechanisms that cultivate insecurity while preserving deniability. The central question is not only who pulled the trigger—though that matters for prosecution—but who helped make the trigger-pull possible, and who benefits when fear goes viral.

There is a common temptation in cases like this: when signs point toward extremist symbolism, the story is quickly filed under familiar categories—individual radicalisation, online recruitment, a “lone” operation. Yet Sydney does not exist in a vacuum. In recent years, Australian security and........

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