Tony Blair says terrorism threat “is not going away and will intensify in time to come”

Tony Blair has said the threat of terrorism “is not going away and will intensify in time to come”.

In an interview with the BBC to commemorate 10 years since the 7/7 bombings in London, the former prime minister  – who was in power at the time of the attacks – said Islamist extremism had spread “right across the world”.

To deal with this he urged the West to show it has “the means of combating these people and combating them on the ground”. Although he didn’t rule out putting British soldiers on the ground, when asked whether he thought this should happen, he said: “This is maybe a discussion for another day.”

Blair argued that attacks weren’t related to Britain’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan:

“I think it’s very important to understand that the probable leader of the 7/7 attacks was someone who was first in a training camp in the middle of 2001, before 9/11, never mind before the invasion of Afghanistan or the invasion of Iraq and the difficulty is that there will always be reason and excuses that people use for terrorism”

“You have countries like France today that’s the subject of terrorism or Norway or Belgium or Tunisia or Kuwait or countries across Africa, none of whom had anything to do with British or American foreign policy and yet whose citizens come under this type of violent and indiscriminate killing so I think in the end, the responsibility has got to lie with the people who carry this out and those who encourage them.”

He went on to argue that terrorism is “not something we [Britain] have caused but something that we are caught up in”:

“You’re not going to reduce this threat of terrorism unless you have a comprehensive strategy to deal with it which requires the battle of ideas but it also requires the force on the ground to fight them”.

He warned that the international community must deal with terrorist groups such as ISIS, otherwise they will continue to grow:

“When you fight these people it’s going to be tough because they’re prepared to kill without mercy and die without regret and that makes them an enemy that may not have the same conventional military capability but has certainly got the determination to fight.”

“I don’t criticise Western leadership today but I do say this is a long hard struggle and we’ve got to be prepared to engage over a long period of time because at the time of 7/7, we faced people who had been radicalised over a period of time.

“But we face a situation today where you have fighters coming back from Syria who are our own citizens. You have training camps actually in Libya not just in Syria, in Iraq and elsewhere and this threat is not going away. It will intensify in time to come.”