Christmas market atrocity will further divide the West

Does terrorism work? It depends what the aim of the perpetrator is and in the case of Friday night's Magdeburg Christmas market attack it's not as clear cut as it may have seemed in the immediate aftermath.

- MARK ALMOND

When the suspect, 50-year-old Saudi doctor Taleb A., drove through the market in an act that killed several people and injured scores more, the Western world was immediately cast back to December 2016, when Tunisian man Anis Amri ploughed a truck through a Berlin Christmas market in a deadly attack for which Islamic State later boasted credit.

Taleb A. arrived in Germany in 2006 and was recognised as a refugee in 2016. He is also reportedly a supporter of Germany's far-right, anti-immigration party, AfD. But unlike the "lone wolf" terrorists, Taleb A. has a public, online profile as a virulent seculariser, damning Islamic fundamentalists and Western multi-culturalists with equal venom.

The confounding picture of Taleb A. makes his aims while behind the wheel on Friday night all the more muddy, perhaps too much to even establish the conventional terrorism tag.

Whatever its perverse motivation, the Magdeburg atrocity won't be just a Christmas horror story.

Far more than an attack on a church, which would be aimed at Europe's small active Christian minority, striking a Christmas market hits at broader secular society enjoying its mid-winter festivities as a whole.

Even before Friday, the friction arising from Syria's domestic revolution with rising fears in Europe about terrorism as an outgrowth of mass migration from the Middle East was sharp.