Chocolate shop terror

A dreamy, upscale chocolate shop selling luxuriant candies and desserts in downtown Sydney became a nightmarish prison the morning of Dec. 15, when a 50-year-old madman pulled out a sawed-off shotgun and took staff and patrons hostage.

The attacker, a self-styled Muslim cleric named Man Haron Monis, claimed to represent the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, a militant organization. True to ISIS style, Monis forced his hostages inside the Lindt Chocolat Café to speak into a camera, relaying his demands to the Australian government: He wanted a live broadcast phone call with Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and wanted an authentic ISIS flag delivered to the café.

It turned out Monis was not an ISIS plant but an Iranian immigrant with a reputation for erratic behavior. He was free on bail after being charged in Australia for allegedly committing sexual assault and facilitating his former wife’s murder. He’d been sentenced to 300 hours of community service for sending taunting letters to the families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

His chocolate shop takeover was a final burst of bizarre behavior. It lasted 16 hours, ending shortly after 2 a.m. when a hostage grabbed the attacker’s gun and police stormed the shop. Afterward, Monis and two of the 17 hostages were dead.

But while Monis apparently plotted his attack alone, he seemed inspired by the rapid growth of ISIS in 2014. The siege in Sydney capped a year of troubling lone wolf attacks by Muslims in the West, apparently influenced by jihadi sentiments: In September, a teenager stabbed two Australian counterterror officers outside a police station. In October, a gunman stormed the Canadian Parliament building in Ottawa, Ontario, and another man attacked police officers in New York City with a hatchet.

The faces of hostages fleeing the café told a tale of terror—one ordinary citizens face in Baghdad, Peshawar, and elsewhere but viewed as commonplace, and usually distant, in the West.

The Sydney attack occurred despite a raft of new Australian counterterrorism laws allowing authorities to suspend passports and monitor citizens traveling overseas.

“How can someone who has had such a long and checkered history not be on the appropriate watch list?” asked Abbott at a news conference following the siege. “And how can someone like that be entirely at large in the community?”

Greg Barton, a director at the Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash University in Victoria, told me lone wolf attacks like the one in Sydney are increasingly inspired by ISIS propaganda: “I think it’s just beginning. I think we’ll see many of these.”