Why do security files stop at borders that extremists cross freely?

After almost every terrorist attack, governments condemn, express solidarity and promise cooperation. Then the shock fades, and each returns to its own agencies and databases. Extremist ideas, money and recruiters cross borders more easily than the intelligence that might stop them. The attack on a passenger jet over Saudi Arabia last week brought that imbalance into view again.

On September 30, the co-pilot of flydubai Flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv assaulted the captain in the cockpit, according to a preliminary Saudi investigation. Passengers and off-duty pilots restrained him before landing the aircraft at Tabuk.

UAE Attorney-General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi said investigators had concluded that the co-pilot planned and attempted a terrorist act. He allegedly attacked the captain with the cockpit crash axe and tried to seize the controls. An inquiry is currently examining physical and digital evidence, motives and possible connections, with final findings to follow when procedures are complete.

The instinctive response is to demand more information-sharing. On paper, governments already have that duty. UN Security Council Resolution 2396, adopted in 2017, requires member states to develop watchlists or databases for known and suspected terrorists, collect biometric data and share it through bilateral and multilateral channels. Yet intelligence still stops at borders, in large part because governments do not trust one another’s standards for identifying extremism.

The United Arab Emirates has long argued that terrorism is the final stage of a process that begins well before an attack. Since 2012, Abu Dhabi has hosted Hedayah, the international centre for countering violent extremism established under the Global Counterterrorism Forum. In June, Maqsoud Kruse, the UAE foreign minister’s envoy for countering extremism and Hedayah’s founding director, told the European Parliament that extremism is an ideology and terrorism the behaviour that follows from it. That makes intellectual, cultural and social work integral to any security strategy and the Emirati record offers a strong case for that approach.

Over the past decade, the UAE has pushed out terrorism close to the margins at home, despite operating in one of the world’s most volatile regions. The Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorism Index places the UAE’s terrorism-impact score at 0.75 out of 10 in its latest edition, down from 2.45 in 2014. Syria, Iraq and Yemen remain among the region’s most affected countries. In February 2024, the Financial Action Task Force removed the UAE from its list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring after it completed all 15 items in its action plan on money laundering and terrorist financing.

The UAE has also moved early online. In 2015, it opened the Sawab Center with the United States to counter Islamic State recruitment at a time when the coalition was widely seen as losing the online propaganda battle. Wealth and state capacity explain part of this record, but prevention, financial controls and counter-messaging have together produced results few states facing comparable regional threats can match.

This preventive approach also explains why the Muslim Brotherhood became a central target. The UAE was among the first governments to ban the group, after Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In November 2014, the Emirati cabinet listed the Brotherhood, its local affiliate al-Islah and more than 80 other organisations as terrorist groups. At home, the UAE has used educational, security, religious and political institutions to confront the group’s ideology, while continuing to push for its proscription abroad. The core position here is that the danger lies in the ideological environment the Muslim Brotherhood operates, one shaped by takfir, the practice of declaring other Muslims apostates, violent incitement and the justification of such extremism.

But prevention in one country cannot intercept a threat that another state has identified and withheld. The FZ1073 attack makes that limit stark in an industry where pilots are trained, hired and rostered across several countries. Closing the gap requires intelligence-sharing narrow enough for governments with different politics to accept. I have thought up three steps that would help.

First, states should strengthen vetting for workers in aviation, energy, ports and other critical infrastructure who move through an international labour market. After the 2009 Colgan Air crash, the United States created a central pilot-records database, in which carriers must check a candidate’s records from the previous five years before hiring. The Gulf Cooperation Council could build a security equivalent: a register requiring member-state carriers to record documented security-related dismissals of pilots or trainees and which prospective employers are mandated to check. Such entries should be limited to clearly defined findings. Pilots should be able to see and challenge their records, while access should be restricted to employers assessing a candidate.

Second, governments need a common minimum definition. Resolution 2396 requires watchlists but leaves each state to decide who belongs on one. That discretion makes lists difficult for others to use. A shared threshold focused on direct support for violence, including financing, recruitment and incitement, would create a category agencies can trust across political lines.

My third solution hinges strongly on regional cooperation and this is one with some significance back home across the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Africa needs renewed regional cooperation. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger left ECOWAS in January 2025 after their military governments broke with the bloc. Two months later, Niger withdrew from the Multinational Joint Task Force fighting Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province around Lake Chad. Armed groups in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin now operate across borders where states share less intelligence than they did three years ago. No prevention programme can compensate for warnings that never reached the right channels.

Extremism begins with ideas. The UAE has shown that early intervention can stop radicalisation before an attacker reaches a cockpit, border crossing or target. But prevention cannot compensate for a warning that remains inside another government’s files. States need clear, verifiable standards for what they share and safeguards that make such exchanges trustworthy. Otherwise, the next attacker may again be known to someone who never passed on the warning.