Many critical issues were left uncertain — including the fate of Ukraine — at the end of Europe’s first encounter with an angry and impatient Trump administration. But one thing was clear: An epochal breach appears to be opening in the Western alliance.

After three years of war that forged a new unity within NATO, the Trump administration has made clear it is planning to focus its attention elsewhere: in Asia, Latin America, the Arctic and anywhere President Trump believes the United States can obtain critical mineral rights.

European officials who emerged from a meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said they now expect that tens of thousands of American troops will be pulled out of Europe — the only question is how many, and how fast.

And they fear that in one-on-one negotiations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Trump is on his way to agreeing to terms that could ultimately put Moscow in a position to own a fifth of Ukraine and to prepare to take the rest in a few years’ time. Mr. Putin’s ultimate goal, they believe, is to break up the NATO alliance.

Those fears spilled out on the stage of the Munich Security Conference on Saturday morning, when President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that “Ukraine will never accept deals made behind our backs.” He then called optimistically for the creation of an “army of Europe,” one that includes his now battle-hardened Ukrainian forces. He was advocating, in essence, a military alternative to NATO, a force that would make its own decisions without the influence — or the military control — of the United States.

Mr. Zelensky predicted that Mr. Putin would soon seek to manipulate Mr. Trump, speculating that the Russian leader would invite the new American president to the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. “Putin will try to get the U.S. president standing on Red Square on May 9 this year,” he told a jammed hall of European diplomats and defense and intelligence officials, “not as a respected leader but as a prop in his own performance.”

Behind closed doors, Mr. Zelensky had a different kind of confrontation with the Trump administration officials this past week: After meetings with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, he rejected an extraordinary proposal that the United States be granted a 50 percent interest in all of Ukraine’s mineral resources, including graphite, lithium and uranium, as compensation for past and future support of the war, according to two European officials.

Mr. Zelensky himself referred to the tense negotiation in Munich, after he met Mr. Vance, complaining that the administration’s proposal included no security guarantees for the country should Russia attempt another invasion. “We can consider how to distribute profits when security guarantees are clear,” he said.

The security guarantee is key because Ukrainians believe the United States and Britain failed to live up to obligations to protect the country under an agreement signed at the end of the Cold War, when Ukraine gave up the Russian nuclear weapons on its territory. But European diplomats complained that the negotiation reeked of colonialism, an era of exploitation when Western countries held up smaller nations for commodities, in return for protection.

Listening to the open debate at the Munich Security Conference over the past three days, and the more blunt conversations over dinners and in hallways, was to witness a relationship in crisis and confusion.

It was only last July that the NATO allies gathered in Washington for the 75th anniversary of the world’s largest and most successful military alliance. While officials knew that the re-election of Donald J. Trump would strain the system, they have been stunned by both the ferocity and the velocity of the effort.

“Compare the speeches that General Mattis and Mike Pence gave here in their first appearances in 2017,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, referring to Mr. Trump’s first defense secretary and vice president. “They were full of reassurance and discussion of what allies can do together. Then listen to Pete Hegseth and JD Vance this week,” she said. “It feels that it’s their goal to create division.”

In fact, when Keith Kellogg, Mr. Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, spoke in Munich on Saturday, he made clear that Europe would not be at the negotiating table. He envisioned a negotiation between Russia and Ukraine in which the United States plays “mediator.”

It is the uncertainty of how that negotiation will play out — and whether Europeans can count on the United States to come to their defense should Russia try to pick off a smaller NATO nation next — that is driving European anxiety. But it is also clear that the Trump administration has no clear plan for Ukraine, at least not yet.

“For those in search of Trump’s strategy on Ukraine: Relax,” said Douglas Lute, who served both Democratic and Republican presidents in senior national security positions. “There is no strategy.”

Still, President Emmanuel Macron of France has asked “the main European countries” to come to Paris on Monday to discuss the war in Ukraine and European security, Jean-Noël Barrot, the foreign minister, said on Sunday in an interview on France Inter radio. He described the event as a “working meeting,” and said that the government was still receiving confirmations, but that heads of state were expected to attend.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain is expected to go, saying on Saturday that this was a “once-in-a-generation moment for our national security” and that it was clear that Europe must take a greater role in NATO.

The Western alliance has gone through many crises before, including in the 1950s, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected with a promise to lower the price of waging the Cold War and pulled back on American troops in Europe, replacing them with nuclear weapons to keep the Soviet Union at bay. Some predict a similar move by Mr. Trump in coming months — sharply reducing manpower, but keeping an arsenal of nuclear weapons on the continent.

To many in Munich, the past few weeks have already alienated Europeans and destroyed much of the unity created over the past three years in providing arms, aid and intelligence to Ukraine.

It is hard to know how lasting the breach will be, but for some like Norbert Röttgen, a member of Germany’s Parliament for the Christian Democratic Union, the party expected to run the next government after elections next week, it is time for Europeans to recognize the world has changed.

“This is a new reality, a break with traditional European American policy that security in Europe is a genuine U.S. national interest,” he said. “But this administration does not consider it a primary U.S. interest, and this is a fundamental shift.”

He pointed in particular to Mr. Vance’s speech on Friday. There was no talk of common bonds, or a plan for Ukraine, or the goals of a peace negotiation. Instead, Mr. Vance delivered a blistering attack on European democracy for restricting the power of the far right. Mr. Vance then met with the leader of the far-right German political party that Elon Musk has backed and which is running second in the opinion polls.

“The spirit of the Vance speech was hostility,” Mr. Röttgen said.

The speed of the embrace of Mr. Putin also shocked those in Munich. In the Biden years, the strategy was to isolate the Russian leader. Mr. Trump broke with that approach when he engaged in a 90-minute phone call with Mr. Putin, without prior consultation with his allies.

Mr. Vance added to the suspicions. The parties he embraced during his visit here are the same far-right parties that Mr. Putin embraces, and that buy into his narrative of an aggressive NATO infringing on a broader Russian sphere of influence. Among those who embraced that view was Tulsi Gabbard, the new director of national intelligence.

Europeans are now afraid that they may find themselves as pawns in a negotiation conducted without their active participation, even if their own borders are in question and they are expected to take up the largest burden of defending them. That is reminiscent of a Europe and a world of a previous age, of regional empires and the rule of the strong with little concern for the rest.

Kaja Kallas, the E.U. foreign policy chief and former prime minister of Estonia, said in an interview that she remained worried about “appeasement” of Mr. Putin by Mr. Trump over Ukraine, which she defined as “giving the aggressor what he wants” even before negotiations begin. “That’s why we shouldn’t give Putin what he wants because that will only invite more aggression,” she said.

Trump officials had sent mixed signals, she said. “When we meet these people inside the rooms, we are discussing that we are great allies,” Ms. Kallas said. But then, “we see also the public statements, which are a bit confusing.”

Given the war in Europe, she said, the stakes are high. “It’s not only the question of the sovereignty of Ukraine, or the freedom of Europe,” she said. “It’s actually a question of trans-Atlantic but also global security.”

As for American troops, which were increased in Europe after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she said that there were no detailed discussions about removing them, but that there was a clear trend that worried her. The United States is “turning inward,” she said.

Boris Pistorius, the defense minister of Germany, said troop withdrawals were discussed with Mr. Hegseth in Brussels. “We would have to compensate for what the Americans are doing less of in Europe,” Mr. Pistorius said. “But that can’t happen overnight.”

Mr. Pistorius said he had proposed a “road map” to Mr. Hegseth that included “a change in burden sharing, in such a way that it is orchestrated” and “no dangerous capability gaps arise over time.”

Other NATO defense and foreign ministers have said that personnel was less of a problem than the kind of arms and equipment only the United States has in Europe in large numbers, from attack helicopters to satellite intelligence. To replace all of that, even if ordered tomorrow, would take close to a decade, one minister said.

As for Ukraine, Ms. Kallas said, there was not yet a real plan from Washington, and no plan could be imposed by Washington because for any plan to function, “you need the Europeans and you need the Ukrainians.”

And if the Ukrainians do not accept a deal and decide to continue to resist, “then Europe will support them.”

António Costa, the president of the European Council, said in an interview that it was important “to keep calm” and “prepare for all scenarios, but not to react to each declaration, each tweet, each speech.”

More important, Mr. Costa said, was Europe’s lasting support for Ukraine. “There can be no lasting peace without Ukraine and without the European Union,” he said.

Europe must pay attention to the realities, not the rhetoric, he said. “We are prepared on tariffs, on security, on defense, on Ukraine,” he said.

Catherine Porter and Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.

No international body is searching for hundreds of Yazidi women and girls still held captive by the Islamist terrorists. Instead, their fates depend on a ragtag army of activists, relatives and armchair detectives.

Feb. 16, 2025

The investigator’s eyes dart between the two photographs. In one, a young girl, maybe 10, is wearing a colorful shirt, her hair loose. In the other, a woman, her face weathered to an indeterminate age and framed by a black hijab, stares into the camera.

The first picture is among hundreds of images of young girls sent in by families desperate to find loved ones who were kidnapped years ago, when militants from the Islamic State first roared to power in Iraq and Syria. The pictures of older women come in from a variety of sources.

The woman examining the photographs has become skilled at finding the telling detail that might help confirm an identity — and lead to someone’s freedom. But she is not a professional investigator. Her name is Pari Ibrahim, and by day she is the executive director of a nonprofit in suburban Maryland.

At night, by the glow of a laptop screen, that she scours the photos, hoping to locate women taken captive as long as a decade ago.

“Sometimes, late at night, I’m working to see if this girl is someone who can be identified,” said Ms. Ibrahim, as she compared the two photographs, searching the faces for any hint — the bow of the lips, perhaps, or a telltale mole — that she might be looking at the same person.

“Ten years brings a lot of change into someone’s face and appearance,” she said. “It’s not easy.”

The missing people are all members of a religious minority, the Yazidi, who were a particular focus of the brutal campaign of terror that ISIS, also known as the Islamic State, launched in 2014. In the years that followed, according to a United Nations commission, the militants murdered, enslaved, raped and tortured at will. Some 3,100 Yazidis were killed and 6,800 kidnapped in August 2014 alone, one study estimates.

The Rescuers

Now, more than half a decade since the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria and Iraq fell, nearly 2,600 Yazidis remain unaccounted for, according to Ms. Ibrahim’s nonprofit, the Free Yezidi Foundation; in 2022, the United Nations Refugee Agency put the number around 3,000. The foundation, which uses an alternative spelling for the ethnoreligious group, provides support services to members of the Yazidi diaspora.

Many are presumed dead, but Ms Ibrahim is hopeful that as many as 1,000 are still in captivity, held by their kidnappers or transferred to fighters’ extended families throughout the Middle East.

Although the United Nations has called treatment of the Yazidis genocide, the U.N. agency mandated to collect evidence of ISIS atrocities ceased operating last year. There is no official entity dedicated to finding the women — and their children.

That task has been taken up by a sprawling network of activists, survivors, family members, informants and amateur detectives like Ms. Ibrahim, a Yazidi whose family left Iraq in the early 1990s. The New York Times interviewed people based in Maryland, Germany, Australia, Iraq and Syria.

They described a modern-day Underground Railroad, on which journeys often begin with snippets of information and photographs shared via messaging apps. Sometimes that information is conveyed to families of the missing, some of whom hire informants and human smugglers to reunite them with their loved ones. Other times it is shared with the local authorities.

One member of the unofficial network, Abduallah Abbas Khalaf, helped free his niece from the Islamic State in 2014 using connections he made working as a beekeeper and honey vendor in Aleppo, Syria. Mr. Khalaf, who is Yazidi and is based in Iraq, says he went on to help free other captives through a variety of methods, including impersonating militants online.

“We used to log into ISIS telegram channels and we used to pretend that we were ISIS members,” he said. To appear more convincing, he said, he would sometimes inquire about weapons and equipment.

“They would welcome us,” Mr. Khalaf said, “and after a period of time, they would post pictures of girls or boys for selling.” As he pretended to be negotiating the price, he said, he would really be trying to coax out the whereabouts of the captives.

Mr. Khalaf shared screenshots from what appeared to be ISIS messaging channels on which women and children were being trafficked. The images showed forum users haggling over sex slaves. The Times was not able to independently verify the source of the images because many of the channels have since been made private or deleted.

At the height of the Islamic’s State’s reign in the portions of Syria and Iraq that it conquered, the enslavement and sale of women was conducted openly. Later, it became more discreet, experts said. Women and girls have been bought and sold online, and then transferred across national borders quietly, making the work of those who would rescue them all the more difficult.

“While the public Yazidi slave markets of the Islamic State caliphate period no longer exist,” said Devorah Margolin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “some women remain enslaved by Islamic State affiliates and continued to be sold by supporters of the group even after the fall of its caliphate.”

According to investigators, experts and news reports, captives have been found in homes connected to ISIS members as far away as Turkey and the Gaza Strip. Other Yazidis have ended up alongside their captors in overcrowded and dangerous desert camps.

About 3,600 Yazidis have managed to get back to their families, according to Nadia’s Initiative, another nonprofit group that works with the Yazidi.

One of them, Sherine Hakrash, said she had been held captive in Syria with her two daughters until she was sold to a Saudi man. Speaking haltingly and at times in tears by telephone from her new home in Australia, Ms. Hakrash said it was too painful to talk about what the girls looked like when she last saw them, in 2018.

“I don’t know anything about them,” she said. “If they are alive. If they need me. How their situation is.”

The upheavals in the Middle East over the past year and a half have further complicated efforts to locate and rescue missing people. In Iraq, for example, the government recently directed a team of international experts investigating ISIS crimes to wind down their work.

In Syria, the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad has led both to hope and fear among Yazidis. They want to take the opportunity to search for the missing, but worry that instability may pave the way for an ISIS resurgence.

The Detention Camp

As their caliphate fell in 2019, ISIS fighters fled across the region, some taking their captives with them. In many cases women were forced to marry their kidnappers, integrating them into expansive clans that could then traffic them around the world.

In December in Germany, federal prosecutors accused two people they said were Iraqi members of ISIS of sexually abusing two young Yazidi girls they kept as slaves. The girls had been held captive by the couple when they were 5 and 12. In Gaza, a woman kidnapped by ISIS at age 11 and, American officials say, later sold and forced to marry a Hamas fighter, was rescued in October after her captor died.

Captivity for some Yazidis grew still worse after their captors were themselves detained.

Some ended up in Al Hol, a sprawling nightmare of a detention camp in the desert of eastern Syria. Captive Yazidi women there are forced to live alongside ISIS members and their families. The camp, in which thousands of people are held, is dangerous — murders are common and there have been reports of beheadings.

For the network of rescuers, Al Hol presents a special challenge. Captives there are reluctant to identify themselves as Yazidis for fear that the ISIS members in their midst, some of whom have organized themselves into a religious police force, will target them. Others may have been taken captive when they were too young to know their heritage.

“The way they were enslaved outside Al Hol camp, they are enslaved inside — the torture, everything,” said the camp’s director, Jihan Hanan, who has worked with Yazidi investigators to help extricate captives in the camp.

One member of the informal rescue network, Barjas Khidhir Sabri, is a Yazidi from Sinjar Province in Iraq who currently lives in an Iraqi camp for internally displaced people. It is about 100 miles from Al Hol.

From his tent, using little more than his wits and a smartphone, Mr. Sabri has developed his own web of informants, which include men he says are ISIS members living at Al Hol.

“I don’t trust them and they don’t trust me,” Mr. Sabri said of the ISIS members. “I have to work with them. I have no regrets because any possible way we can save women and girls, it is worthwhile.”

Ms. Ibrahim said the Free Yezidi Foundation did not deal with ISIS members under any circumstances. But for many families, desperation overshadows the disgust of dealing with — and even paying — those who belong to the terrorist group, Mr. Sabri said.

When a woman in the camp is identified as a possible Yazidi captive, Ms. Hanan works with security guards to arrange a discreet interview.

Ms. Hanan said she had seen seven Yazidi girls and women liberated from Al Hol in at least the past two years.

But it is not always simple.

Some Yazidi women who have given birth to their captors’ babies fear their children may not be accepted by the Yazidi community. Some who have been raped fear returning home only to be shunned. Still others who were captured as young children know nothing but their captors’ families and may not even realize that they are Yazidi.

“We have to make sure the woman is able to make a choice in a safe space,” said Ms. Ibrahim, the nonprofit director.

Marwa Nawaf Abas, embraced the opportunity for freedom.

“I was held captive as a sex slave for three months of torture and sold on to several ISIS terrorists,” Ms. Abas, who was 21 when she was rescued, said in an interview.

After escaping from her captors in Raqqa, Syria, in 2014, Ms. Abas was offered temporary protection by a local family. She contacted her uncle, and her family paid smugglers to take her from the ISIS-controlled area to a Kurdish-controlled one.

Ms. Abas moved to Germany, and works at a hair transplant center.

“I am very happy now in Germany,” she said.

Falih Hassan contributed reporting from Baghdad.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem on Sunday, where they discussed President Trump’s insistent proposals for the United States to seize the devastated Gaza Strip and force out its Palestinian residents, among other matters.

The trip is Mr. Rubio’s first to the region as secretary of state, and comes as uncertainty is rising over whether Israel and Hamas can or are willing to turn a tenuous cease-fire in Gaza into a permanent end to their war.

But Mr. Trump’s controversial vision for transforming Gaza into an American-owned “Riviera of the Middle East” has overshadowed those high-stakes negotiations, and Mr. Rubio is sure to be pressed for more clarity about the proposal during his visits in the coming days to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Mr. Trump has “been very bold about what the future for Gaza should be, not the same tired ideas of the past,” Mr. Rubio said in prepared remarks delivered alongside Mr. Netanyahu on Sunday after the two met privately. “It may have shocked and surprised many, but what cannot continue is the same cycle where we repeat over and over again and wind up in the exact same place.”

Mr. Rubio also talked about the need to watch for any security threats arising from the new government in Syria, and the imperative to disarm Hezbollah in Lebanon. And he asserted Iran is the “common theme in all of these challenges,” using more aggressive language to describe that nation than Mr. Trump typically does in calling it “the single greatest source of instability in the region.”

“Behind every terrorist group, behind every act of violence, behind every destabilizing activity, behind everything that threatens peace and stability for the millions of people who call this region home, is Iran,” Mr. Rubio said.

Mr. Netanyahu said he had thanked Mr. Rubio for “America’s unequivocal backing for Israel’s policy in Gaza in moving forward.” However, Mr. Netanyahu’s government has yet to present a long-term strategy for Gaza to the Israeli or American public.

“I want to assure everyone who’s now listening to us, President Trump and I are working in full cooperation and coordination between us,” said Mr. Netanyahu, who met with the president in the White House on Feb. 4.

Mr. Trump surprised the world with his Gaza plan during a news conference that day with Mr. Netanyahu, who has since called it “a revolutionary, creative approach” that should be studied. Mr. Netanyahu said on Sunday that he and Mr. Rubio had discussed Mr. Trump’s “bold vision for Gaza, for Gaza’s future — how we can work together to ensure that that future becomes a reality.” Some Israeli officials consider the idea impractical, and experts say it would be a severe violation of international law.

After Arab officials in the region immediately denounced the proposal, Mr. Rubio had suggested that Mr. Trump was merely trying to “get a reaction” and “stir” other nations into providing more assistance for postwar Gaza.

Since then, however, Mr. Trump has doubled down, telling reporters in the Oval Office on two other occasions and in a Fox News interview that he intends to move forward with the plan. On Friday, Mahmoud Abbas, who governs the West Bank as the president of the Palestinian Authority, said the Palestinian people “must remain” on their land.

The forced expulsion of Palestinians would be ethnic cleansing and a war crime, international law scholars say. More than 47,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military retaliation in Gaza for a Hamas-led assault in October 2023 that killed 1,200 people. Most of the dead on both sides have been civilians.

Mr. Trump has said Jordan and Egypt should allow the Palestinian residents of Gaza to move to their countries. The idea has long been promoted by the Israeli right but flatly rejected by Arab and Palestinian leaders as well as past U.S. presidents of both parties. King Abdullah II of Jordan publicly rejected Mr. Trump’s proposal after a Wednesday meeting at the White House that was also attended by Mr. Rubio.

Mr. Rubio said in a radio interview on Thursday that any Arab proposal for a postwar Gaza should address the mammoth task of reconstructing the territory and deploying a multinational security force to fight remnants of Hamas.

But that would only be possible once the war in Gaza comes to an end — which is dependent on extending a cease-fire agreement that revolves around hostage and prisoner exchanges. The first phase of the current cease-fire agreement is set to end in March.

Neither Mr. Rubio nor Mr. Netanyahu made any reference in their public remarks on Sunday to the status of negotiations for the next phase of the deal. Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, said in an interview with Fox News on Sunday that talks on phase two of the cease-fire deal would take place this coming week.

Indirect negotiations for a permanent cessation of hostilities and the release of all remaining living hostages from Hamas captivity were supposed to have begun two weeks ago and were meant to be finalized by the end of the coming week. Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman has denied that any such talks are underway.

Israel and Hamas have both asserted that the other party has violated the terms of the cease-fire. On Sunday, Hamas accused Israel of violating and showing a lack of commitment to the cease-fire deal by preventing the entry of trailers into Gaza to house displaced Palestinians and delaying talks for the next phase of the agreement.

Israeli officials acknowledged holding up the entry of housing trailers for Palestinians into Gaza, saying over the weekend that the issue would be discussed in the coming days and without elaborating on reasons for the delay.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, appears to have given Mr. Netanyahu some leeway for changing the terms of the deal or for resuming fighting in Gaza, should he choose to do so, saying in a social media post on Saturday that the United States would back any decision made by the Israeli government.

Both Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Rubio spoke on Sunday of the need to eliminate Hamas’s military and governing capabilities. Israel’s Ministry of Defense announced that a shipment of 2000-pound bombs, which had been held up by the Biden administration, had arrived in Israel overnight. U.S. military officials have said that such bombs are unsuitable for urban combat, though the Israeli military has dropped them in Gaza.

Mr. Rubio’s arrival in Israel on Saturday night came hours after Hamas released three Israeli hostages, including a dual American citizen, in exchange for 369 Palestinian prisoners.

The Israeli and American governments had been pressuring Hamas for days to release the hostages in hopes of sustaining the cease-fire first reached with the prodding of Biden and Trump aides in mid-January. Mr. Trump warned last Monday that Israel could cancel the agreement and that “all hell is going to break out” if Hamas did not release all hostages by Saturday.

Mr. Rubio is on his second trip as secretary of state. He landed in Israel after a stop at the Munich Security Conference, and was expected to fly onward to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Rubio had planned to stop in Qatar earlier, but that was not on the announced schedule.

In Saudi Arabia, Mr. Rubio and two other top Trump aides plan to meet with Russian officials to discuss ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Michael Crowley contributed reporting from Washington, and Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

The man who Austrian authorities said killed a teenager and injured several other people in a knife attack in Villach, Austria, was inspired by the Islamic State militant group, officials said on Sunday.

The man, who was detained after the attack on Saturday, had become radicalized online, said Austria’s interior minister, Gerhard Karner. He added that it was not clear whether the suspect knew the victims.

The attack happened around 4 p.m. local time, killing a 14-year-old and injuring four other people, according to the mayor of Villach, a city in the south near the Italian and Slovenian borders. The police told The Associated Press that two people were seriously injured.

The suspect is a 23-year-old Syrian man with legal residence in Austria, local police officials said in an interview with Austria’s public broadcaster ORF. It is not known if he lived in Villach. The police are investigating the suspect’s background, said Rainer Dionisio, a spokesman for the police department in Carinthia, the province where Villach is located.

Peter Kaiser, Carinthia’s governor, called for the “harshest consequences” for the attacker, saying the perpetrator “must be put on trial, imprisoned, and deported” in a post on X. The city’s mayor, Günther Albel, wrote on Meta: “To all those who sow hatred and violence, I say: You will not win.”

Several similar attacks in neighboring Germany in recent months, including a car attack in Munich last week, have pushed migration to the forefront of that country’s national election campaign.

Millions of Syrians have sought refuge in Europe after a popular uprising against the nation’s autocratic longtime leader, Bashar al-Assad, that began in 2011 turned into a civil war. The large migration has strained social safety nets in Europe and stirred concern about assimilation, which has at times taken openly xenophobic form and provided an opening for right-wing, nationalist political movements.

The collapse of the Assad regime in December prompted several European countries to pause legal proceedings on asylum status for Syrians. Austria has said it would plan to deport Syrians whose claims for asylum failed.

Violence is relatively uncommon in Austria, which was ranked as the fifth-safest country in the world as of 2023, according to the Global Peace Index.