In the years following the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bombings, the nature of the challenge al Qa'ida and its affiliates posed began to change. The threat of large-scale 9/11–type attacks declined, but terrorist and guerilla attacks by Salafist groups against local targets around the world increased. Al Qa'ida in Iraq led this trend with its campaign of suicide and other attacks on U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians, but violence by al Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula, the Islamic Courts Union (al Shabab's predecessor), and al Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb also contributed to the global tally. If the trend was toward smaller scale, localized attacks, therefore, the problem had also become more diverse, as al Qa'ida's affiliates offered new, broader opportunities for would-be terrorists from the West to draw inspiration, train, and attack. By 2011, an established part of this trend was the growth of attempts at terrorism by permanent residents of the West, inspired by al Qa'ida's message and trained in camps of al Qa'ida or its affiliates – such as in the cases, for example, of U.S. residents Najibullah Zazi and Faisal Shahzad. In 2015, France would suffer a direct hit even more indicative of this trend with the murders of twelve staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, at least one of whom had trained in an al Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula run camp in Yemen.

The Charlie Hebdo attacks were not the first of this kind in France. In March 2012, France was already shaken by a series of equally gruesome attacks that underscored the risk posed by the proliferation of al Qa'ida affiliates, their safe havens, and training camps. The attacker was Mohammed Merah, a second-generation French Muslim from Toulouse. On March 11, Merah answered an advertisement for a used motor scooter posted on the Internet by a French Muslim soldier named Imad Ibn-Ziaten. After meeting Ibn-Ziaten and confirming that he was a soldier, Merah shot him in the head at point blank range.

Three days later, Merah videotaped another shooting of three more soldiers outside an ATM near their base in the nearby town of Montauban. Two of the three, Mohamed Legouad and Abel Chennouf, were killed, while the third, Loïc Liber was gravely wounded.