Anti-immigrant terror takes Northern Ireland back to its ‘darkest chapters’

BELFAST — Northern Ireland is on fire again in what looks and feels like a modern twist on the U.K. territory’s “Troubles” of old.

In several parts of Belfast, police and firefighters struggled to contain mobs of anti-immigrant militants into the early hours of Wednesday as they targeted ethnic minority households, restaurants and shops. Police said dozens of homes were torched, along with many of the immigrants’ cars and at least one city bus, as authorities focused on getting threatened people to safety, not on confronting and arresting attackers.

In London, Prime Minister Keir Starmer vowed that the hundreds of rioters, most of them teenagers and men in their 20s covering their faces, would be identified and charged in the coming weeks and months.

“It is clear that people were targeted last night because of their background and I will not tolerate it. Those responsible will feel the full force of the law,” he vowed.

This wave of destruction and intimidation was widely expected in response to Monday night’s alleged knife attack by a Sudanese asylum seeker on a local man in the middle of a north Belfast street — a gruesome and surreal event captured and shared internationally on social media accounts run by far-right agitators.

The alleged attacker, 30-year-old Hadi Alodid, was arraigned in a Belfast court Wednesday after being charged with the attempted murder of Stephen Ogilvie, who lost an eye in the attack.

Ogilvie’s family issued a statement appealing to the public not to take out their anger against innocent immigrants.

“We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector and we depend on them to make our country work,” the family said. “We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility.”

The extremist response mirrors what has happened in parts of Northern Ireland for the past two summers: in August 2024, when police reinforcements from Scotland had to be drafted in to suppress a week of anti-Muslim violence, and June 2025, when two Romanian youths were accused of sexually assaulting a teenage girl.

In both cases, anti-immigrant groups organized protests mainly on Facebook and WhatsApp that degenerated into marauding attacks on immigrants’ homes and businesses.

Analysts say social media posts promoted by overseas agitators can easily inspire and intensify this locally organized violence — but only because conflict lines here are already so deeply ingrained in a city of peculiar divisions and paramilitary traditions, particularly in the poorest Protestant areas.

That is where almost all of the violence broke out Tuesday night in areas still overseen by one of the two main outlawed pro-British groups, the Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Volunteer Force.

They once killed Catholics in retaliation for Irish Republican Army violence, a horrific era that has faded into memory with the Good Friday peace accord of 1998.

But since then, the rival UDA and UVF have morphed into full-time criminal enterprises with thousands of members who share values with far-right agitators in England and beyond.

These so-called “loyalist” groups started their existence as grassroots gangs committed to keeping Catholics from settling in Protestant areas. Today, when there’s a trigger event, their primary targets have become the Asian and African immigrants who, despite a rise in migration in recent years, still represent barely 3 percent of the Northern Ireland population in what remains, by far, the whitest corner of the U.K.

History repeats?

This focus on defending Protestant turf from outsiders dates to Act I, Scene I of the Northern Ireland conflict. Those “Troubles” ignited in Belfast in August 1969 with loyalist attacks on Irish nationalist households, driving out thousands of Catholics to create exclusively Protestant areas — a sectarian map still starkly in evidence today.

Near spots where Catholics were burned from their homes two generations ago, 40-foot-high walls dubbed “peace lines” demarcate working-class districts into, on one side of the fortifications, Catholic neighborhoods marked with the green, white and orange of the Irish tricolor and, on the other side, Protestant areas bearing the red, white and blue of the Union Jack.

In the generation since the 1998 peace agreement made Northern Ireland a more attractive place to live, the lowest-rent properties on both sides of those security barriers have become home for a quickly growing population of newcomers from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa.

Because the Irish nationalist population is growing and the Protestant unionist community is declining in these so-called “interface areas,” non-white asylum seekers are more likely to find housing on the Protestant side of the fence.

In the case of Monday night’s knife attack, it happened near one of those “interface areas” but on the Catholic side of the divide, where immigrants often say they feel marginally safer.

The sense of history repeating itself, with age-old tensions confronting new demographic shifts, is not lost on Paul Doherty, a councilman representing Catholic west Belfast.

“I grew up hearing stories of my own community in west Belfast who were burnt out of their homes on Bombay Street in the 1960s,” Doherty said, referring to the spot where the first “peace line” was born. “People still carry trauma from those days. We know where that road leads. We can’t allow reckless mobs in 2026 to repeat some of the darkest chapters of our past. That’s what it felt like last night.”