IN the run-up to Christmas I listened with growing irritation while a respected military analyst on a BBC radio programme attempted to explain the results of the RAF’s bombing campaign against Islamic State (Isis) targets in Syria. The analyst knew what she was talking about and was clearly well-versed in the subject but to the growing consternation of the presenter she was unable to answer repeated questions about the efficacy of the bombing. Had it worked, and if it had not, why had it failed?

No wonder there was consternation in the studio. The Ministry of Defence has repeatedly made it clear that it will not provide a running commentary on the air force operations as it if they were part of a sporting fixture and not a matter of life or death – at least for those on the receiving end. As a result of that absence, everything else is guesswork. Showing commendable restraint, the expert rehearsed what is known, namely that the bombing raids are slowly degrading the oil production infrastructure which the Islamic State uses for funding its operations and that the exercise will not be completed any time soon. In other words, bombing Syria has not provided the quick fix demanded by the armchair enthusiasts in the wake of the November atrocities in Paris. Nor was it ever likely to do so – and the war against terrorism simply goes on and on.

It was a suitable metaphor with which to end a year that has been dominated by young men and women who know how to handle Kalashnikov assault rifles and who are prepared to don explosive vests, the better to kill other people in crowded city centres. It all kicked off at the end of 2014 with the massacre of 141 innocents, amongst them 132 schoolchildren, in the Pakistani town of Peshawar. Then the violence continued to Paris in the first week of this year when two Islamist gunmen walked into the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine on January 7 and killed a dozen people, including two police officers.

There was, of course, a connection. The Pakistani terrorists were linked to the Taliban while the Parisian killers were French Muslims of Algerian descent who shouted “Allahu Akhbar” while they carried out their slaying. The Charlie Hebdo massacre was followed by the killing of four other people in a Hypercacher kosher supermarket in Port de Vincennes, an eastern suburb of Paris, and again the perpetrators were Muslim terrorists.

There was some surprise that France found itself on the frontline in this way. Although there have been historical tensions with its Algerian community, largely as a result of the Algerian war of independence in the 1960s, France had steered clear of the US-led interventions in the Middle East from 2003 onwards and the country was deemed to be neither safer nor more dangerous than other European centres.

All that changed with the Charlie Hebdo killings, which were triggered by the earlier publication of satirical depictions of the Prophet Muhammed. This was confirmed two days later when al-Qaeda’s franchise in Yemen (AQAP) claimed responsibility for the attack in a speech by a prominent Shariah cleric Harith bin Ghazi al-Nadhari, citing the motive as “revenge for the honour” of the Prophet. The incident sparked international outrage: the slogan "je suis Charlie" went viral, and when the surviving staff vowed to continue publishing, the subsequent issue sold 7.95 million copies in six languages. Normally Charlie Hebdo’s average weekly sale was 35,000 copies.

Despite the displays of international solidarity, security in Paris was increased and there were reports of isolated anti-Islamic attacks against mosques and other Muslim centres. As armed troops became a familiar sight on Parisian streets, there was a general feeling in the French capital that it was only a matter of time before there was another attack. Paris is a large, open city with a diverse population and although increased security measures had been put in place it was clear that not every neighbourhood was free from the threat of terrorist attack. It was the old story that those who guard everything end up protecting nothing.

In fact the next outrage came not in Paris but in a suburb of Tunis on the morning of March 18, when three terrorists attacked a party of European tourists visiting the Bardo National Museum. Unlike the Paris attack, the shooting was indiscriminate with 19 foreign tourists being killed as well as two Tunisians, one of them a police officer. Two terrorists were also killed while the third fled from the scene and was later arrested. Although the so-called Islamic State (Isis) claimed responsibility for the action, the Tunisian government blamed an al-Qaeda franchise called the Okba Ibn Nafaa Brigade.

Whatever the true identity of the terrorists – an al-Qaeda offshoot is the most likely culprit – one thing remains certain. They knew what they were doing by targeting Tunisia. Not only is it a popular holiday destination but ever since the removal from power of long-time President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, the country has been anxious to proclaim its return to “normality” as part of the so-called Arab Spring. By slaughtering Europeans at a location such as the Bardo National Museum, the terrorists were giving notice that nowhere in the country was safe from their attention and that tourists should stay away. Ironically, at the time of the attack, the Tunisian parliament was debating anti-terrorist policy.

The point was rammed home brutally three months later when a lone terrorist equipped with a Kalashnikov assault rifle opened fire on tourists at the beach resort of Port El Kantaoui, about 10 kilometres north of the city of Sousse in the same country. During the shooting, 38 people were killed, 30 of them British. The assassin, a young engineering student called Seifeddine Rezgui Yacoubi, was disguised as a tourist and spent some time socialising with others on the beach before pulling his weapon from a beach umbrella and opening fire. He was eventually gunned down by security forces. Once again the main object of the attack was to sow alarm amongst Western tourists and to reinforce the notion that Tunisia is not a safe holiday destination.

All this was a grim precursor to an even bigger and more lethal attack on Paris over a period of 35 minutes on November 13. On a mild evening with crowds attending an international football match between France and Germany and a pop concert at the Bataclan concert hall, and many people enjoying café society on a Friday night, Paris was an open city (as any enlightened European centre should be). For a brief moment it could be forgotten that France had become a leading player in the global confrontation with radical Islam. French forces have been in action against Islamist terrorists in Mali and French aircraft are currently flying against Islamic State targets in Syria. That gave the nine terrorists both a reason and an opportunity to attack unprotected civilians and to kill 130 of them, mostly young people enjoying a night out – the very thing which Islamic fundamentalists abhor.

It soon became clear to the security forces that the perpetrators were all radicalised Muslims (and EU citizens) and that they had connections with Isis. As a result, the first response was military with 10 French air force strike aircraft bombing the northern Syrian town of Raqqa, which has become de facto capital of the Islamic State. Inevitably this led to demands within the UK for Britain to follow suit and by the beginning of December, Parliament had voted overwhelmingly to support the bombing of targets in Syria. That same night, RAF warplanes were in action operating from their base in Cyprus and, unofficially, the country was at war against an unseen enemy.

It is a moot point if the bombing campaign will solve anything or simply make matters worse. History shows that air power alone is not enough to defeat an enemy and already siren voices are claiming that only the insertion of ground forces will eradicate Isis, which politicians have started referring to as Daesh, its Arabic acronym. As the year draws to an end there is little reliable news coming out of the Syrian desert and no-one knows if the RAF Typhoons and Tornadoes are simply attacking remote, sandy places or really “degrading” a vicious enemy.

Only one thing is sure. We may know only very little about what is happening within our own Mediterranean bailiwick but we also have little clue about what is happening in hot and sweaty places further afield. It’s a chilling fact that in the year that stretched from Charlie Hebdo to the Bataclan in Paris, the West African state of Nigeria had to confront the biggest increase of terrorist casualties ever experienced by a single nation largely as a result of the depredations of Boko Haram, another Islamist group with links to Daesh. During the course of a six-year reign of terror, more than 20,000 people have been killed in Nigeria and a further 1.23 million have been dispossessed. But unlike the uproar over Syria, so far no bombs have been dropped.