It happens after a terrorist attack, doesn’t it?

The identities of those who died begin to emerge and instead of talking about the number of dead, we learn their names, we see their faces and we learn a little bit about their lives.

This morning when I woke up, I saw the first image online. The face of a woman. The first confirmed death. She had warm eyes and a pretty smile. And as I read through the first paragraph of the story, the first paragraph which told me her name was Aysha Frade, I kept reading hoping that what I thought was probably the case, wasn’t.

But there it was. Aysha was a mother of two. She’d left work as a Spanish teacher at a college yesterday afternoon and was crossing Westminster Bridge to collect her two young daughters from school. She never arrived. Her daughters will never see her again. She was hit by the SUV and died from her traumatic injuries on Westminster Bridge.

She was like so many of us. A busy mum juggling work and family and going about her business in London, and then suddenly she’s dead. I doubt Aysha’s ever been to Iraq, the birthplace of the ISIS ideology that overnight claimed responsibility for her death.

Like me, she probably sheltered her children from conversations about terrorism and ISIS. They’re too young. But they’ll know now. And they’ll carry that with them for life. ISIS. The group that killed their mother. 

And while I was writing this, an alert flashed up on my phone. It was from CNN. Belgian police had just intercepted a car as it sped towards a busy shopping street.

How is that cars have become a weapon of war? ISIS has lost valuable ground in the Middle East. Why haven’t we seen the trademark killing of hostages in orange overalls? They no longer have any Western hostages.

And so their chief weapon of war has become these lone-wolf attacks. The truck in Germany that crashed into a Christmas market killing 12, the truck in Nice that was driven into the Bastille Day Parade killing 86, and now this on Westminster Bridge.

Aysha, as she quietly walked across Westminster Bridge would have had no idea what was coming. She was probably looking forward to seeing her daughters and mulling over what she’d have for dinner that night, and seconds later she was a fatality. The victim of a rabid ideology. It’s so hard to grasp the randomness of it.

The former head of London’s counter-terrorism operation has described the threat to Western life as “complex, diverse and one that we’ve not seen before.”

It’s there as we go about our every day lives. And there is nothing any of us can do about it.