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The lengths terrorists go to: Perpetrator characteristics and the complexity of jihadist terrorist attacks in Europe, 2004-2011
Abstract
This article introduces the Terrorist Attack Complexity Index, a framework to measure the complexity of terrorist attacks. This measurement takes place on the basis of 16 characteristics of terrorist attacks. The framework is applied to jihadist terrorist attacks in Europe during the period 2004–2011 to find perpetrator characteristics that are related to attacks with a high degree of complexity. The findings suggest that complex attacks are more likely to be carried out by perpetrators, who have gained expertise by visiting training camps outside Europe or participated in actual jihad, worked in large groups, and are acting on instructions from other terrorist groups. Simple attacks are generally carried out by perpetrators who have none of these characteristics.
... Instead, the preferred type of weapon has become different types of high- velocity firearms. Most terrorists use only one kind of weapon during the attack (Van Dongen, 2014). Spaaij (2010) studied lone terrorists from 15 different countries and found that firearms are one of the three preferred weapons. ...
There is agreement amongst scholars regarding the lack of a unique profile for lone wolf actor terrorists. Therefore, this study focuses on the characteristics of the lone attack, which has rarely been studied. The study seeks to fill these gaps, examining the element of opportunity and situational conditions by focusing on the offence/attack rather than on the offender/attacker in cases of run-over terrorist attacks. In order to shed more light on this dangerous phenomenon of lone-actor terror in general, and lone run-over attacks more specifically, this study examines all 62 run-over attacks carried out in Israel between January 2000 and March 2016. Data for this study were obtained from confidential and open sources. The study’s findings reveal certain characteristics of lone run-over attacks regarding the ‘four pillars of opportunity’ (target, weapon, tools/training and facilitating conditions). These findings suggest that, in order to prevent run-over terrorist attacks or to minimize the damage, one should not concentrate primarily on identifying the profile of the potential attacker. Rather, effective counter-measures should identify the run-over attack elements of situational opportunities and introduce effective situational crime prevention measures that have been found to be effective in preventing non-terrorist crime.
Islamic law denotes as haram any forbidden behavior, object, beverage, or food. Despite subscribing to a similar Salafi ideology, very few jihadi groups use violence against haram targets (e.g., brothels, casinos, statues, liquor stores, mixed sex schools, and gay clubs). This study argues that haram-centered violence unites ethnically-mixed jihadi groups by fostering a superordinate Islamic identity that enables them to overcome their collective action problems. As a result, ethnically-mixed Salafi jihadi groups deploy haram targeting much more than homogenous ones. Using new disaggregated group-level data, our analyses demonstrate that the ethnic structure of Salafi jihadi groups shapes haram targeting, both in Dagestan and on a global scale. The article discusses these findings and directions for future research on religious violence.
Like terrorism researchers, scholars of religion are inevitably confronted with a plethora of definitions and concepts claiming to describe the subject of research adequately. The complexity and diversity of how religious traditions and new religious movements manifest themselves individually and socially make defining religion a problematic endeavor. Principally, religious studies encompass four definitional approaches: experiential or affective (identification of religion by subjective experiences), substantive (identification of religion by genuine belief systems), polythetic (identification of features describing something as a religious phenomenon), and functional definitions (identification of religion by social functions, not beliefs) (Dawes and Maclaurin,.Dawes and Maclaurin (eds), A New Science of Religion, Routledge, New York and London, 2013, 14–16).
Novel COVID-19 is having far-reaching consequences worldwide. Security and security management are not immune from this influence. Building on the scientific literature, this article explores the mixed impact of this unexpected macro-level phenomenon and its consequences on violent extremism and terrorism in the West, in the short and in the medium to long term. The paper looks at the influence on extremist beliefs and attitudes and, moreover, it examines the effects on extremist behaviors, with an emphasis on terrorist activities, drawing on a model of terrorist attack cycle. The COVID-19 pandemic can be interpreted as a global natural experiment that offers insight into causal processes, in the interplay among societal, group, and individual factors.
Public warnings have the potential to mitigate the threat from terrorism: the public is alerted, and in response, the terrorist may defer his attack. Paradoxically, warnings can be a victim of their own success. The absence of an attack may be misconstrued by the warning recipients as a false alarm, leading to warning fatigue and a dampened response to future warnings—also referred to as the “cry-wolf” effect. To capture this phenomenon and examine its implications, we model the interaction between the defender and the terrorist using a dynamic game-theoretic framework. Our equilibrium results suggest that absent any political gamesmanship or incompetence, the prospect of false alarms can lead to either lengthy stretches of sustained warning, or more attacks at lower warning levels. Furthermore, we recommend that warnings and security deployment ought to be decoupled and treated as independent levers. By studying how the equilibrium shifts with changes to the parameter regime, we find that an increase in the terrorist’s “readiness” can result in a lower frequency of terrorist attacks; and a rise in the cost of issuing warnings can induce more frequent warnings.
The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2018.1721 .
Public warnings have the potential to be a powerful tool to mitigate the threat from terrorism: the public is alerted, and in response, the terrorist may defer or deflect his attack. Paradoxically, warnings can be a victim of their own success. The absence of an attack may be misconstrued by the warning recipients as a false alarm, leading to warning fatigue and a dampened response to future warnings -- also referred to as the "cry-wolf" effect. To capture this phenomenon, we model the interaction between the defender and the terrorist using a dynamic game-theoretic framework. We find that a more effective warning shifts emphasis from the direct benefit of mitigating losses from an attack, to the indirect benefit of inducing the terrorist to defer his attack to a later time. We examine the implications of this finding in the context of defending a single location, and two locations. For instance, we find that the frequent occurrence of false alarms does not necessarily imply political gamesmanship; an increase in the terrorist's readiness can result in a lower frequency of terrorist attacks; issuing a joint warning across two locations can be optimal even when the asymmetry in their vulnerability is high. Our results clarify conventional wisdom, and hence, have important policy implications.
This book examines the role of terrorist innovation and learning in theory and practice, and in the context of three specific EU case-studies. It is often said that terrorist groups are relatively conservative in character operating in a technological vacuum - relying almost exclusively on bombs and bullets. This observation masks increasing complexity and creativity and innovation within terrorist groups and one of the most distinguishing features of al-Qaeda's terrorist operations is its propensity for remarkable innovation. This book examines how and why terrorist groups innovate more generally and al-Qaeda-related terrorist plots in Europe more specifically. The starting point for this book was twofold. Firstly to examine the issue of innovation and learning more generically both in theory, within specific themes and within the context of al-Qaeda's influence on this process. Secondly, this book examines the evolution of specific al-Qaeda-related plots in three specific northern EU states - the United Kingdom, Denmark and Germany - where there has been a significant volume of planned, failed and executed terrorist plots. In particular, these case studies explore signs of innovation and learning. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism and counter-terrorism, political violence, security studies and IR in general. © 2015 selection and editorial matter, Magnus Ranstorp and Magnus Normark; individual chapters, the contributors. All rights reserved.
This article provides the most thorough overview yet of how jihadis have plotted terrorist attacks in Europe. Drawing on a database of 122 incidents, we review trends in weapon types, attack types and target types in the period 1994–2013. The overall finding is that jihadi terrorism in Europe is becoming more discriminate in its targeting while attack types and weapons are becoming progressively more diverse. The most likely scenarios in the coming three to five years are bomb attacks and armed assaults against sub-national entities, communities and individuals. A majority of the terrorist attacks will be limited in scope, but mass-casualty terrorism cannot be excluded. Foreign fighters from Syria are likely to influence the threat level in Europe, but we do not expect them to alter patterns in modus operandi dramatically.
Os profissionais da area da saude mental com frequencia sao desafiados a encontrar novos tratamentos para situacoes adversas e peculiares dos individuos. O Transtorno de Estresse Pos-Traumatico (TEPT) e um dos disturbios psiquiatricos mais comuns e que deixam sequelas, tendo em vista que afeta a vida funcional das pessoas que sofreram um trauma e desenvolvem o transtorno. Dessa forma, este estudo visa a uma revisao da literatura a respeito das estrategias terapeuticas utilizadas em Terapia Cognitivo-Comportamental (TCC) no tratamento do TEPT em bancarios. Para tanto, foi realizada uma busca por artigos que descreveram protocolos de tratamento para o TEPT e as particularidades encontradas nos bancarios, a fim de adequar a TCC para essa populacao. Os resultados sugerem que a populacao de bancarios apresenta algumas diferencas em termos de cognicoes pos-traumaticas se comparada a outras populacoes, de forma que e sugerida uma adaptacao dos protocolos de tratamento para atender as necessidades desses pacientes. Palavras-chave: Terapia Cognitivo-Comportamental, Transtorno de Estresse Pos-Traumatico, bancarios.
The purpose of this article is to review the above incident: what happened, how it happened and who did it and why. Also, to place it in the context of the current "peace process," Irish history and the history of Irish Republican violence. In looking at who carried out the bombing there is also an attempt to explain the split between the Provisional and Real IRA, their motives and ideas, the complex relationship between the two and what they hope to achieve. This is then followed by an analysis of the actual bombing, the tactics involved in carrying it out and what went wrong. And finally to look at the after effects of the bombing. In many ways the bombing was not as unusual as portrayed by the media, just a continuation of what had been happening for the last 30 years; thus, it is instructive in itself as an "ideal" terrorist operation.
Over the past two decades repeated attempts have been made to identify the next "new" form of terrorism, but all have come up short. Modern terrorism is not about the next trend, but is--and long has been--characterized by mass casualty bombers (defined as those terrorist groups that have killed 25 or more people in a bombing attack). When compared to other "new" terrorists, mass casualty bombers are more prolific than state-sponsored terrorists, more deadly than suicide terrorists, more identifiable than religious terrorists, and more plausible than CBRN terrorists. Mass casualty bombers have long presented the greatest terrorist threat to international peace and security and will likely continue to do so in the future.
In recent years, Al Qaeda succeeded in perpetrating several terrorist attacks that were successfully calculated and executed. Each operation may be considered to be analyzed as a project. This article analyzes the events taken by Al Qaeda prior to their operations, focusing on planning, controlling, and decision-making processes, using common tools from the project management area. This unique approach enables an understanding of the operational aspects of Al Qaeda and the managerial processes that its leaders were focused on. It was found that Al Qaeda's greatest managerial strength lies in human resource management, which includes team members recruiting, developing a clear organizational structure, team developing and team members motivating. Al Qaeda's greatest weakness lies in time management, resulting with many operations’ schedule delays.
Using twice-yearly data from 1991 to 2003, we analyze the incidents of suicide attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad within Israel and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Given the exploratory nature of the question, we have first estimated the relevant coefficients by using a Quasi-Maximum Likeli-hood Ratio and then checked their robustness by reestimating the model with the help of a Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) as an interrelated system. The results indicate that the two groups deliberately use suicide bombings as strategic weapons within the larger Israeli-Palestinian political milieu. With the Western world locked in an armed struggle with the militant extremists of Islam based on mil-lenarian ideologies, this study emphasizes the need to develop appropriate analytical capabilities to distinguish among terrorist groups and their motivations, ideologies, and tactics.
Europe did not wake up to terrorism on 9/11; terrorism is solidly entrenched in Europe's past. The historical characteristics of Europe's counterterrorism approach have been first, to treat terrorism as a crime to be tackled through criminal law, and second, to emphasize the need for understanding the ‘root causes’ of terrorism in order to be able to prevent terrorist acts. The 9/11 attacks undoubtedly brought the EU into uncharted territory, boosting existing cooperation and furthering political integration—in particular in the field of justice and home affairs, where most of Europe's counterterrorism endeavours are situated—to a degree few would have imagined some years earlier. This development towards European counterterrorism arrangements was undoubtedly event-driven and periods of inertia and confusion alternated with moments of significant organizational breakthroughs. The 2005 London attacks contributed to a major shift of emphasis in European counterterrorism thinking. Instead of an external threat, terrorism now became a home-grown phenomenon. The London bombings firmly anchored deradicalization at the heart of EU counterterrorism endeavours.
We developed and tested a model in which transformational leadership affects sports performance indirectly, through the mediating effects of intrinsic motivation. During the season, 168 university athletes provided data on their perceptions of their coach's transformational leadership and their own intrinsic motivation. At the end of the season, their coaches assessed the performance of the athletes. Using LISREL VIII, three models were estimated following the sequence of mediator tests outlined by Kelloway (1996, 1998). The proposed model received considerable support. The results isolate intrinsic motivation as a mediator of the relationship between transformational leadership and sports performance, suggesting that transformational leadership may enhance intrinsic interest in the task.
Applying criminological/victimological concepts and theories, the study addresses the social processes involved in Palestinians' suicide terrorism and describes Palestinians' pathways to suicide bombing. The data are derived from in-depth interviews of 7 male and female Palestinians serving prison sentences in Israel for attempted suicide bombing. The social background, context, and experiences of the interviewees, including their recruitment, interactions with the organizations that produce suicide bombing, the tangible and intangible incentives and rewards that motivated them to become suicide bombers, their preparation for the mission, and the strategies employed by the organizations to sustain recruits' resolve to conform to the plan are described and analyzed. The implications of the findings for theory and public policy are drawn and discussed.
Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Terrorist Typologies Ideology Strategy Tactics Capabilities Target Protection The Security Environment External Factors Decision-making Target Selection Bibliography Index
"Human bombs cannot be defeated, not even by nuclear bombs," declares the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. From Chechnya to Sri Lanka, terrorist groups are embracing this deadly strategy and deploying suicide bombers as their ultimate weapon. But they can be stopped.
The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part examines why organizations may be unwilling to resort to suicide missions (SMs). It considers five possible reasons: cognitive accessibility, normative preferences, counterproductive effects, constituency costs, and technological costs. The second part explores the factors that affect individual members' willingness to participate in SMs. Because evidence on the reasons or causes for the absence of SMs is particularly hard to come by, this chapter is more analytical than empirical. It formulates hypotheses and illustrates them by examples rather than testing them.
Much debate has recently focused on Hamas' development of short-range missiles and on the organization's alleged interest in chemical weapons. Successful employment of such technology could potentially be very destructive and would have an immense effect on the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This article seeks to address the question of likelihood of Hamas' technological progression by examining the issue as a cost-benefit analysis from the perspective of the organization's leadership. The article presents suicide bombings, missiles and chemical weapons as possible tactical options for Hamas, and discusses the possible costs and benefits of the individual options as they pertain to the movement's long-term and short-term objectives. Additional factors likely to influence the organization's decisions in terms of weapons selection are also addressed. An interpretation of current Hamas' actions as well as an attempted forecast of Hamas' military activities is provided in the conclusion.
The current article seeks to add to the quantitative approach to understanding terrorism by examining the logic underlying terrorist choice of targets and timing within the context of the Chechen–Russian conflict. Using data on Chechen rebel bombings in Chechnya and Russia from 1997–2003, the analysis revealed support for a logic underlying terrorist choice of targets. The results indicated that civilian targets were more likely to be targeted in Russia than in Chechnya, illustrating the importance of examining contextual effects within quantitative approaches to terrorism. The results also implicated an affect of weather and urbanization. Implications of the results and future directions for research are discussed.
The emergence of “self-starter” cells represents a distinct and significant development in the post–9/11 era. These autonomous groups share an ideological affinity with the original Al Qaeda network, but they operate in the absence of any institutionalized training or recruitment. As demonstrated by the case of the London bombers, conventional conceptions of “networks” are ill-suited to analyze groups of this nature. A broader range of sociological models are necessary to deconstruct how and why they form. This phenomenon must be examined with reference to the Internet as an operational tool and “democratizer of violence.”
Nationalist terrorism aspires to independence or greater autonomy for some territory. The combination of territorial claims and armed struggle gives rise to a very definite strategy, violence intended to coerce the State. Nationalist terrorist organizations kill repeatedly with the aim of breaking the will of the State. They engage in a peculiar sort of war of attrition with the State. This paper analyzes comparatively the war of attrition strategy in two organizations, ETA and the IRA. The focus of the paper is on strategy: it examines how ETA and the IRA understood their activity in terms of war of attrition and how they developed their strategy subject to some constraints, such as the moderate preferences of their supporters. I show that popularity constraints account for the high degree of selectivity in their killings. The analysis is based on a combination of historical information, internal documents, and a large data set I have constructed of the killings of these two organizations.
The literature on the origins of modern terrorism generally acknowledges that terrorism as a recognisable phenomenon had its roots during the latter decades of the nineteenth century and that the first exponents to embrace violence in a systematic way as a strategy to achieve their political ends were the extremist groups of the social revolutionary movement in Russia, particularly Narodnya Volya. Their campaign of terrorist attacks culminated in March 1881 with the assassination of Tsar Alexander the Second and thus both the conceptual and methodological seeds had been sown that led in the following century to the political violence in the characteristic form that we now refer to as terrorism. It is argued here that this unilinear model is flawed as it ignores the seminal contribution to the development of terrorism in the twentieth century made by the extreme Irish nationalist movement. During the years from January 1881 to January 1885 they mounted a series of bomb attacks in cities on the British mainland with the objective of forcing the government to relinquish its rule of the island of Ireland. Their strategy, operational methodology, tactics and targeting were innovative in both concept and execution and in turn they provided a blueprint for the conduct of terrorism that has not changed fundamentally for well over a hundred years. Terrorism, as it manifested itself in the 20th century, owes at least as much to the strategy, tactics and techniques developed and applied in the 19th century by the “physical force” proponents of the Irish republican movement as it does to the more readily acknowledged activities of the Russian revolutionaries.
Considering Europe's long history of terrorist violence by separatist, leftist and rightwing groups, terrorism by militant Sunni Islamists has until recently been a marginal phenomenon. However, empirical data presented in this chronology suggests it constitutes a growing and increasingly lethal threat, and a worrisome trend in the context of increased tensions between the Muslim world and the West in the wake of 9/11 and the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which needs to be dealt with on many levels—socially, politically, and economically. The current chronology is meant to serve as a tool for conducting academic research on the scope of the threat, and for mapping incidents that might be surveyed in more depth to create a better understanding of its organizational, operational, and motivational patterns.
When, why, and how do people living in a democracy become radicalized to the point of being willing to use or directly support the use of terrorist violence against fellow citizens? This question has been at the center of academic and public debate over the past years as terrorist attacks and foiled plots inspired by militant Islamism have grabbed European and American headlines. This article identifies and discusses empirical studies of radicalization and points to the strengths as well as the weaknesses characterizing these studies. The aim is to take stock of the current state of research within this field and to answer the question: From an empirical point of view, what is known and what is not known about radicalization connected to militant Islamism in Europe?
This article describes the development and application of a framework to compare national counterterrorism policies. It discusses the state of the art regarding concepts, frameworks and inventories to compare counterterrorism policies, explains the logic behind our own framework, briefly describes the application to ten European Union Member States, and then formulates an empirically based categorisation of counterterrorism policies. It is shown that the counterterrorism policies of the nine European states differ fundamentally. The concluding section sums up the findings and addresses some possibilities for the practical application of a framework of this kind.
Ideology plays a crucial role in terrorist's target selection; it supplies terrorists with an initial motive for action and provides a prism through which they view events and the actions of other people. Those people and institutions whom they deem guilty of having transgressed the tenets of the terrorists’ ideologically‐based moral framework are considered to be legitimate targets which the terrorists feel justified in attacking. As an extension of this, ideology also allows terrorists to justify their violence by displacing the responsibility onto either their victims or other actors, whom in ideological terms they hold responsible for the state of affairs which the terrorists claim led them to adopt violence. While it is not the only factor which determines whether a potential target is attacked, ideology provides an initial range of legitimate targets and a means by which terrorists seek to justify attacks, both to the outside world and to themselves.
Contemporary jihad is the lineal descendant of classical jihad theory as modified by contemporary radical Islam. It has expressions in both Sunni and Shiʿite Islam, but differs from the classical material in that the targets allowable for jihad are not states but smaller groups or even individuals. The article traces the history of this development.
Since the attacks of 11 September 2001 on New York and Washington DC there has been an ongoing controversy about whether the real threat of global terrorism is posed by al-Qaeda, its territorial extensions and affiliated organisations, or by decentralised groups inspired by, but unconnected to, such entities. The 11 March 2004 Madrid train bombings are often held up as the archetype of an independent local cell at work, and the perpetrators depicted as self-recruited, leaderless terrorists. Six years after the blasts, however, new evidence connecting some of the most notorious members of the Madrid bombing network with al-Qaeda's senior leadership, along with features of the terrorist network itself and distinctive elements of the likely strategy behind the blasts, suggest that these assumptions are misleading. Judicial documentation now fully accessible at Spain's National Court and other relevant primary or secondary sources can help us better understand what the attacks can tell us about al-Qaeda and a global terrorism in transition, as well as about the changing nature of the threat to open societies.
This study develops a conceptual framework that relates role-modeling behavior of sales managers to a set of key outcome variables
and assesses the validity of the framework using a cross-sectional sample of salespeople and sales managers drawn from a variety
of business-to-business sales organizations. Findings indicate that salespeople’s perceptions of their managers’ role-modeling
behavior relate positively to trust in the sales manager and relate indirectly, through trust, to both job satisfaction and
overall performance of salespeople. The study provides empirical validity for practitioner suggestions that sales managers
should lead by example, and thus should provide a model of the behavior managers desire their salespeople to enact.
A vulnerability analysis of possible use in security studies is presented. The analysis of the London underground network suggests that the stations bombed on 7 July, 2005 may not have been chosen randomly. From the viewpoint of effectively disturbing the transport system, nearly the best choice was made out of roughly 3 million possible combinations for attacking three stations. By comparing the underground networks of London, Tokyo and Budapest, we discuss the vulnerability of their underground networks. It seems to be plausible that such calculations can be made by softwares used widely in social network analysis. The predictive power of network analysis can be helpful in setting priorities in defence.
This article aims to challenge the dominant view that the expressions of terrorism since the last decade of the twentieth century are fundamentally new. It questions the new aspects of terrorism, such as the transnational nature of the perpetrators and their organizations, their religious inspiration and fanaticism, their use of weapons of mass destruction, and their indiscriminate targeting. It points out essential continuities with previous expressions of terrorist violence, such as the national and territorial focus of the new terrorists, their political motivations, their use of conventional‐ weaponry, and the symbolic targeting that is still aimed at achieving a surprise effect. The article calls for more thorough historical investigations in order to appreciate truly new aspects of terrorism.‐
This article applies formal modeling to study a terrorist group's choice of whether to attack or not, and, in the case of an attack, which of two potential targets to strike. Each potential target individually takes protective measures that influence the terrorists' perceived success and failure, and, hence, the likelihood of attack. For domestic terrorism, a tendency for potential targets to overdeter is indicated. For transnational terrorism, cases of overdeterrence and underdeterrence are identified. We demonstrate that increased information about terrorists' preferences, acquired by the targets, may exacerbate inefficiency when deterrence efforts are not coordinated. In some cases, perfect information may eliminate the existence of a noncooperative solution.