Strategic Terrorism: Threats and Risk Assessment

Abstract

Conventional terrorism (CT) aims to intimidate the public by demonstrating that a government is powerless and unable to protect either its citizens or even its own representatives and thus, conventional terrorism tries to coerce decision-makers by using violence against non-combatant members of the target population. The ultimate goal of conventional terrorism is to blackmail decision-makers into giving in to the terrorists’ demands, such as making changes to the existing political systems. This approach has been used for decades by terrorist organizations in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom (IRA), in France (Action Direct), in Germany (Baader-Meinhof Group), Italy (Red Brigades), and in the Middle East (PLO). A conventional terror attack is commonly associated with the use of conventional weapons against a relatively small group of individuals, for example, a hand grenade thrown into a crowd of people in a market place; an assassin killing a politician with a pistol; or a mine detonated as a convoy of security forces passes by. Such types of action usually do not require lengthy planning or sophisticated weaponry and they are well within the capability of the several dozen terrorist groups currently operating around the world.KeywordsTerrorist AttackAttack ModeThreat LevelTerror AttackSuicide BomberThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.