The recent car and knife attacks in London claimed seven lives. Although British police later killed the three jihadist perpetrators, this incident adds to the latest crescendo of Islamist terrorist atrocities using vehicles as simple, but lethally effective, weapons.
Keeping in mind recent terrorist rammings in Nice, Berlin, Westminster and Stockholm last April, jihadist movements, including Al-Qaeda and Isis, are discrediting the potential resort to nuclear-powered armaments long advocated by international security experts.
Apart from May’s Manchester suicide bombing, guns and bombs are being exchanged for motor vehicles in the jihadists’ simple, however menacing, terrorist arsenal.
Calling for stronger anti-terrorist regulations after London’s recent atrocity, UK Prime Minister Theresa May confessed: “Perpetrators are inspired to attack not only on the basis of carefully constructed plots but by copying one another and often using the crudest means of attack.”
A precursor to this deadly phenomenon in terrorist tactics stems from the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah. During the early 1980s, Hezbollah revolutionised this deadly line of weapons by breaching perimeters around intended targets through explosive-laden vehicles. Hezbollah’s subsequent wave of suicide car bombings against Israeli and multinational diplomatic and military facilities paved the way to rising numbers of on-duty and off-duty casualties.
Hezbollah aimed to ensure moral disorientation and discouragement from militarily superior states engaged in overseas coalitions. Since then, jihadist-inspired militants from Al-Qaeda have recognised how this combination of suicide bombings with vehicle rammings can be applied on land, at sea and on air to wreak mayhem in pursuit of a global Islamic caliphate.
Examples, including the USS Cole bombing in 2000, September 11 and the 2007 Glasgow Airport attack, reflect how Al-Qaeda has shifted Hezbollah’s terrorist gears of ‘suicide ramming’ targets to include the breaching of national security parameters against civilian infrastructure.
However, the singular use of vehicle rammings as a terrorist weapon per se is quite a recent phenomenon. Since 2008, Palestinian militants began to employ vehicles as a deliberate tactic to kill random Israeli pedestrians.
After knife stabbings, vehicle rammings emerged as the second lethal form of political violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by 2016. Comparable to suicide bombings, vehicle rammings are easy to plan, cheap and executed without detection.
Terrorism is all about the deliberate use of indiscriminate violence
Vehicles are ultimately legal to own but can become devastating when terrorist drivers hijack steering wheels and plough into civilians.
The 2016 Nice terror attack, which killed 86 people and injured hundreds, demonstrated how undetected lone-wolf jihadists can hijack massive vehicles, and wipe away innocent civilians according to Isis’s twisted justifications to this massacre strategy.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) first promoted jihadist-inspired vehicle rammings in a 2010 issue of its English online magazine Inspire.
By appealing to Islamist lone-wolf extremists, AQAP aimed to encourage a do-it-yourself terrorist plot involving the type of vehicle used in accordance to the quality and quantity of selected targets.
AQAP furthermore motivated continued attacks through knives if vehicles were subsequently neutralised by national security forces. The 2013 Woolwich assassination of British army fusilier Lee Rigby is a textbook example of how AQAP incites potential jihadists to resort to vehicle rammings and knife attacks against western democratic societies.
Such encouragement to engage in terrorist vehicle rammings stems from the strategic teachings of American-born AQAP ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki. Although killed in a drone strike in 2011, al-Awlaki’s online sermons remain influential for generations of Islamist militants to embrace vehicle attacks as a contemporary expression of neo-Islamist political violence.
Al-Awlaki believed how Al-Qaeda’s conversion from organised terrorism to do-it-yourself jihadist vehicle attacks is just, right and ultimately ‘legitimate’ to portray a clash of civilisations against infidel and crusader western military coalitions involved in the Middle East.
Since 2014, Isis has uncompromisingly radicalised al-Awlaki’s message to promote vehicle rammings.
In the words of (recently killed) Isis spokesperson Abu Mohammad al-Adnani: “If you are not able to find an explosive device or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car.”
Instead of travelling to Iraq and Syria, Isis has motivated prospective foreign fighters to focus their leaderless retaliation against western coalition airstrikes by stealing larger commercial trucks, intensify and multiply the deliberate ploughing of innocent civilians.
Abu Salman al-Faranci, a French Isis foreign fighter, explained this strategic choice after the recent attack at Westminster Bridge: “There are weapons, cars and trucks available and targets ready to be hit… kill them and run them over with your cars.”
London’s recent vehicle-and-stabbing attacks remind us how terrorism is all about the deliberate use of indiscriminate violence. National security forces must be aware that unless strengthened collaboration with Islamic communities leads to the search-and-arrest of potential jihadists, more drastic vehicle rammings are likely be carried out to sow fear and panic in democratic civil societies.
Samuel Bezzina is an independent researcher in terrorism and political violence.