Lone-wolf terror tough to prevent, experts say
Headlined “Knights of Lone Jihad,” the article posted on an Islamic State-linked website last month — and reported by the SITE Intelligence Group — was a bit of a how-to guide.
It urged supporters to kill unbelievers on their own, “especially the spiteful and indecent French, or an Australian or a Canadian,” and helpfully suggested doing so in the dark of night.
Details remain sketchy, but a 30-year-old Edmonton man appears to have followed just such a pattern this weekend, using a car, a truck and a knife to injure a police officer and several pedestrians Saturday evening, the latest in a string of attacks worldwide by socalled lone-wolf terrorists.
About the same time in France, a man who reportedly shouted Allahu Akbar — God is great — stabbed to death two women outside the Marseille train station.
Experts stressed Sunday that the toll taken by individual extremists — like all forms of terrorism — is small compared to other forms of violence.
But the number of incidents does seem to be rising, egged on by groups like ISIL. And it raises the question: what, if anything, can authorities do to prevent terrorism planned within the mind of an individual, with no chatter between plotters to intercept, no conspirators to turn into informants?
Perhaps not much, say some experts.
“If we’ve gotten to this point where we’re talking knives and cars … they are virtually unstoppable,” said Phil Gurski, a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) analyst and head of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting. “This may be an era where we have to expect these things are going to happen, which is not defeatist, it’s realist.”
Terrorism experts say most lone actors have made at least their radical beliefs — if not their actual attack plans — known to someone else.
Norway’s Anders Breivik went on a one-man killing spree, yet was part of a pan-European far-right movement.
And the Edmonton suspect, a Somali national waiting for refugee status, has been on the radar of authorities since 2015 when a complaint was filed suggesting he may have been radicalized, the RCMP said Sunday.
“Even lone wolves give off vapour trails that are potentially discoverable by security agencies,” said Wesley Wark, a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa and leading national-security specialist.
But distinguishing between the radicalized and non-violent — a group known as “couch Jihadis” within CSIS, says Gurski — and those determined to do harm is much tougher for security agencies with limited resources to achieve.
It’s especially difficult to do without trodding on basic civil rights.
“In Canada, we don’t criminalize thought,” noted Christian Leuprecht, a security expert and professor at the Royal Military College and Queen’s University. “Do we really want the state to get into trying to change people’s minds?”
The trigger for action, he said, might be radicalized beliefs combined with other factors, such as having contact online with a terrorist group, a propensity for petty crime or attempts to procure weapons.
Terrorism in the 21st century certainly took a different form when it first burst into the public consciousness.
Attacks like 9/11 and the 2007 transit bombings in London involved multiple accomplices planning sophisticated events long in advance. The unsuccessful Toronto-18 plot was arguably another example, and illustrated how security agencies could stymie such acts, in that case with a police mole at the heart of the conspiracy.
But some of the most shocking terrorist events recently have been planned and carried out by individuals employing low-tech weaponry. That includes last year’s shooting in an Orlando gay nightclub that took 49 lives and the knifevan attack outside the U.K. parliament in March. Canada had the deadly assault on a Quebec City mosque this January, the shooting of a soldier on Parliament Hill in 2014 and the aborted bombing by Ontario’s Aaron Driver in 2016.
A report by Britain’s United Services Institute — a security think-tank — found the number of lonewolf terrorist events in Europe rose steadily between 2000 and 2014, 38 per cent motivated by religion, 24 per cent by far-right ideology.
As for Islamist terrorism, Gurski said the trend may indicate it is scraping the bottom of the barrel, using untrained, often-incompetent supporters, the more skilled extremists having been killed or arrested.
Many lone wolves are young, socially isolated and mentally unstable people, a resource that organizations like ISIL can inexpensively manipulate over the web, said Daniel Alati, an expert on counter-terrorism at Toronto’s Ryerson University.
Indeed, one of the ISI-Llinked “Knights of Lone Jihad” articles even plays up the concept’s practical advantages. It’s ideal for the person “who wants to participate in al-Jihad without costing him the hardship of travelling … or wants to pursue al-Jihad in secrecy alone … while he pursues his everyday life in a natural way.”
Alati suggested an increased emphasis on countering radicalization would be the most effective way to prevent lone-wolf attacks.
Wark advocates a number of measures: better educating the public about the nature of the threat, boosting the resources of security agencies and offering more support to the Muslim community in its efforts to fight extremism.