Assessing the real threat from ISIL copycats
Just keep calm and carry on, writes Eric Morse.
Earlier this year, according to Vice magazine, Islamic State (ISIL) published a manual for jihadist secret agents and homegrown terrorists called How To Survive in the West. Excerpts range from sensible Internet tradecraft (how to cover your tracks on social media) to silliness (use Nerf guns for target practice) to deadly silliness (very inept, even dangerous bomb recipes). It might as well be a genre parody, except that some people do try to use it.
Not long ago, a colleague with a military intelligence background happened to stop by his favourite sporting goods and army surplus store. A couple of other men were in the store acquiring expeditionary gear for a long and thirsty local event. At the counter was a customer who requested, in front of everyone, the following items: body armour, a fake police badge, military rank badges, and a taser.
Tasers are illegal for retail sale in Ontario, but the shopper duly departed with the rest of the goods. The friend and one of the customers exchanged “not good” or words to that effect. A call was subsequently placed to the local counterterrorism unit.
The event might have been entirely innocent but circumstantially it’s a definite attention getter. Offered solely as a joke, it would have been up there for rank stupidity with declaring a bomb at airport security.
Since one of the first rules of counterterrorism is that if there really is ill intent present, even gross incompetence does not preclude success, there would be some urgency to the request.
Occurrences like this are not frequent but when they happen they have to be investigated. And that is exactly the difficulty with the lone-wolf/copycat style of terrorism that ISIL has been pushing in North America: the perpetrators — unless spectacularly clumsy — are practically impossible to detect in advance. Once an act is committed, unless the perpetrator proclaims his affiliation or is claimed by a known terror group, it can be difficult to assign a motive. The net is cast for personalities that will seize on just about any pretext for selfactualization.
Among many acts of violence in the past year in Canada and the U.S., including school and theatre shootings and serial killings, only five have been definitely linked to jihadism: the killings of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo and Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent within a week of each other in Canada last October, and the Queens, N.Y., Garland, Texas, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, attacks between October 2014 and now.
Some have been more deeply indoctrinated than others (the Chattanooga killer seems to have deliberately erased himself from social media in advance, as ISIL manuals recommend) but there is no doubt that all five drew direct inspiration from ISIL recruiting propaganda. Which having been said, there have still only been five on a continent in a year.
That is the good news, plus the fact that Canadian security forces have been highly successful at preventing anything more ambitious or organized. The bad news is that by the sheer nature of the act, no security force, no matter how wellresourced, and no legislation, no matter how draconian, is going to prevent every lone-wolf act of violence.
Security forces have always known that. But we have lived in a society so violence-free for so long that any violation at all of our state of innocence is disproportionately felt. The best advice? “Keep calm, carry on” and don’t let “them” stampede you — terrorists, media, or anybody else.
Even gross incompetence does not preclude success.