The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence housed at the University of Maryland, offers a course looking at the who, what and how of Terrorism Studies, by introducing students to cutting-edge research from the social and behavioral sciences and the experts investigating these topics. The course will begin with a unit looking at widely held myths about terrorism and utilizing empirical data to discuss the realities of broad trends and patterns in terrorist attacks over time. The course will then review the psychological factors at play in individual radicalization and recruitment into terrorism, followed by an analysis of terrorist group dynamics. The course will next look at terrorist group operations, including their attacks and some of the supporting behaviors that allow them to carry out attacks, including use of media, financing, recruitment, and training. The course will conclude by looking at the factors that drive terrorist group persistence or endurance versus terrorist group desistance, and will bring the varied course concepts together through a detailed look at the case of Al-Qa’ida. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to study and work with the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the largest database of terrorist incidents in the world, learning its capabilities and developing basic skills in searching and displaying terrorism data.
4.D: Gary Lafree (University of Maryland), "Weapon Trends in the GTD"
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From the course by University of Maryland, College Park
Understanding Terrorism and the Terrorist Threat
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From the lesson
Module 4: Terrorist Operations
Meet the Instructors
Dr. Gary LaFreeDirector
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
Bill BraniffExecutive Director
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
Kate IzsakEducation Director
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Reponses to Terrorism
Joyce Rasing
One of the themes we talked about in earlier lectures is that high profile
attacks like 911 and also the more recent attacks in Madrid, London and Mumbai.
Have an oversize impact on how we think terrorist attacks are typically
carried out.
I'm going to do a series of three lectures now,
where we compare some of the stereotypes that we're likely to
get from the media about how terrorists attacks are carried out.
And compare those stereotypes to what we actually find
when we look at a large database.
In this case, the Global Terrorism Database.
Which these days has over 113,000 terrorist attacks from around the world,
going back to 1970.
So I plan to do three separate lectures in this series.
The first is going to be looking at what the GTD tells us about weapons.
The second is going to be looking what it tells us about the targets of terrorism.
And the third it's going to be looking at tactics used by terrorist.
I could say that in a sense what I'm trying to do in these lectures is to make
it look like terrorism is perhaps more boring than it should be otherwise
looked at.
In other words when we look at one high profile event like 911,
it tends to look like a very emotional, exciting event.
If I do my job correctly though in these lectures, what I want to convey to you is
actually when you really look at a large number of attacks, the individual
elements become much more prosaic and much more easily explained in many ways.
So, as I say in this first lecture,
we going to start up by talking about weapons.
In the first figure that you will see on the screen we show that weapons used by
terrorists for more than 113,000 attacks included in the GTD between 1970 and 2012.
I should mention that about 8% of these attacks we did not know the weapon and so
they had to be excluded.
We also exclude from this figure attacks where the weapon type was simply
listed as other.
These others are a fairly eclectic mix including everything from smoke bombs,
to bows and arrows, to electrocution, noise bombs and rocks.
If you look at the figure as a whole though the thing I want
you to take away from it, I think the most important
thing we can communicate when we taking a look at weapons.
Is the fact that the vast majority of weapons actually
used in these thousands and thousands of terrorist cases are very prosaic.
The two largest categories in the chart are bombings and firearms.
So the most striking feature, I think,
of these data is that contrary to the view that terrorism is often
involved with very sophisticated, very difficult to get access to weapons.
The vast majority of attacks in the database
are essentially weapons that are relatively easy to get access to.
So, according to the figure,
weapons most commonly used in the GTD were explosives and firearms.
[INAUDIBLE] Just these two categories they account for
almost 90% of all the attacks in the data.
And not only are explosives and
firearms the most commonly used weapons, but the type of explosives and
firearms are also relatively common and relatively accessible.
So, the most common explosives include things like dynamite,
the most common firearms include things like shotguns and
other kinds of pistols and automatic weapons.
So all other weapons in the database are just over 10% of attacks.
Incendiary weapons would include devices besides explosives,
so things that produce fire, flamethrowers, firebombs, containers
filled with gasoline or alcohol, any weapon that facilitates arson.
Now some of you may not be familiar with the expression melee,
but melee here refers to weapons that can only be used at very close range, so
this would be blunt objects, hands, feet, fists, sharp objects, rope.
Something that could be used to injure someone directly or
could be used to suffocate someone.
So melee is used as the primary weapon in less than 3% of the attacks so
relatively uncommon.
And it's worth nothing that melee is one of the weapon types recorded for
the 911 attacks.
Given that the attackers used knives and
box cutters in the process if hijacking the airplanes.
You'll see a chemical weapons which include toxic substances,
insecticides, such as cyanide, powerful gasses such as sarin gas.
All of which can call immense sickness, discomfort, even death.
We also include sabotage equipment which describes objects other than explosives or
firearms that are used to disrupt how systems function.
These are often used to make the system destructive, dangerous or lethal.
So for example, this one includes a situation where a terrorist removes nuts
and bolts from train tracks causing them to de-rail.
You'll notice there's an odd category on here called Fake Weapons.
These are sometimes used to intimidate and
threaten victims in order to make them comply with the attacker's demands.
These can include mock explosives, it can include white powder that mimics
anthrax spill, it could include fake firearms, fake guns.
Now, we don't generally include hoaxes in the data, but
if the individuals in the situation perceive the weapon to be real and
an event is actually carried out, we will include it in the data.
So, some attackers use fake weapons in concert with real weapons to exaggerate
the threat of violence, for example.
You will see also that vehicles are included as weapons.
They're included as weapons on rare occasions where through their impact they
actually injure or kill somebody.
If instead they're used to deliver bombs or explosives, we treat them as explosives
but if they're actually used as a weapon, we code them separately.
Among the least frequently used weapons in the table are biological agents.
This would include things like anthrax, e-coli, salmonella, which can be
extremely toxic and contact with even tiny amounts of these can sometimes be fatal.
In fact, some types of biological agents can also be transmitted through contagion.
Potentially making each initial target
a moving weapon that can continue to spread the infection.
In fact, the risk of exposure to biological weapons makes them potentially
difficult to control and more dangerous even then chemical weapons to both
a potential victim, and also to the terrorist who are trying to employ them.
Radiological weapons include materials that emit potentially harmful radiation
and are typically used in such a way that victims can be affected,
either through contamination contact or simply being close to the agent.
As with biological agents,
radiological weapons have rarely been used in terrorist attacks.
And finally, we have nuclear weapons which are of great
concern to policymakers in the general public, but thankfully,
of thus far never been used in a recorded terrorist attack included in our database.
So among the more sophisticated weapons in the GTD are those using remote
detonated devices, there's about 1,300 of these in the database.
Those using chemical agents, we have about 220 of these.
Those using biological agents, a total of 32 of these.
And then a few radiological agents, just 13 attacks.
Chemical agents were as used in one fifth of 1% of
all incidents in the GTD, and biological and radiological incidents were each
present in less then three one hundreds of 1% of all attacks, so you can see.
They're extraordinarily rare, but they do appear in the data.remote detonated
devices are most often left on roadsides or sometimes attached to vehicles as part
of improvised explosive devices, which we refer to popularly now as IEDs.
These were used most frequently and more recent years particularly in Afghanistan,
Algeria, Palestinian territories and in Turkey.
In some cases, they are also planted in packages and
detonated in strategic locations.
Attacks involving chemical agents range from letters containing wrath poison for
attempts to contaminate water supplies.
Ten of the 32 biological weapons recorded in the GTD were the anthrax attacks that
took place in the United States in 2001, in which seven people lost their lives.
Ten of the 13 cases involving radiological materials were part of a series of
attacks in Tokyo, Japan.
In which an individual sent envelopes containing trace amounts of monazite
to government officials.
And it turns out monazite is a reddish, brown mineral which can be radioactive.
While in these cases, it caused no injuries.
The letters threatened to smuggle uranium into North Korea
which raised alarms about the potential for a nuclear attack.
Even though, thankfully that never happened.
The fact that most weapons used in terrorist attacks are readily available
and not very sophisticated is not surprising when we consider that
a fundamental characteristic of terrorism is that the groups employing it often
times do not have access to military grade weaponry.
Still, if you look at how terrorism is portrayed in the media, you often
think instead that terrorists are going to have access to very sophisticated weapons.
In general that's for
the most part, terrorists rely on weapons that are relatively easy to obtain.
I wanted to put weapons into context, I wanted to go now into two other sections.
One, to look at how the use of weapons by terrorists
varies across regions of the world.
And then to conclude this lecture I'll talk a little bit about how weapons use
has changed over time.
The next figure shows how the four most common terrorist weapons and
these are explosives, firearms, incendiary devices and
melee have been used across 13 regions of the world.
And according to this figure explosives were the most common type of weapon used
in most regions but there are some exceptions to this, Central America,
the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa,
all more frequently, relied on firearms than on explosives.
The figure also shows that terrorist attacks in three regions
disproportionately relied on incendiary devices.
Recall that among all of the known weapons used in GTD attacks,
only about 8% were based on incendiaries.
So, these regions are interesting in terms of relying much more than other parts of
the world on incendiaries.
So a tax in East Asia, North America, and Western Europe relied
much more on incendiary devices than other parts of the world.
It turns out that melee related weapons were used disproportionately in
East Asia compared to other regions.
In fact, in East Asia, melee is a more important type of weapon than firearms.
We think this probably reflects the fact that firearms are much more difficult
to obtain in East Asia than in other regions of the world.
And finally, let me say just a little bit about how weapon-use
has evolved over time.
In the next figure we see how the use of these four most common types of weapons
changed over time.
Unsurprisingly, explosives and firearms,
we already know that they are the most common and they are consistently the most
frequently used weapons over the more than four decades included in the database.
We can also see in this figure that trends in the use of firearms and
explosives are mostly similar through the series with explosives use slightly more
than firearms.
In fact, firearms were used more often than explosives in only
eight of the past 43 years.
The gap between the use of explosives and
firearms is especially wide in the early 1980s and from 2006 to 2012.
The 1980s saw explosive attacks greatly increasing by extremely active
terrorist campaigns, particularly in South America.
Including Chile and Peru, where they were very common.
The large number of attacks using explosives in the 21st century reflects,
to a large extent, attacks in the Middle East and North Africa, especially in
the aftermath of the US lead military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Starting in 2001 and 2003, respectively.
From 2003 until the end of the series in 2012 the GTD includes nearly 7,000
attacks in Iraq and over 2,500 attacks in Afghanistan that used explosives.
The figure shows that comparative explosives and firearms,
incendiary devices and melee related weapons are of course far less common.
Overall attackers use explosive nearly six times more often than incendiaries and
about 19 times more often than melee related weapons.
However, incendiaries were especially common for
the mid 1970s to the late 1990s.
They decline through the 2000s, and have, again,
become more common, since about 2008.
As we talked about, just a moment ago,
melee attacks were relatively rare throughout the series.
But, they began to increase in the late 1980s and reached a peak in 1992.
Melee attacks began to drop again in 1998 and
bottomed out with only 35 attacks in 2004.
What conclusions can we wrap this session up with if we
talk about weapons more generally?
I would say the following.
Despite the fact that the media and policy makers often emphasize the threat of
sophisticated weapon are used by terrorists, our analysis of the weapons
used in the more than 113,000 cases in the GTD shows that attackers, by and
large, have relied mostly on explosives and firearms.
Now, I should hasten to say that just because the weapon used is relatively
unsophisticated, it does not imply that it can't be deadly.
In fact, many of the deadliest attacks over the past 43 years have
not been based on sophisticated weapons, but
have been on weapons that are relatively easy to get access to.
Just to give you one example, if we think back to November 2008 and
the attacks in Mumbai, India.
Where the attackers stormed the city shooting indiscriminately into crowds at
the central train station.
Engaged in a gun battle with police in a hospital.
Shot at and threw hand grenades at patrons in crowded restaurants and hotels,
attacked a synagogue, these were incredibly deadly attacks.
More than 175 people were killed and several hundred were injured, and
all based on relatively, easily acceptable weapon, or
easily accessible weapons firearms and explosives.
So, it's important to remember that terrorists can cause large numbers of
casualties and tremendous damage with relatively simple weapons.
And, in fact, most attackers do not use sophisticated weapons.
Instead they generally rely on just a couple of readily accessible weapons.
Now despite the fact that this is the case, I don't think it's good advice to
ask counter terrorist officials to stop looking at more sophisticated weaponry.
Indeed, as technology evolves, terrorists may be
even more likely to adopt new weapons and tactics to help reach their goals.
And in fact, after any new invention,
from airplanes to radioactive isotopes, it's perhaps inevitable that
terrorists will seek ways to use these new tools to advance their political agendas.
Now this example doesn't apply just to weapons, but
again going back to the Mumbai case,
we can see how technology really was used by terrorists in this case.
Media reports confirm that Lashkar Itaba, attackers relied on in the Mumbai attacks,
relied on Google Earth images of their targets.
They use satellite telephones and they use GPS to navigate the targets and
to provide an escape route.
They use Internet phones to communicate with their handlers who are also
monitoring media reports.
The live video reporting over the four day massacred allowed
the terrorists to anticipate many of the efforts by the police and
by the military to contain them and to put an end to the attack.
Thank You.
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