Decoding the new face of global terrorism
The first season of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan streamed on Amazon Prime had clearly highlighted the elements that are likely to change the face of global terrorism in the years to come. The rapid dismantling of IS in Syria has now posed a new threat in front of the security agencies working across the globe. Serious ramifications have still been felt in the West, where attackers have been inspired to act under the IS banner using explosives, knives and vehicles as weapons of choice. This has seen businesses that would not traditionally have considered themselves likely victims of terrorism being caught up in the fallout, emphasising that attacks are no longer just the concern of large corporations in urban centres.
The digital space has been vividly used by the IS promote ‘virtual caliphate’. Most of the attacks that happened on the European soil are self-funded. As per reports, more than 40,000 foreign fighters, who are highly trained and motivated and battle-ready, have left the war-torn country of Syria in the last few months. Experts believe that Western Europe could become the cradle of IS as more than 7000 European jihadists who fought for the group in the middle east could resurface in the region in the days to come.
AQ (Al-Qaida) has strengthened its foothold in tribal regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. To combat the emerging threats in June 2018, the United Kingdom announced its new strategy for countering terrorism. As per high level reports, the enemy is diverse and it has changed its shape, size and way of functioning. They often work as a lone wolf and they are trained to plan large-scale attacks with the help of bioterrorism or cyber terrorism. As per a report published in ‘Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’,
“Al Qaeda has included bioterrorism planning in its training and plotting from the late 1990s onward. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of Al Qaeda, recruited biologists to develop anthrax-based biological weapons. His two high-level recruits, Rauf Ahmad and Yazid Sufaat, were arrested just months after 9/11, heralding a change in Al Qaeda’s organizational structure as well as its biological weapons exploration. Al Qaeda became more decentralized, so there was less direct control of biological weapons development, even though some cells still pursued it”.
The same report says, “In 2009, the world saw the first deadly sign that terrorists pursuing biological weapons are more likely to unleash a local outbreak than a biological attack. Forty Al Qaeda jihadis in an Algeriabasedcell, who may have been experimenting with biological weapons, all died of the plague. Had any one of those jihadis interacted with somebody from a nearby community, they could have set off a localized epidemic in rural communities where antibiotics and other medicines are not readily available”.
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Satya Swaroop
Managing Editor
satya@newmediacomm.biz
