All you need is a car, truck, or van, a crowd of people, and a driver willing to kill.
On Tuesday afternoon, Sayfullo Saipov, a 29-year-old from Uzbekistan who came to the United States in 2010 drove a rented Home Depot truck into a pedestrian and bike path in Lower Manhattan, killing eight people and injuring eleven.
Although police have not yet established any ties between the attacker and a larger terrorist group such as ISIS or al-Qaeda, the method of attack mimics other ISIS-directed and inspired attacks around the world in recent years, including in Nice, France and London, England .
As Europe has learned only too well and Americans are now coming to understand, these kinds of attacks are notoriously difficult to prevent because it’s hard for authorities to know if an individual will slam a vehicle into a crowd of people. Indeed, that’s in large part why terror groups — particularly ISIS — encourage their followers to use this method of attack.
Which means that we’re very likely to see more of these kinds of attacks in the coming years.
Big, complex attacks like 9/11 usually take years of planning by multiple individuals and a decent amount of money to pull off successfully. The 9/11 attacks were the product of nearly a decade of intense planning, involved dozens of people in multiple countries, and were estimated to have cost al-Qaeda around $500,000.
That kind of planning leaves a (now mostly digital) paper trail — things like email and telephone records, credit card receipts, travel documents, etc. — that give law enforcement and intelligence officials multiple chances to intercept a plot before it comes to fruition (though, as 9/11 made all too clear, even then an attack may still occur).
By contrast, it doesn’t take an elaborate or complicated terrorist plot to pull off a vehicle attack. All you need is a car, truck, or van, a crowd of people, and a driver willing to kill. That helps explain why vehicles have become the terrorists’ weapon of choice in recent years:
This string of attacks isn’t random. ISIS in particular wants would-be militants who share their beliefs to carry out as many strikes as they can in their home countries without consulting ISIS headquarters in Syria first. And both ISIS and al-Qaeda propaganda have specifically called on supporters to use cars as weapons.
For example, ISIS spokesperson Mohammed al-Adnani told supporters in 2014: « If you can’t detonate a bomb or fire a shot, manage by yourself…run them over with your car. » And after the Nice attack, ISIS’s online propaganda magazine Rumiyah ran an article praising the attack and calling for supporters to recreate it, specifically identifying “outdoor markets” as a prime target for driving a large truck into.
“Terrorist groups now push out this methodology that you should use whatever the hell you have to hand to kill whoever the hell you can find,” Raffaello Pantucci, a counterterrorism expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London, told my colleague Zack Beauchamp in June. “That makes it very difficult for security services to stay ahead of that.”
After all, law enforcement and intelligence agencies need information: an informer with knowledge of the plot, intercepted communications between the plotters, etc. It’s hard to catch that if people are acting alone, or in a tight-knit group that doesn’t involve anyone currently under police surveillance.
While it’s still very early in the investigation into the attack New York City, it seems that the scourge of vehicle attacks that has terrorized Europe has now reached America’s shores.
