TerrorismRemote-controlled terrorism

On Saturday the New York Times published an analysis of what Rukmini Callimachi, the author of the analysis called “remote controlled” terrorism, or individuals coached in terror tactics online and from afar (“Not ‘lone wolves’ after all: How ISIS guides world’s terror plots from afar,” New York Times [4 February 2017]).

These individuals are trained and guided by terrorist organizations employing “virtual plotters” and “cyber planners” who keep in near constant contact with the individuals carrying out the actual terror plot. These terrorists, or “terror agents,” are micromanaged in every decision, right down to the bullets they use to carry out their violence.

“If you look at the communications between the attackers and the virtual plotters, you will see that there is a direct line of communication to the point where they are egging them on minutes, even seconds, before the individual carries out an attack,” said Nathaniel Barr of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (Barr and Daveed Gartenstein-Ross wrote one of the first article on the phenomenon of remote-controlled terrorism. See “Bloody Ramadan: How the Islamic State Coordinated a Global Terrorist Campaign,” War on the Rocks, 20 July 2016).

Callimachi describes the remote-controlled grooming by ISIS of Mohammed Ibrahim Yazdani, a young Indian engineer, to carry out the first ISIS strike on Indian soil, before making the points that this analysis is different from the argument advanced by the Obama administration regarding terror attacks within the United States:

When the Islamic State identified a promising young recruit willing to carry out an attack in one of India’s major tech hubs, the group made sure to arrange everything down to the bullets he needed to kill victims. For 17 months, terrorist operatives guided the recruit, a young engineer named Mohammed Ibrahim Yazdani, through every step of what they planned to be the Islamic State’s first strike on Indian soil…

As officials around the world have faced a confusing barrage of attacks dedicated to the Islamic State, cases like Mr. Yazdani’s offer troubling examples of what counterterrorism experts are calling enabled or remote-controlled attacks: violence conceived and guided by operatives in areas controlled by the Islamic State whose only connection to the would-be attacker is the internet.

In the most basic enabled attacks, Islamic State handlers acted as confidants and coaches, coaxing recruits to embrace violence. In the Hyderabad plot, among the most involved found so far, the terrorist group reached deep into a country with strict gun laws in order to arrange for pistols and ammunition to be left in a bag swinging from the branches of a tree.

For the most part, the operatives who are conceiving and guiding such attacks are doing so from behind a wall of anonymity. When the Hyderabad plotters were arrested last summer, they could not so much as confirm the nationalities of their interlocutors in the Islamic State, let alone describe what they looked like. Because the recruits are instructed to use encrypted messaging applications, the guiding role played by the terrorist group often remains obscured.

As a result, remotely guided plots in Europe, Asia and the United States in recent years, including the attack on a community center in Garland, Tex., were initially labeled the work of “lone wolves,” with no operational ties to the Islamic State, and only later was direct communication with the group discovered.