Why the latest wave of terrorism will get worse before it gets better

For each of 8,294 hostage crises from 1970 through 2015 and all 80,676 terrorist events from 2004 through 2015, we coded the perpetrators as either religious or secular terrorists. Religious terrorism includes not only Islamist terrorists, but terrorists motivated by any religion, such as Hindu and Christian fundamentalists. This gave us more than five million data points.

Terrorism is very infrequent compared to other crimes and natural disasters. But the risk of terrorism is greater, because of the colossal social and economic costs. So the fashionable observation that other crimes kill more people ignores terrorism’s wider harms, not least the terror itself.

The GTD shows that the risk of terrorism has increased dramatically over the long term, most acutely in the last couple decades, as religious terrorism became predominant globally, and most harmful, even in countries such as the U.S., where religious terrorism is not predominant in frequency. Risk is usually calculated according to the frequency of attacks and their negative effects. By both of these measures, religious terrorists represent a greater risk than secular terrorists. We found that they attack more frequently and kill more people on average per attack and in aggregate. This is true even in countries such as the U.S., where most terrorism is not religious.

In the early 2000s, terrorist attacks worldwide remained steady at about 1,000 per year, although average lethality was increasing. In 2005, attacks began to rise dramatically, increasing over the next decade by more than 15 times in frequency and more than nine times in lethality, with around 40,000 total deaths from terrorism in 2015.

How terrorism is changing
Terrorist ideologies are becoming more religiously extreme. This is associated with more murderousness, more willingness to die and more intransigence.

Their objectives – such as destroying Israel or “conquer(ing) your Rome, break(ing) your crosses, and enslav(ing) your women,” – are unacceptable for the rest of us.

Religious terrorists are more resistant to compromise. For instance, according to our calculations, over 46 years of data, hostages taken by religious terrorists were released only 31 percent of the time. When secular terrorists took hostages, they released the hostages 51 percent of the time.

We also found that these religiously motivated terrorists are more lethal fighters than old terrorists and are more willing to kill. Twice as many people die during religious terrorist hostage-takings than political terrorist hostage-takings. (The dataset does not distinguish the causes of these deaths.) They tend to kill more people, even though they deploy fewer hostage-takers per event and per hostage.

Religious terrorists are also more willing to die to maximize the harm to their targets. More than twice as many religious terrorists as political terrorists die per hostage-taking event. Moreover, almost all the terrorists who commit suicide during an attack are religious terrorists.

The newest generation of terrorists are competing with each other to raise the horror. This includes, unfortunately, lengthening publicity before mass killings, such as the followers of the Islamic State in Bangladesh, who took hostages just to release film of themselves killing 21 of them.

As part of this interest in increased horror, new terrorists are more drawn to chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons. For instance, from 2014 through 2016, IS used chemical weapons at least 52 times in Iraq and Syria (mostly chlorine and sulfur mustard agents). They also encourage wider use of uncontrolled weapons – such as knives and automobiles – rather than more lethal weapons that would draw official attention.

Increasing urbanization and growing population sizes provide readier targets. We found that newest terrorists choose more public targets, such as theaters and shopping malls, theoretically in pursuit of higher lethality and terror. Old terrorists choose more politically useful or symbolic targets, such as government buildings or military barracks.

Thanks to easier access to information, new terrorists are more informed about their opposition’s policies, tactics, techniques and procedures. They have access to better surveillance technologies, such as for mapping targets.

What’s more, terrorists use open borders, easier travel and communication technologies. For instance, the Manchester bomber traveled regularly to Libya for conferences with extremists and eventually terrorists from the Islamic State.

Finally, there is the fact that these newest terrorist use information and communication technologies to communicate with the public directly. These technologies are even used to attract targets to the site of the attack.

Our findings suggest that terrorism will get much worse before it gets better. Religious ideologies, access to weaponizable materials and ease of communications, along with the massing of targets, are all moving in the wrong direction. This makes terrorism easier and counterterrorism harder.

Bruce Newsome is Lecturer in International Relations, University of California, Berkeley. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution / No derivative).