Vehicle-Ramming Attacks

·  None of the terrorist groups that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s utilized the tactic. They preferred bombs and guns—legitimate weapons of revolutions and war.

·  Ramming attacks did not become a terrorist tactic until the 1990s when Palestinians started carrying out vehicular assaults in Israel, and did not become a major feature of the Palestinian terrorist campaign until a decade later.

·  Both al Qaeda and ISIS have urged their followers abroad to carry out car ramming attacks beginning in 2010. The initial exhortations produced no discernible response.

·  A cluster of attacks appears to follow the November 2016 issue of the online ISIS magazine Rumiyah, which urged car ramming attacks, but a spectacular attack in Nice, France, which killed 86 persons and preceded the exhortation in Rumiyah by four months, may have inspired both the author of the article and other attackers.

·  More important, the data show a contagion effect that reaches beyond political extremism. It is not an ideology, exhortation, or lack of violent alternatives that unite the perpetrators of vehicle ramming attacks—it is the tactic. One event inspires another. Attacks occur in clusters.

·  The data from 1981 to the end of September 2019 show a gradually growing volume of attacks with a sharp increase after 2013 followed by a decline in 2019. Lethality also increases very gradually, then declines, owing to the greater volume of lowlevel incidents.

·  A majority of the attacks (54%) occur in the more developed countries (minus Israel); the developing world accounts for 23% of the attacks; 22% of the attacks take place

in Israel and the West Bank.

·  However, the developing world accounts for 49% of the fatalities compared to 45% in the developed world.

·  As for individual countries, Israel and the Palestinian Territories lead with 41 attacks, followed by the United States with 39 attacks, China with 28, France with 14, and the United Kingdom with 10.

·  In countries with more than 10 attacks, those in China have been the most lethal, followed by France, United Kingdom, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and the United States. (This may be skewed by incomplete reporting of low-level incidents in China.)

·  Of the four major attacker categories, mentally unstable individuals account for 91 (49%) of the attacks and 43% of the fatalities; Palestinian attackers account for 22% of the attacks but just 6% of the fatalities; jihadists account for 10% of the attacks but 30% of the fatalities; finally, right-wing extremists account for 5% of the attacks and 4% of the fatalities.

·  Attacks by jihadists and mentally unstable attackers have seen the sharpest increase in recent years.

·  Confirmed and possible suicide attackers are the most lethal—they account for 17% of the attacks but 44% of the fatalities.

·  Incidents with the highest number of fatalities per attack occur when attackers are able to plow into public gatherings; people walking on partially pedestrianized streets that allow some vehicle traffic come next, followed by people gathered at bus stops or near train stations.

·  Most attackers (71%) use their own or a family vehicle; in 9% of the cases, the vehicle is stolen, and in 5% of the cases the vehicle is rented.

·  Attacks involving rental vehicles, however, are the most lethal, accounting for 29% of the total fatalities. This reflects that fact that the attack is the result of prior planning, not spontaneous, and that renters are able to acquire larger vehicles, which can be more lethal.

·  Given that urban areas contain hundreds of thousands to millions of vehicles and millions of pedestrians, prevention of vehicle ramming attacks is not a realistic security goal.

·  More realistic are mitigation measures that focus on improving the protection of the most attractive and lucrative targets of vehicle ramming attacks—public gatherings, street markets, and pedestrianized or partially-pedestrianized streets. This can be achieved with both temporary and permanent barriers.

·  Recommended security efforts also include increasing scrutiny of vehicle renters, especially those renting large vans or trucks.