Into the Crowd: The Evolution of Vehicular Attacks and Prevention Efforts

Islamic State-organized and -inspired attacks started in Western Europe.²⁴

In September 2014, Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani called for supporters to use vehicles as weapons, saying that if they were “not able to find an IED or a bullet,” then they should “single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies, smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car.”²⁵ Just weeks later, on October 20, 2014, one of the group’s supporters, Martin Couture-Rouleau, heeded the call in a vehicle attack that killed a member of the Canadian armed forces.²⁶ There were, however, no further terrorist vehicular ramming attacks in the West until a January 2016 attack on the French military in the town of Valence. (See Table 1 in the appendix.)

The watershed moment for the threat came on France’s national day in 2016. At 10:32 PM on July 14, a 19-ton Renaud Midlum truck, driven by 31-year-old Tunisian jihadi named Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, plowed into the crowd on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, for more than a kilometer. Eighty-six people were killed and 458 were injured in the span of four minutes and 17 seconds, before the terrorist was shot dead by law enforcement. He had carefully organized his attack, using his job as a delivery man to rent the truck in advance, and practicing reconnaissance and driving in the area 11 times in the days preceding the attack.²⁷ In the years that followed the Nice attack, there was an increase in mass-casualty vehicular attacks in the West. (See Table 1.) Just five months after the Nice attack, in December 2016, another jihadi attack using a semi-trailer truck killed 12 people at a Christmas market in Berlin. As noted by Vincent Miller and Keith Hayward, “the VRA [vehicle ramming attack] has transitioned from being a relatively rare occurrence, to become, by 2016, the most lethal form of terror attack in Western countries, claiming just over half of all terrorism-related deaths in the West that year.”²⁸

The following year saw a surge in vehicular terrorist attacks in the West (defined for the purpose of this study as North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand), with seven attacks, the most seen in any year. (See Table 1.) These included mass-casualty attacks by jihadis in London in March 2017 (five killed, including four with a vehicle),²⁹ in Stockholm