How the #CharlieHebdo attacks represent the Mumbai model of terrorism. Via Slate: -Erika This week’s assault on Paris does not fit into the mold of what we typically think of as a terrorist attack. The attackers employed guns, rather than bombs, fled the scene of the initial attack rather than martyring themselves, and displayed some level of tactical acumen without it being clear that they were trained professionals. It’s not that commando-style raids have never happened. They just receive less attention than suicide bombings because they more often take place in war zones, where there’s less media coverage than in major international cities. A U.N. report released last July, in fact, found that the Taliban had shifted their tactics from improvised explosive devices to gun battles in heavily populated areas. This is one major reason for the recent increase in civilian casualties in Afghanistan. And this week hundreds are believed to have been killed in a series of shooting raids by Boko Haram on a town in northern Nigeria. “I would place [the Paris attack] into the ‘urban warfare’ model of attacks, said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and co-author of a 2012 report commissioned by the U.S. Congress on the use of small arms by terrorists. First, it’s an attack that’s designed to make use of a broader urban area as a battleground. Second, the attackers intend to survive long enough to extend this out over a couple of days, thus to prolong the terror and keep a place feeling skittish. Urban warfare attacks also often involve taking hostages in one place or another. The first example of such an attack on a city at peace was Mumbai in 2008, when about two dozen militants from the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba attacked multiple locations in the Indian city, firing on civilians, setting off explosives, and taking hostages. The attacks were perceived as being hugely successful, and al-Qaida has been talking about how to emulate this for some time, said Raffaello Pantucci, a terrorism analyst at the Royal United Services Institute in London. In 2010, intelligence services of the United States, Britain, France, and Germany claimed to have disrupted a plan to carry out Mumbai-style attacks on several European cities.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 20:33:02 +0000
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