Holy Terror and Mass Killings? Reexamining the Motivations and Methods of Mass Casualty Terrorists

Is Islamist Terrorism More Dangerous?: An Empirical Study of Group Ideology, Organization, and Goal Structure

“…This is consistent with empirical studies by Asal and Blum and Quillen that show a non-random clustering of high-casualty attacks perpetrated by al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-related terrorist groups, specifically the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 1999 attack on a Moscow apartment building, 21 and the 2001 attacks in the United States on September 11th. 22 These bits of evidence underline the pitfalls of adopting a monolithic view of Islamist terrorist groups and support the contention that there is a complex relationship between basic group ideological typology and lethality.…”

Defining Weapons of Mass Destruction

“…144 Other terrorism experts accepted Jenkins's 100 deaths threshold for identifying incidents of "mass casualty terrorism." 145 However, because few terrorism attacks caused as many as 50 deaths, at least one terrorism analyst argued that as few as 25 deaths qualified a terrorist attack as a mass casualty incident. 146 These terrorism analyses, however, drew on pre-9/11 figures, and the criteria they developed may be inappropriate given the growing deadliness of conventional terrorism.…”

Nonstate Actors, Terrorism, and Weapons of Mass Destruction

“…I am not aware of WMD use by any of the 300 politically significant minorities that have been tracked since the 1980s by the Minorities at Risk (MAR) project (data are available at http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/mar). Asal and Blum (2004) identify thirty-four Mass Casualty Terror (MCT) events during the last thirty years; eight of them perpetrated by ethnonationalist Chechens and Tamils. None of these MCT attacks used nuclear, biological, or chemical agentsFbut we can speculate that, if WMD had been available to these groups, they probably would have used them.…”