Vehicular terrorist attacks are increasingly becoming the new normal in the West, a Daily Caller News Foundation review reveals.
Terrorists have used vehicles as weapons periodically since the mid-2000s, but the tactic recently gained steam with use by Palestinian jihadists against Israeli’s in late 2014. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula also encouraged the tactic in 2010 saying “pick your location and timing carefully. Go for the most crowded locations … The ideal location is a place where there are a maximum number of pedestrians and the least number of vehicles.”
The Islamic State quickly adopted the tactic after its inception in 2014 and began encouraging such attacks with success in the West.
The first high profile vehicular attack took place on Bastille Day in Nice, France, when a Tunisian born man inspired by ISIS ran down hundreds of people, killing 84. The tactic then appeared again when a Tunisian asylum seeker plowed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016, and when a Somalian-American national plunged his car into students at Ohio State University in November 2016.
London since this time has been hit twice by vehicular terrorist attacks in 2017, both in crowded tourist areas killing more than a dozen. The last major vehicular terrorist attack in the West occurred in Barcelona in mid-August when a young jihadist terror cell rented van that plowed into Las Ramblas, a well known tourist site.
Police are now investigating a man who reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” plowed into pedestrians in lower Manhattan Tuesday evening as an act of terrorism.
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