Author(s)

PRABAL PRATAP SINGH, DEEPU PHILIP

Abstract

Terrorism perpetrated by both internal and external actors destabilizes the economy, hampers social harmony, and jeopardizes any nation’s internal security. While various forms of terror attacks occur globally, most terrorist organizations focus on high impact attacks (HIA) that maximize human fatalities and associated damages to precipitate fear within the community. Realistic modeling of terrorism is essential to identify critical trends and patterns to devise appropriate countermeasures. global terrorism database (GTD) is the most comprehensive terrorism-related database available for research purposes. Comparing terrorist attacks require specific benchmarks. A specific attribute from the GTD (nkill) and a derived composite parameter from GTD (global terrorism index (GTI)) are compared to establish their efficacy in successfully segregating HIAs from other terrorist attacks. This research focuses on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and Europe. A sequential filtering heuristic based on local point outlier analysis utilizes both measures to extract HIAs of the MENA region. The proposed heuristic using nkill reports 1,055 unique HIAs in comparison with GTI and 522 vice versa. A simple geospatial analysis of these HIAs indicates the most fertile regions for terror organizations. Terrorism proliferation plots are developed to visually identify the migration timelines of major terrorist organizations that are capable of HIAs from the MENA region to Europe. The study concludes that virulent terrorist groups of the MENA region like Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Muslim Extremists (ME), etc. migrated to Europe successfully.

Keywords

high impact attack, global terrorism database (GTD), global terrorism index (GTI), outlier analysis, sequential filtering heuristic, MENA region, terrorist migration, geospatial analysis