• Issue 112 • December 2017

DorogaRoad
Trucker Digest • Для Тех, Кто За Рулем • Established in 2007

Truck attacks - a frightening tool of terror, with a history

By www.cnn.com; www.overdriveonline.com russian

It used to be that we worried about truck bombs. Now we have to worry about trucks used as weapons.

The tactic has been adopted by jihadist terrorists in the West, including in the United States, but fortunately the lethality of these attacks had been relatively low -- until July's attack in Nice that killed at least 84. I

n December, 12 people were killed when a tractor-trailer plowed into a crowd at a Berlin Christmas market, in an act that ISIS claimed it inspired.

The Scania tractor-trailer used in the deadly terror attack in Berlin, Germany, on Dec.19 was hijacked, according to a report from Britain's The Independent, citing the owner of the trucking company whose truck was used. The truck had Polish plates, and a Poland-licensed driver was found dead in the passenger seat of the truck, according to reports.

The Independent reports the trucking company's boss says driver Lukasz Urban was shot and killed before the still-unidentified attacker drove the truck and curtainside trailer into a crowded Christmas market. Twelve have been reported dead and another 50 injured.

The truck was loaded with steel and was en route from Italy to Germany, according to the report. The attack is similar to another terror attack carried out in July in France, when a straight truck drove into a crowd on a boardwalk, killing 86 and injuring hundreds more.

A Pakistani man was arrested Monday after the attack, but German police freed him Tuesday, citing a lack of evidence for his arrest and captivation. Another suspect Anis Amri of Tunisian origin was shot dead while Police tried to apprehend him in Milan, Italy.

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DorogaRoad Magazine. Issue 112 • December 2017 cover.

The tactic has been a long time coming.

Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch encouraged its recruits in the West in its 2010 webzine, Inspire, to use trucks as a weapon. An article headlined "The Ultimate Mowing Machine" called for deploying a pickup truck as a "mowing machine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah."

In September 2014, an ISIS spokesman similarly encouraged such attacks, saying of ISIS' enemies, "run him over with your car."

A month later, on October 20, 2014 Canadian Martin Rouleau Couture, who had traveled to Turkey in what appears to have been an unsuccessful attempt to join ISIS in neighboring Syria, ran over two soldiers in Quebec, killing one and injuring another.

Also in 2014, there were two such car attacks in France in the cities of Nantes and Dijon, though the motives of the attackers, one of whom shouted "Allah Akbar!" after one of the attacks, are murky. In both cases the assailants had long histories of mental illness, according to the BBC.

The tactic has also been used in the United States. In 2006, Mohammed Taheri-azar, an American-Iranian, drove an SUV into an area crowded with students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He later said that that the United States government had been "killing his people across the sea" and he was taking revenge and he was "thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah." Luckily the attack killed no one but it did injure nine.

A year later, a pair of British terrorists opposed to the Iraq war rammed their Jeep into the arrivals area of Glasgow Airport, but killed no one.

The technique of using vehicles as weapons has been frequently employed by Palestinian terrorists targeting Israeli citizens.

We don't know enough yet to say what prompted the Nice attack. But what the attack shows is that we are now in an era when lone terrorists are becoming increasingly lethal.

Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with a truck bomb in 1995, but he was aided in every respect of the attack by co-conspirator Terry Nichols who is now serving a life term. There is no indication so far that the Nice attacker operated as part of a terrorist group.

This will have important implications for how we conceive of the danger of lone terrorists in the West going forward. Law enforcement authorities in the States and other Western countries will have to consider the vulnerabilities to vehicular attacks of large, packed crowds of the kind that we saw jamming the waterfront in Nice celebrating their national holiday.

www.cnn.com; www.overdriveonline.com