Why the Existence of “Lone Wolves” in Islamic Terrorism is an Urban Myth

On 15 April 2013, brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev detonated two home-made bombs near the finish line of the Boston marathon in the United States of America, killing three people and injuring hundreds others. During the course of the ensuing investigation, officials concluded that the siblings  had no ties to any terrorist organisations and were isolated actors—lone wolves. This term, that is used frequently to describe perpetrators of crimes that act in support of an idea or a group without any external help, is now recognised as a common manifestation of Islamic extremism. Over the past few years, “lone wolf terrorism” has been used to describe several acts of terror such as the killing of 25-year-old British soldier Lee Rigby by Islam converts Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebolawe, as well as the acts of Mohammed Merah, the shooter who killed seven people in Toulouse, France in 2012. In this excerpt from his new book, The New Threat, Jason Burke, current south Asian correspondent for The Guardian writes about how isolated “self-radicalisation” is not feasible in the age of the internet.  Burke argues that  usage of the term “lone wolf” is forming a roadblock on the path to a comprehensive understanding of the evolving nature of Islamic terrorism.

In the mid-1970s, as Europe and the Middle East were hit by a wave of violent extremism, one security official confidently told journalist Colin Smith that "Arabs don’t blow themselves up, only the Japanese do that." The first suicide bombings occurred in the Middle East in the early 1980s, primarily in Lebanon, and then became more numerous in the 1990s with a high- profile campaign in Israel which was very influential on extremists around the world. However, suicide bombings were still rare in overall terms. The hugely violent campaigns by extremists returning from Afghanistan to countries such as Egypt and Algeria in the early 1990s did not feature suicide tactics, and attackers in the West at the time, such as the men who first struck the World Trade Center in 1993 or shot up the CIA headquarters the same year, made careful plans to escape to sanctuaries overseas. Since then, however, martyrdom has become an integral part of Islamic extremist terrorism, with the average annual number of suicide attacks rising from fewer than twenty in the last half of the nineties, to 156 between 2000 and 2005, and nearly four hundred over the last decade. The tactic saw its first recorded use in Afghanistan in 2003, in Somalia in 2009, and in Nigeria in 2011. Its proliferation has been accompanied by the spread of the cult of martyrdom. Though clearly linked, the one does not necessarily lead to the other, and of course there have always been martyrs of various types in Islam, as in every major faith, or indeed secular tradition. But the idea that deliberately seeking to die for the faith, let alone killing other unarmed individuals while doing so, appears more widespread now than at any time in living memory. If the Tsarnaevs did not carry out a suicide attack, they could not have expected any end other than either ‘death by cop’, or almost certain execution if taken alive. The killers of Lee Rigby had tapes about martyrdom in their car and appear to have been set also on being killed by the policemen who arrived at the scene of the murder. Merah barely considered giving himself up when surrounded in his apartment. ‘Right from the moment I started with the attacks, I knew how it was going to finish: either I’d be gunned down in the street, or I’d be killed in my home, or someone else’s . . . Given a choice between fighting or surrendering, the mujahideen fight to the death, you see,’ he told a negotiator. Even Roshanara Choudhry, who stabbed the MP in 2010, told police after her arrest that she wanted to die a martyr, though quite how she expected to achieve this was not immediately obvious. Most of the abortive spectacular mass-casualty terrorist operations planned since 2001 have involved the death of the attackers.

By 2014, from Toulouse to Boston, as from Kabul to Raqqa, it was taken as a given among militants that, as Merah put it, being killed is a duty and that the murder of unarmed civilians is legitimate. Clearly both of these ideas are not just controversial, but are emphatically rejected by the vast majority of Muslims and Islamic scholars. However, the argument that civilians in democracies are as culpable as soldiers because they have voted for governments which are themselves responsible for violence to Muslims, or at least accept a democratic system which allows those governments to remain in power, had become a standard part of the extremist ideological lexicon. The phrase ‘we love death more than you love life’, often wrongly attributed to bin Laden, was quoted so often by extremists that it became a cliché. Mohammad Sidique Khan said it in his ‘martyrdom’ video recorded somewhere in Pakistan before the 7/7attacks in London in 2005. Even Dzhokhar Tsnarnaev, the laid-back, pot-smoking college kid, scrawled it on the wall of the boat in which he lay, wounded, as the police closed in, along with his version of the argument justifying the killing of civilians, even though, he said, this was something he did not ‘like’ doing.

Another striking theme is the resemblance of these attacks to the horrific executions that feature in the videos of the Islamic State. The murder of Rigby with knives, the attempt at decapitation, the speech afterwards, was clearly an execution of this sort. Merah, who shot his defenceless victims in the head at point-blank range, actually described his killings as ‘executions’ to police. One reason for this is the limited means of the attackers: the weapons they had available required a more personal, intimate form of killing. Another was, of course, the influence of the videos themselves. The pioneers of the genre were the Chechen militants in the late 1990s, but the first such production to come to wider attention was the execution of US journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi in 2002, posted on the Internet by Pakistani militants led by Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Then came the terrible productions of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq between 2004 and 2006. Many more have since emerged from Syria and other theatres of extremist violence. Adebolajo, Adebowale, Merah and Tamerlan Tsarnaev had all watched violent videos including executions. Merah had even faced a police complaint from a relative after effectively abducting an adolescent and forcing him to watch horrific films. Like a suicide bombing, an execution too communicates a message in the choreography of its violence. Twenty years ago such events were extremely rare. Now they are part of the mainstream of violent militant activism.

A further common element between the attacks described in the last two chapters is their choice of target. These were selected because they were vulnerable, but also because each had some symbolic significance. Merah pointed out to negotiators, correctly, that if he had shot random people in the street he would simply have been labelled a madman, so it was necessary to kill soldiers and Jews. Rigby was a soldier, albeit off-duty. The Tsarnaevs could have bombed a mall, or a busy street, or any number of weekend sporting events. Instead they chose a race held in the centre of a historic American city as part of Patriots’ Day celebrations which commemorate the first battles of the American Revolutionary War. That all of these attackers made such choices without receiving direct instructions from any veteran extremist or authority – Merah’s shootings were his own suggestion, not that of the men he spent a few days with in Pakistan – demonstrates that all had integrated a common set of principles. This was surely a vindication of the vision elaborated by thinkers such as Abu Musab al-Suri, the man who had formulated the idea of a ‘leaderless jihad’ a decade before. Al-Suri had envisaged a movement without organisation but held together instead by a commonly understood set of guidelines. This is exactly what evolved.

As al-Suri had foreseen, pretty much anyone with a computer, or, latterly, a phone, and an Internet data connection could, with a little effort, learn what targets were preferable for Islamic militants to attack. These were explicitly laid out in texts such as his own work and publi- cations like Inspire, but they were implicit in much else too. There were the simple historical pseudo-documentaries reframing the history of early Islam as a war of resistance against a violent and aggressive West and the much-viewed apocalyptic material that Tamerlan Tsnarnaev apparently enjoyed; the audio versions of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the jihadi raps; the huge variety of texts and clips expounding an immense range of conspiracy theories; the online lectures by a host of extremist clerics. All of this had an impact, clearly identifying those responsible for the many ills afflicting the umma.

For what is especially striking about the Rigby killers, Merah and the Tsarnaevs is the similarity of their public statements. The angry rant of Adebolajo over the body of the dying soldier, the arguments of Merah as he fenced intellectually with a Muslim police officer in his final hours, and the sentences Dzhokhar Tsarnaev scrawled on the internal wall of the dry-docked boat in which he had taken shelter, all use identical phrases, despite their very different lives and locations. Extremists I have interviewed over the last two decades, in safe houses in Algeria and compounds in Pakistan’s Khyber pass, in madrassas in Bangladeshi slums and kebab shops in east London, in the capital of the Maldives and in Gaza City during the war of 2014, all use this same vocabulary. Whether in Arabic, Urdu, Dhivehi, Bangla, English or Pashto, they voice the same set of imprecations, complaints, justifications and invocations which together constitute the international lingua franca of Islamic extremism. If a shared language is the defining characteristic of a community, then there can be no doubt that this particular global community exists, extending far beyond the particular circumstances of these five killers. These men were formed, conditioned and prepared for their ultimate acts over years, if not decades, by an entire culture of extremist activism. The words that they spoke after killing were not their own, but words that they had heard from others many, many times.

The killers of Rigby learned some of this language from the other activists they had spent so much time with over the years before they acted, even if their fellow campaigners often did not actually endorse or encourage violence. They had learned it too from immigrant gangs that mixed jihadism with gangsta criminality. Merah had certainly learned it from fellow prisoners in Toulouse jail, but also in a home where prejudice was as much a part of the environment as the dirty cutlery in the sink. Tamerlan Tsarnaev learned the language, or perhaps simply perfected his mastery of it, from the Union of the Just in Dagestan, a group which was not violent but committed nonetheless to a world view many would see as extremist. For Dzhokhar, there was Tamerlan as a tutor. For both brothers, there was a mother who had begun to speak a language of anger, alienation and hurt which they heard and never questioned and reinforced in their turn. For all of these men, there were the anonymous, distant, virtual authors, tweeters, posters, forum managers, password dispensers, bloggers and forwarders encountered through social media. Together these multiple contacts, whether virtual or real, meant the five eventual killers were, day after day, month after month, year after year, exposed to a culture of extremism. Perhaps most importantly of all, this environment in which they lived made them feel part of a shared endeavour involving very large numbers of people.

Yet despite this, officials and analysts have continued to talk of such men as ‘lone wolves’. One explanation for this lies in a mistaken view of how people become violent extremists. ‘Radicalisation’ is seen as a specific event or, even more misguidedly, as a conscious act. By this same logic, people ‘are radicalised’, a term which implies they are voluntary but passive objects of a designed process, or that they are involuntarily ‘brainwashed’ despite themselves, or even that they somehow ‘self-radicalise’ in total isolation. This is reassuring as it implies that the responsibility for an individual’s violent extremism lies solely with the individual themselves or with some other individual or group, all of which could theoretically be eliminated. But the truth is that terrorism is not something you do by yourself. It is, like any activism, highly social. Only its consequences are exceptional. It makes as much sense to talk about the ‘radicalisation’ of a sixteen-year-old who becomes involved in Islamic militancy, as it does of a sixteen-year-old who becomes involved in gangs, or in taking psycho- tropic drugs, or even in extreme sports, particular video games or a certain type of music and dress. People become interested in ideas, ideologies and activities, even abhorrent and immoral ones, because other people are interested in them. No one describes a young adult who suddenly takes up an activity such as rock-climbing or fly-fishing or campaigning against global warming as ‘self-activising’, even if that enthusiasm has been nurtured and developed largely through their own initiative, social media and exploitation of resources on the Internet. The psychological and social barriers to involvement in violence are certainly higher than in other less nefarious activities, but the mechanics of the process that draws people into them are the same. If lone wolves do exist, they are extremely rare. Even those individuals who do fulfil the commonly understood definition of the term, and operate entirely without contact or support from anyone else, still feel themselves to be part of a broader community. Nor, as should by now be clear, is this sense of belonging unfounded. These attackers are indeed, as they believe, part of something bigger.

An extract from Jason Burke’s The New Threat From Islamic Militancy, published by Penguin Random house India.