An online university of terrorism

AS many Stratfor Security Weekly readers know, for the past several years I have focused pretty heavily on the threat grassroots jihadists practicing the leaderless resistance model of terrorism pose to the West. One of the things that I’ve attempted to do in my writing is to place the threat into the proper perspective: It is the most likely type of terrorism that will occur, but grassroots operatives are often quite limited in their terrorist tradecraft, and it is a rare individual who is capable of pulling off a spectacular terrorist attack alone.

Because of this difficulty, jihadist ideologues have been urging grassroots operatives living in the West to focus on conducting simple attacks within their capabilities rather than more complex attacks. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has instructed grassroots jihadists to “build a bomb in the kitchen of your mom,” and the Islamic State urges grassroots jihadists to conduct attacks with rocks, knives, cars, their hands or poison.