Authorities in Jordan were quick to pronounce the terrorist who fired into a crowd of tourists at the Roman amphitheater in Amman as a lone gunman, someone “without connection to terrorist organizations neither inside nor outside” the country. This announcement seemed intended to comfort and reassure. However, the phenomenon of the solitary terrorist is a seemingly growing, disturbing new trend. The problem seems to have grown in the post-9/11 international environment and in al-Qaeda’s transformation from a centrally-organized, cohesive terrorist group to an international political/religious movement.
According to eyewitness reports, the gunman, Nabil al-Jaoura, yelled “Alluhu Akbar” (God is Great) repeatedly before firing into a group of western tourists. Al-Jaoura later told his interrogators that the attack was an act of vengeance for the deaths of his two brothers in Lebanon in 1982. Al-Jaoura holds Jordanian nationality, but his two brothers were members of Palestinian organizations during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
His action synchs up well with key messages al-Qaeda has been promulgating for years. First, all non-Muslim westerners are part of the same “Zionist-Crusader alliance.” According to this logic, the attack on tourists from the United Kingdom , New Zealand , and the Netherlands is a legitimate act of revenge for deaths blamed on Israel . Second, members of this alliance should be attacked wherever and whenever they can be accessed. If a believer in the global Islamist Jihad cannot travel to Europe or the United States , he should attack citizens of those countries that are available to him in his homeland. Third, it is never too late to exact revenge for the deaths of Muslims. Al-Jaoura was reportedly acting in response to an event that occurred nearly 25 years ago. Bin Laden claims his 9/11 operation was also in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that occurred nearly 20 years prior. The fourth message that al-Qaeda leader and other international Islamic Jihadist figures have been pushing out to the faithful is that the Jihad is up to them. These leaders have joined a global effort to provoke individuals or small groups to activate themselves and attack whatever targets may be within their reach. Underlying this effort is the Jihadist presence on the Internet, networks of radical imams, and the influence of fundamentalist, anti-western points of view in political dialogue in the Islamic world.
Al-Jaoura and others like him may not have had any direct connection to terrorist organizations, but evidence shows that they may be animated to violence by these organizations and the international Jihadist ideology they work so hard to spread. Jordan is not the only country to face this phenomenon. Saudi Arabia recently saw an incident with a solitary, self-activated terrorist in Jeddah (Terror Web Watch), and France has also witnessed isolated murders and attacks that are motivated by Jihadist ideology but lack connection to a terrorist organization.
The US has experienced several incidents of possible Jihadist-inspired, entrepreneurial terrorism: an unconfirmed, possible attempted suicide bombing of an athletic stadium at Oklahoma University; the 2003 slaying of Israeli Arial Sellouk by Saudi citizen Mohammed Ali Alayed in Houston, Texas; an attempted hit-and-run vehicular attack on University of North Carolina students by an Iranian man ; and the June 16, 2006 murder of Jewish-American Paul Schrum in a movie theater in Owings Mills, Maryland by Mujtaba Rabbani Jabbar.
The US, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan have all responded to these events in a similar fashion: by either playing down their importance because of the lack of direct links to established terrorist entities or attributing them to mental illness in the attacker. However, the alleged presence of mental illness or the lack of terrorist ties in any of these cases does not ameliorate a growing threat.
Failing to recognize the power of the international Jihadist movement to inspire individuals to violence in its name complicates the ability to recognize and counter this recent trend in global terrorism. As governments achieve successes in eradicating al-Qaeda-associated terrorist organizations, the movement will increasingly rely on its effort to animate self-starters to violence with propaganda and ideology alone. Such individuals and small groups will be harder to interdict because of this very lack of connections to nefarious people and organizations. This dynamic will develop inertia after a few successful attacks of these types, inspiring copycats. The trend is in its beginning stages, but now is the time to develop strategies to counteract its effects, rather than dismissing these events as isolated incidents and refusing to refer to their executors as terrorists.
