The Audacity of ‘Lone Wolf’ Terrorism
By
Don Okereke

Introduction
The recent gruesome daylight murder of a 25-year-old off-duty British Army Drummer- Lee Rigby, in Woolwich, Southeast London five weeks after the Boston Marathon bombings in the United States of America, has once again brought to the fore, the growing threat of ‘Lone Wolf’ Terrorism, a new terror impetus towards unsophisticated and uncoordinated attacks that are virtually impossible to thwart. A cardinal analogy between the London and the Boston incidents is the prospect that the suspected masterminds became radicalized and may have inculcated their proficiency from extremist publications on the Internet. The potency of terrorism generally is that it alters the psyche of a society and instills fear in the minds of people.

The Shifting Face of Terrorism
Some analysts have described the London attack as a form of "open-source jihad". Recent incidents lend credence to the assertion that 'lone wolf' attacks seems to be the new corridor to terror. Lone Wolf terrorism narrows the ease with which terrorists slip between the seams of a country’s security, military/defence establishment.

To refresh our minds, terrorism refers to ‘premeditated acts that are committed with the intent to seriously intimidate a population, or unduly coerce a Government or international organization to perform or refrain from performing any act, or seriously destabilizing or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country or an organization’ (Council of the European Union, 2002).

According to Dr. Boaz Ganor, a counterterrorism expert at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, terrorist attacks can be divided into two types: “personal initiative” attacks, and “organized terrorism”.

A lone wolf is an individual or small group of individuals who use regular terrorist tactics – including violence and the targeting of civilians -- towards the realization of overtly political or ideological goals, but who act devoid of membership or cooperation with an official or unofficial terrorist organization, cell or group. Lone wolf terrorists are tricky to spot and cannot be easily sniffed out by Security agencies. Lone-wolf terrorists may identify or empathize with extremist movements, but they do not form part of these movements. The boundaries of lone-wolf terrorism are often foggy juxtaposed with crimes carried out strictly for personal reasons (cf. Hewitt, 2005).

Sequel to the waning of Al Qaeda's leadership cum network by more than a decade of protracted war with the U.S. and its allies, analysts believe that ‘lone wolf’ terrorism will pose an enormous threat to World Peace. The audacious reassertion of irredentist, racial and religious identities is sequel to the fact that the capability to propagate violence is increasingly trickling down from State actors to Non-state actors and even to ‘Lone wolves’ or freelancers. Because of this escalating flux in the application of raw power, smaller groups and in many cases freelancers are upping the ante in the deployment of terror and acts of subversion.

There are significant and profitable insights to be gleaned from understanding the phenomenon and modus operandi ‘Lone Wolf’ terrorism.

Please if you care, kindly read the rest of the article here: [url]http://www.scribd.com/doc/145818951/The-Audacity-of-%E2%80%98Lone-Wolf%E2%80%99-Terrorism[/url]

Don Okereke
(Security Analyst & Consultant)
Abuja, Nigeria
Email: donnuait@yahoo.com
Phone: +2347080008285
Twitter: @ DonOkereke