Terrorism Around the Globe

    In the article, “Who Will Become a Terrorist?,” there is no clear indicator on who will actually become a terrorist. The profile of one who does spans from seemingly normal people to extremely violent criminals. However, governments still rely on the outstanding assumption that the lack of money is usually a primary factor leading to terrorist. This, combined with a government's focus on creating checklists and marking those off, has still led to an overgeneralization. In reality, there are  no reliable indicators which indicate which individual would be more likely to join a terrorist organization. Even with highly accurate information, the pursuit of terrorists is still an inexact science because the population of those who become terrorist is incredibly small. Essentially, every terrorist is an outlier to the population, a unique profile to that individual who decided to become a terrorist. And, as Apuzzo notes, “With each new terrorist incident we realize that we are no closer to answering our original question about what leads people to turn to political violence” (Sageman, 2014, as cited in Apuzzo, 2016). 

    An example of a terrorist attack that occurred in the state of Florida occurred on December 6th, 2019. A Saudi aviation student and air force operator in training, Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, opened fire on the Pensacola Air Force base killing three and wounding eight other servicemen and women. The FBI officially classified this as an act of terrorism due to the discovery of Alshamrani’s radicalization and his connection to the terrorist organization Al Qaeda. According to the FBI Director Christopher Wray Afat the time, “We now know that Alshamrani was more than just a troubled student — he was a determined terrorist.” (Wray, 2020). AFter this attack, this raised the concerns of the foreign military training in the United States, enhancing the security vetting process for those individuals. 

    In the Global Terrorism Distribution by Country and Region bubble chart, the chart demonstrates the distribution of terrorists according to the region they are from. The Trends and Area chart demonstrates the different types of terrorist attacks and their frequency across the rest of the world. This chart shows the percentage of the number of terrorist attacks within each region, and labels them accordingly based on the percentage of the total terrorist attacks in that region. Finally, the Regional Breakdown Horizontal Bar chart displays the type of attack in those regions. Each bar is color coordinated and represents a different type of attack. It shows the percentage of that type of the attack for the region. For example, for the sub-Saharan Africa region, 29.05% were explosions. 

    Connecting this back to class, the area charts demonstrate the change over time. This goes back to our conversations in class that discuss the way in which the terrorist attacks shift into and out of different regions. In class we talked about the areas like Iraq and Afghanistan that seemed to have more terrorist attacks, and as is demonstrated by the bubble chart, the conversations were generally on target with their questions and responses. 

    Florida has experienced a number of terrorist attacks including the 2019 Orlando Pulse Nightclub attack and the previously mentioned attack on the Pensacola Air Force Base. While tragic, these attacks are demonstrative of a continued presence of terror attacks in the United States and are actually less than those of other states in the United States. According to the 2020 report of Strategic and International studies between 1934 and 2020, the United States experienced 893 attacks. While Florida has experienced attacks in line with the statistical norm, it is still as reported, less than the states of New York, with 9/11, and places like Texas, which included the Fort Hood shooting in 2009.

 

 

 

Reference: 

Apuzzo, M. (2016, March 27). Who will become a terrorist? Research yields few clues. The New 

York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/world/europe/mystery-about-who-will-become-a-terrorist-defies-clear-answers.html

Center for Strategic and International Studies. (2020, June 17). The escalating terrorism problem 

in the United States.https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-terrorism-problem-united-states

Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2020, January 13). Naval Air Station Pensacola shooting 

called act of 

terrorism.https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/naval-air-station-pensacola-shooting-called-act-of-terrorism-011320

National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). (n.d.). 

Home. University of Maryland. https://www.start.umd.edu