Why the Boston Bombers Succeeded
April 23, 2013
By Scott Stewart
Vice President of Analysis, Stratfor
When seeking to place an attack like the April 15 Boston Marathon
bombing into context, it is helpful to classify the actors responsible,
if possible. Such a classification can help us understand how an attack
fits into the analytical narrative of what is happening and what is
likely to come. These classifications will consider factors such as
ideology, state sponsorship and perhaps most important, the kind of
operative involved.
In a case where we are dealing with an apparent jihadist operative,
before we can classify him or her we must first have a clear taxonomy of
the jihadist movement. At Stratfor, we generally consider the jihadist
movement to be divided into three basic elements:
the al Qaeda core organization,
the regional jihadist franchises, such as al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula, and grassroots operatives who are radicalized, inspired and
perhaps equipped by the other two tiers but who are not members of
either.
Within the three-tier jihadist movement there exist two distinct
types of operatives. One of these is the professional terrorist
operative, a person who is a member of the al Qaeda core or of one of
the regional franchises. These individuals swear loyalty to the leader
and then follow orders from the organization's hierarchy. Second, there
are amateur operatives who never join a group and whose actions are not
guided by the specific orders of a hierarchical group. They follow a
bottom-up or grassroots organizational model rather than a hierarchical
or top-down approach.
There is a great deal of variety among professional terrorists,
especially if we break them down according to the functions they perform
within an organization, roles including that of planners, finance and
logistics specialists, couriers, surveillance operatives, bombmakers, et
cetera. There is also a great deal of variety within the ranks of
grassroots operatives,
although it is broken down more by their interaction with formal groups
rather than their function. At one end of the grassroots spectrum are
the lone wolf operatives, or phantom cells. These are individuals or
small groups that become radicalized by jihadist ideology but that do
not have any contact with the organization. In theory, the lone
wolf/phantom cell model is very secure from an operational security
standpoint, but as we've discussed, it takes a
very disciplined and driven individual to be a true lone wolf or phantom cell leader, and consequently, we see very few of them.
At the other end of the grassroots spectrum are individuals who have
had close interaction with a jihadist group but who never actually
joined the organization. Many of them have even attended militant
training camps, but they didn't become part of the hierarchical group to
the point of swearing an oath of allegiance to the group's leaders and
taking orders from the organization. They are not funded and directed by
the group.
Indeed, al Qaeda trained tens of thousands of men in its training
camps in Afghanistan, Sudan and Pakistan but very few of the men they
trained actually ended up joining al Qaeda. Most of the men the group
instructed received basic military training in things like using small
arms, hand-to-hand combat and basic fire and maneuver. Only the very
best from those basic combat training courses were selected to receive
advanced training in
terrorist tradecraft techniques,
such as bombmaking, surveillance, clandestine communications and
document forgery. But even of the students who received advanced
training in terrorist tradecraft, only a few were ever invited to join
the al Qaeda core, which remained a relatively small vanguard
organization.
Many of the men who received basic training traveled to fight jihad
in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya or returned home to join insurgent
or militant groups. Others would eventually end up joining al Qaeda
franchise groups in places like Yemen, Iraq, Libya and Algeria. Still
others received some basic training but then returned home and never
really put their new skills into practice.
Most grassroots jihadists fall along a continuum that stretches
between the lone wolf and someone who received advanced terrorist
training but never joined al Qaeda or another formal militant group.
Whether the two men suspected of carrying out the April 15 Boston
Marathon attack knowingly followed al Qaeda's blueprint for simple
attacks by grassroots actors, their actions were fairly consistent with
what we have come to expect from such operatives. Certainly based upon
what we have seen of this case so far, the Tsarnaev brothers did not
appear to possess sophisticated terrorist tradecraft.
For example, regarding the bombs employed in the attack and during
the police chase, everything we have seen still points to very simple
devices, such as pipe bombs and pressure cooker devices. From a
bombmaking tradecraft standpoint, we have yet to see anything that could
not be fabricated by reading Inspire magazine, spending a little bit of
time on YouTube and conducting some experimentation. As a comparison,
consider the far larger and more complex improvised explosive device
Anders Behring Breivik, the Oslo bomber, constructed.
We know from Breivik's detailed journal that he was a self-taught
bombmaker using directions he obtained on the Internet. He was also a
lone wolf. And yet he was able to construct a very large improvised
explosive device.
Also, although the Tsarnaev brothers did not hold up a
convenience store as initially reported, they did conduct an
express kidnapping
that caused them to have extended contact with their victim while they
visited automatic teller machines. They told the victim that they were
the bombers and then allowed the victim to live. Such behavior is hardly
typical of professional terrorist operatives.
Grassroots Theory
As it has become more difficult for professional terrorists to travel
to the United States and the West in general, it has become more
difficult for jihadist organizations to conduct attacks in these places.
Indeed, this difficulty prompted groups like al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula to attempt to attack the United States by dispatching an
operative with an underwear bomb and to use printer cartridge bombs to
attack cargo aircraft. In response to this difficulty, al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula began to adopt the grassroots into their operational
doctrine. They first began promoting this approach in 2009 in their
Arabic-language magazine Sada al-Malahim. The al Qaeda core organization embraced this approach in
May 2010 in an English-language video featuring Adam Gadahn.
In July 2010, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula launched an English-language magazine called
Inspire dedicated to radicalizing and equipping grassroots jihadists. Despite the losses that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has experienced on the battlefield, it has continued to devote
a great deal of its limited resources
toward propagating this concept. It has continued to publish Inspire
even after the magazine's founder and editor, Samir Khan, was
killed in an American missile strike in Yemen.
The grassroots strategy was perhaps most clearly articulated in the
third edition of Inspire magazine, which was published in November 2010
following the failed October 29, 2010,
printer bomb operation. In a letter from the editor in which Khan explained what he referred to as "Operation Hemorrhage," he wrote:
"However, to bring down America we do not need to strike
big. In such an environment of security phobia that is sweeping America,
it is more feasible to stage smaller attacks that involve fewer players
and less time to launch and thus we may circumvent the security
barriers America has worked so hard to erect. This strategy of attacking
the enemy with smaller, but more frequent operations is what some may
refer to the strategy of a thousand cuts. The aim is to bleed the enemy
to death."
In Adam Gadahn's May 2010 message entitled "A Call to Arms," Gadahn
counsels lone wolf jihadists to follow a three-pronged target selection
process. They should choose a target with which they are well
acquainted, a target that is feasible to hit and a target that, when
struck, will have a major impact. The Tsarnaev brothers did all three in
Boston.
Implications
Yet despite this clearly articulated theory, it has proved very
difficult for jihadist ideologues to convince grassroots operatives to
conduct simple attacks using readily available items like in the "build a
bomb in the kitchen of your mom" approach, which they have advocated
for so long.
This is because most grassroots jihadists have sought to conduct
huge, spectacular attacks -- attacks that are outside of their
capabilities. This has meant that they have had to search for help to
conduct their plans. And that search for help has resulted in their
arrest, just as Adam Gadahn warned they would be in his May 2010
message.
There were many plots disrupted in 2012 in which grassroots operatives tried to act beyond their capabilities. These include:
- On Nov. 29, 2012, two brothers from Florida, Raees Alam Qazi and
Sheheryar Alam Qazi, were arrested and charged with plotting attacks in
New York.
- On Oct. 17, 2012, Bangladeshi national Quazi Nafis was arrested as part of an FBI sting operation after he attempted to detonate a vehicle bomb outside New York's Federal Reserve Bank.
- On Sept. 15, 2012, Adel Daoud was arrested
after he parked a Jeep Cherokee outside a Chicago bar and attempted to
detonate the bomb he thought it contained. This was also an FBI sting
operation.
But the carnage and
terrorist theater caused by the Boston attack
have shown how following the simple attack model can be highly
effective. This will certainly be pointed out in future editions of
Inspire magazine, and grassroots operatives will be urged to follow the
model established by the Tsarnaev brothers. Unlike operatives like
Faisal Shahzad who attempted to go big themselves and failed, the
brothers followed the blueprint for a simple attack and the model
worked.
It is quite possible that the success of the Boston bombing will help
jihadist ideologues finally convince grassroots operatives to get past
their grandiose plans and begin to follow the simple attack model in
earnest. If this happens, it will obviously have a big impact on law
enforcement and intelligence officials who have developed very effective
programs of identifying grassroots operatives and drawing them into
sting operations. They will now have to adjust their operations.
While these grassroots actors do not have the capability of
professional terrorist operatives and do not pose as severe a threat,
they pose a much broader, amorphous threat. Law enforcement and
intelligence agencies generally do not deal well
with ambiguity.
There are simply too many
soft targets to protect
and some of these simple attacks will inevitably succeed. This means
that this low-level broad threat will persist and perhaps even intensify
in the immediate future.
As we've previously discussed, the best defense against the grassroots threat are
grassroots defenders. These include the police and alert citizens who report suspicious activity -- like
people testing bomb designs -- a frequent occurrence before actual bomb attacks.
The slogan "If you see something, say something," has been mocked as
overly simplistic, but it is nonetheless a necessity in an environment
where the broad, ambiguous threat of grassroots terrorism far outstrips
the ability of the authorities to see everything. Taking a
proactive approach to personal and collective security also beats the alternative of living in terror and apprehensively waiting for the next simple attack.
It is also very important for people to maintain the
proper perspective on terrorism.
Like car crashes and cancer and natural disasters, terrorism is part of
the human condition. People should take prudent, measured actions to
prepare for such contingencies and avoid becoming victims (
vicarious or otherwise). It
is the resilience of the population and its perseverance that will
ultimately determine how much a terrorist attack is allowed to
terrorize. By separating terror from terrorism, citizens can deny the
practitioners of terror the ability to magnify their reach and power.
Why the Boston Bombers Succeeded is republished with permission of Stratfor.