The blasts in Spain that killed nearly 200 people could illustrate a trend towards “spectacular” attacks, with terrorist groups adopting tactics proven to cause mass casualties, British experts said on Friday.
“If someone has done a September 11, then doing the odd litter-bin bomb isn’t going to impress anyone,” said defence and terrorism analyst Francis Tusa, referring to the attacks in the United States in 2001 by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.
“If someone has raised the bar then other groups do have to pay attention to that” and possibly imitate it, said Tusa.
Coordinated blasts on rush-hour commuter trains in Madrid killed 198 people on Thursday, in the worst attack in Europe since the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of a transatlantic jet in Britain that killed 270.
“If what other people have done has proven to achieve press coverage, horror, fear, terror, for a terrorist that’s proof that the formula works,” said Tusa, editor of the London-based Defence Analysis specialist newsletter.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper on Friday agreed that the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington had set “a new benchmark for terrorists to attract public attention”.
The paper quoted Jonathan Eyal, director of the Royal United Services Institute in London, as saying that to make an impact terrorists now “have to go into three figures or, ideally, four figures” in terms of victims.
“It looks as if terrorists are becoming more ambitious in their aims,” Tim Dunne, a military analyst, told the London-based Independent daily.
“They want to do more damage, inflict more harm and cause more shock — to grab the attention of their public and force governments to react.”
According to The Times daily, Europe is now facing “international understanding among extremists, who copy each others’ methods, supply each other with arms and coordinate attacks on their common enemies”.
Tusa said a type of globalised terrorism has existed for decades, noting that prominent groups trained together and swapped information in the 1970s.
“Looking at how other operations went, and thinking ‘Is there something in that we could learn from?’, I would suggest to a certain extent this has been something that’s been going on for years,” he said.
“Now I think we are seeing an accentuation of the trend.”
Spanish officials immediately blamed Basque separatist group ETA after the Madrid attacks, but adopted a more cautious approach later on Thursday, saying they were not ruling out that it may be the work of extremists linked to al-Qaeda.
Tusa said: “Some people say this wasn’t ETA’s hallmark, but terrorist groups change their modus operandi.
“The terrorist organisations that don’t learn and don’t adapt get broken up, get defeated. Terrorist organisations which have been around 20-plus years are the ones that adapt. We forget that at our peril.”
If it was proved ETA was responsible, the group would face a massive backlash, according to Tusa.
“This will be a gross strategic and tactical misjudgement, which is feeding a public backlash and will destroy a Basque terrorist organisation,” he said.
“It’s happened before. People have misjudged catastrophically the effect of an operation like this.” — Sapa-AFP
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