Terrorist Strategies

Terrorists often seek to demoralize and paralyze their enemy with fear, using their acts as a form of blackmail to apply pressure on governments to achieve goals the terrorists could not achieve by other means.

Where terrorism occurs in the context of open warfare or insurgency, its perpetrators may shelter behind a section of the local population. Examples include the Intifada on Israeli-occupied territory, and the occupation of Iraq. This population, which is usually ethnically distinct from the counter-terrorist forces, is either sympathetic to their cause, indifferent, or acts under duress.

Terrorist groups may arrange for secondary devices to detonate at a slightly later time in order to kill emergency-response personnel attempting to attend to the dead and wounded. Repeated or suspected use of secondary devices can also delay emergency response out of concern that such devices may exist. Examples include a (failed) cyanide-gas device that was meant to explode shortly after the February 26, 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and a second car bomb that detonated 20 minutes after the December 1, 2001 Ben Yehuda bombing by Hamas in Jerusalem.

In the absence of state funding, terrorists may rely on organized crime to fund their activities. This can include kidnapping, drug trafficking, or robbery. But terrorists have also found many more sources of revenue. Osama bin Laden, for example, invested millions in terrorism that his family made in the construction industry building luxury mansions for Saudi Arabia’s oil-millionaires. The diamond industry emerged early in the twenty-first century as an important new source of funding for terrorism, and Islamist terrorist groups in particular have been very effective at procuring funding through a system of charitable contributions.

Guerrilla warfare is sometimes confused with terrorism, in that a relatively small force attempts to achieve large goals by using organized acts of directed violence against a larger force. But in contrast to terrorism, these acts are almost always against military targets, and civilian targets are minimized in an attempt to increase public support. For this reason, guerrilla tactics are generally considered military strategy rather than terrorism, although both terrorism and guerrilla warfare could be considered forms of asymmetric warfare.