Profiling terrorist organizations capable of high impact attacks

Abstract

AbstractTerrorist attacks aim to maximize human fatalities and related damages to instill fear within the community. Such attacks are considered High Impact Attacks (HIAs) and orchestrating them requires considerable organizational setup and resources. This study extends the implementation of the Iterative Outlier Analysis (IOA) heuristics developed earlier to each region reported in the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). It reinforces and generalizes the finding that the “nkill” attribute resulted in richer sets of HIAs in regions where terrorism is prolific compared to the composite measure Global Terrorism Index—Impact Score (GTI-IS). HIA dataset of each region facilitates the identification and ranking of the Most Active Organizations (MAOs). Moreover, this study proposes a consistency and intensity code (CIC) to classify terrorist organizations capable of HIAs using four color categories. K-Means validate the number of clusters. The frequency of MAOs rank follows distinct probability distribution in each CIC category. Finally, this research identified the most virulent consistent and intense terrorist organizations (CITO) capable of perpetrating attacks in multiple regions. Regional counterterrorism policymakers can use such a classification method. A non-parametric hypothesis test confirmed that the contribution of ideologies varies significantly by region.

Keywords

• counterterrorism
• Global Terrorism Database (GTD)
• Global Terrorism Index (GTI)
• terrorist organizations
• High Impact Attacks (HIA)
• classification