Emergency personnel tend to an injured person outside Britain’s Parliament after an attack by a British-born man on March 22. ISIS, which claimed the attack, encourages its followers to use vehicles to achieve bloodshed.
Emergency personnel tend to an injured person outside Britain’s Parliament after an attack by a British-born man on March 22. ISIS, which claimed the attack, encourages its followers to use vehicles to achieve bloodshed. Credit: AP File

In the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State group became infamous for its spectacular variations on explosive vehicles. For attacks in the West, it has suggested a simpler method, encouraging followers to use regular vehicles to kill people on foot.

Experts say attacks in which cars or trucks are driven into popular pedestrian areas present a unique challenge for law enforcement officials as they are nearly impossible to predict and easy to pull off. They require no advanced training, no specialized materials.

Four people were killed and dozens wounded Wednesday in London with this tactic – the worst attack on British soil since the transport network bombings on July 7, 2005.

Charlie Winter, a senior research fellow at the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, said what makes such attacks so frightening is the relatively low barriers to entry. The method was embraced by al-Qaida before being revitalized by ISIS.

“It makes for a very effective unsophisticated high impact, very frightening form of an operation,” he said.

British authorities on Thursday identified Khalid Masood as the man who mowed down pedestrians with an SUV and stabbed a policeman to death outside Parliament. The British citizen wasn’t on a terrorism watch list although he was once investigated for extremism. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, and said he was a “soldier” that answered its call to attack nations in the coalition fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

Rita Katz, director of the SITE Intelligence group, said it is almost impossible for law enforcement agencies to stop ISIS-inspired attacks, especially vehicular-style ones like the one in London. Since 2014, this simple but effective attack has been promoted in ISIS propaganda online.

“It’s not a style of attack that you can monitor by increasing security and intel on who has weapons or other attention-grabbing variables,” Katz said. “Every car suddenly turns into a possible weapon, so it’s really very difficult to stop.”