(New York, NY) – Counter Extremism Project Executive Director David Ibsen today released the following statement on the one-year anniversary of the ISIS-inspired truck attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, Germany which killed 12 people:
“Since ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani implored followers to kill non-believers ‘with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car,’ terrorists have markedly increased their use of low-tech tactics. Since Berlin, the use of vehicles as weapons has been replicated in Britain, Spain and the U.S., a testament to ISIS's continuing threat, despite its battlefield setbacks. These are textbook vehicular attacks, straight from the pages of ISIS’s magazine Rumiyah and the group’s online videos.”
According to German officials, Amri searched the Internet for radical Islamic extremist content and used encrypted messaging service Telegram to describe plans to carry out an attack. The use of a vehicle as a weapon of terror occurred most recently on October 31 when Sayfullo Saipov drove a rental truck onto a bicycle path in lower Manhattan.
To view the CEP report, Vehicles as Weapons of Terror, please click here.
To read CEP’s blog, Why Does Content with Links to Terror Persist Online?, please click here.
To view the CEP report, Germany: Extremism and Counter-Extremism, please click here.