Orlando Night Club Mass Shooting and 'Lone Wolf' Terrorism

The attack by one Omar Mateen at the Pulse night club in Orlando on 12 June 2016, which has killed 50 people, is now termed as the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States (US) since the 9/11.[1] Analysts have further gone on to describe the mass shooting as more deadly than all the other jihadist attacks on US soil combined since the 9/11. Further, President Obama termed the shooting an “act of terror”, which is an attack on all of America.[2] In the light of the latest Orlando shooting and many other instances of lone wolf terrorist attacks in the recent past, this article aims to give a perspective on the phenomenon of lone wolf terrorism, which has been on the rise. 

The phenomenon of lone wolf terrorism differs from other types of terrorism and political violence in that such terrorism are carried out by lone individuals as compared to those carried out by terrorist organisations. In other words, lone wolf terrorism involves terrorist attacks carried out by persons who – operate alone, do not belong to an organised terrorist group or network, and whose modus operandi are conceived and directed by the individual without any direct outside command or hierarchy.[3] However, it has been argued that the realm of lone wolf terrorism is fuzzy and arbitrary. In this case, what separates the actions of the lone wolf terrorist from those of criminals, assassins and the like is the presence of a broader political, ideological, or religious cause.[4] Some of prominent lone wolf terrorist attacks includes Andreas Behring Breivik killing 77 people in two consecutive attacks in Norway on 22 July 2011, Sousse (Tunisia) mass shooting on 26 June 2015, 2 December 2015 San Bernardino attack where 14 people were killed in an Islamic terrorist-inspired mass shooting to name a few.

As far as the Orlando Pulse mass shooting is concerned, reports have initially indicated that Omar Mateen is a lone wolf, inspired by Islamic State (IS) but not under its operational control. In this context it is important to note that there is a difference between IS-inspired and IS-directed in that IS-inspired attacks are considered to be more amateurish. Nevertheless, the horrific Orlando shooting goes on to show what a loner with the right weaponry can do. While IS-directed terrorist attacks would be the kind that took place in Paris in 2015 with more catastrophic results.[5]

While the IS-directed Paris-type attacks where multiple terrorist attack their targets working in teams, attacking guarded targets as well as soft targets such as cafes and restaurants with devastating result is a dominant terrorist strategy even before 9/11, the lone wolf or single attacker terrorist menace rose to prominence mainly after 9/11. Subsequently, the modus operandi of lone wolf terrorism has undergone dramatic changes. Initially, the main targets of lone wolf terrorist involved the targeting of uniformed police and military officers, but the latest trends have shown that lone wolf terrorism targets popular tourist destinations, and crowded places such as schools, pubs, theaters and the like.

Lone wolf terrorist tend to combine personal grievances with political grievances, which in turn reflects their motive. However, it has been found that for both lone wolves and terrorist organistions, violence is considered the only alternative to an unjust system. There is an affinity between the lone wolf terrorist and an organised terrorist group in that the latter sympathizes with the former. In other words, lone wolves are found to be inspired by a given terrorist group’s propaganda via the social media or through internet. Lone wolves are enabled either directly through people who are willing to assist in planning a terrorist attack or indirectly by people who provide inspiration for terrorism.[6] In this case, it is important to note that besides somebody who encourages terrorism, affinity towards an extremist group of a certain ideology is an experience best understood as ideological validation of beliefs, which is also considered an enabler to carry out terrorist attack.

As far as the Orlando mass shooting and terrorism in US is concerned, while terrorist incidents as a whole and mainly the group-based terrorist attacks are on the decline, lone wolf terrorism has been increasing in the recent past.[7] One of the factors identified for making this kind of terror attacks difficult to prevent and to analyse is because of its individual-centric menace that has lot to do with individual’s ideological sympathies including Islamism, radical environmentalism, and far-right extremism. Further, compounding the difficulty of preventing this scourge is that fact that lone wolves, by definition do not engage in communication with other terrorists, and can theoretically manifest themselves as any individual, which limits the usefulness of traditional interdiction ad surveillance efforts by law enforcement.[8] As such, lone wolf attacks are hard to anticipate making them more catastrophic.

Analysts are of the view that the phenomenon of lone individuals carrying out terrorist attacks is not entirely a new phenomenon; the growth of certain ideology such as that of IS seems to have superimposed a violent supremacist ideology upon a wide variety of grievances. In other words, Islamic State’s ability to provide a persuasive anti-establishment ideology with transnational appeal, along with easy access to its narrative and potential operations support through the social media via the internet has made things very easy for an alienated loner to attract individuals to the group’s thought processes and actions. While much of counter-terrorism strategies consider lone wolf terrorism operating under the assumption that the attack patterns are identical to, or overlap with group-based terrorist, there is still a serious lack of clarity on dominant explanations of terrorism that can be applied to the actions of lone individuals carrying out acts of terrorism on their own.

The Author is an Associate Fellow at CLAWS. Views expressed are personal.