Sydney siege highlights threat of 'lone wolf' attacks

Sydney hostage crisis Details of what motivated Man Haron Monis may be scant, but whether the Sydney siege was an act of terrorism or base criminality or that of an unhinged man, it plays directly to the fears of security agencies.

So-called "lone wolf" or "wolf pack" attacks have become the gravest concern for counterterror chiefs worldwide. The past 12 months have seen a gruesome escalation in the incidence of the phenomenon, from the murder of four visitors to a Jewish museum in Brussels in May to the shootings in Ottawa in October in which a Canadian soldier died.

"This does seem to be the new normal in terrorist incidents - a modus vivendi we are moving towards where you are dealing with one lone individual and the line between terrorism and an individual act of derangement is blurred," says Raffaello Pantucci, director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank. "It's a confusing picture that we're seeing more of."

Analysing such attacks can be tricky. Lone wolf incidents typically involve minimal or no direction from the terrorist organisations that may inspire them, which makes pinpointing the cause, or preventing them, fraught with difficulty.

Attackers can be driven as much by their own psychological state as an ideological one - making the task of dealing with them a problem that ordinary policing or counterterror work alone cannot hope to fully combat.

In 2009, for example, Nidal Hasan, a US army psychiatrist, shot and killed 13 people and injured 30 at Fort Hood in Texas. He was apparently motivated by jihadist ideology in what the US Senate called the worst terror attack since the World Trade Center bombings. Colleagues of Mr Hasan saw signs of his radicalisation but had no idea he would go on to carry out a massacre.

Even where the ideological motivation is more obvious, the chances of detecting lone wolves are slim.

In April 2013 brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev killed three people and wounded more than 260 with two pressure cooker bombs at the Boston marathon in the US. A month later, Britons Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale ran down Fusilier Lee Rigby outside his London barracks and hacked him to death with a meat cleaver.

In both cases, security officials were absolved of blame in having not detected the attacks beforehand.

It has been tempting, until now, to look at the rise of lone wolf jihadism as proof that the US-led drone campaigns in Yemen, Iraq and the rural, tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan have disrupted the al-Qaeda network to the point where sophisticated bomb-making and planning attacks on far-flung western targets is hard if not impossible to undertake.

Improved domestic counterterrorism efforts have broken up cells and restricted their access to the tools of terrorism. Getting hold of sufficient quantities of the peroxide or fertiliser used in crude bombs, for example, is now no easy task.

But the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as Isis, in the Middle East, is changing calculations for security agencies.

Isis is equally, if not more restricted in its ability to project spectacular acts of terror overseas than al-Qaeda. But the group has proved far more adept at manipulating and using the channels open to it, particularly online.

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If lone wolf jihadism was a symbol of al-Qaeda's weakness, it is so far proving Isis's strength. The group appears to realise that in the age of Twitter and YouTube, an attack with a single blade, filmed or digitally packaged correctly, can spread terror almost as effectively as a bomb on a bus in a capital city.

Isis has used its slick messaging and social media prowess to project its influence deep into the consciousness of extremists - and those vulnerable to extremism - around the world. Just as such messaging has been invaluable in motivating thousands of young Muslims - including at least 3,000 from Europe - to risk their lives and travel to Syria and Iraq to fight for Isis, security officials worry that it may also be exhorting would-be jihadis to carry out acts of violence at home.

It is a sign of the power of such digitised terrorism that Australia - a country remote from Isis's self-proclaimed caliphate - should be on its front line.

In September, 15 men were arrested in Sydney in connection with a plot to behead random civilians in public. Later the same month, an 18-year-old would-be jihadi was shot in Melbourne after apparently attempting to murder a policeman with a knife.

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