Terrorism… While pronouncing this word, lots of terrible and horrible pictures appear in our mind. But people should remember the most terrible terroristic acts, and more over, these terroristic acts should be studied. Why? – To understand the psychology of people, who plan and act these terrors and as a result to be able to predict and to cope with them.
The main aim of studying terrorist acts is to assist officers in understanding the current psychological and sociological stances of various terrorist groups. The terrorist profiles are created with this aim. It is very difficult to create a terrorist profile as different terroristic acts have different aims, they are committed by different people, with different traditions, so it is rather difficult to unite them in one instruction, in one definite plan.
Terrorism is a global phenomenon which appears to be very frequent in modern life. Modern terrorism is rather fleeting, irrational and brutal. The nature of terrorism is unpredictable, ‘its tactics we frequently label cowardly’. The terrorism is often committed in crowds, as it is so difficult to pick up the terrorist in crowd (Horgan, 2005).
One of the most frequent methods of terrorism is bomb attacks. The terrorists put the bomb in the crowded place and wait for the time when people are of the greatest number there (underground, supermarkets, railway stations, cars near government administration buildings). Terrorists, while using bombs as the means of their terror attacks, have one of the aims to sow fear in people’s hearts (Thackrah, 2004). Some terrorists put a bomb, call to police, say about it and watch the panic which appears, the others just explore the bomb and watch the results, and only after that say what they wanted to show by that explosion.
The suicide terrorism is also one of the ways of committing attack. The suicide terrorism is committed due to somebody’s faith. The faith is the main driving motive for the suicide terrorist. ‘Suicide terrorism includes a diversity of violent actions perpetrated by people who are aware that the odds they will return alive are close to zero’ (Pedahzur, 2005).
Suicide terrorism is the most unpredictable, as the faith of terrorists is very confused and spoiled, and it is impossible to know what may come to their minds the other day and who they will understand as their enemies tomorrow. Suicide bombing is one of the most frequently used types of terrorism, which is committed during the last time.
There are some facts, which may help to study the terrorism in general. One of the main reasons for terrorism is the presence of foreign military forces on the territory of opposed ethnic or national territory. The other feature of the terrorism is that it is usually occur in the series of events, not as isolated event. In this case we are talking about terrorist campaign. There is statistical information that terrorism attacks appear in democratic countries in 70% (Pedahzur, 2005).
Still, hijacking, bombing and suicide terrorism are the main types or methods of terrorism which criminals use to manage their aims and to maintain terror in the countries they want to terrorize.
So, terrorism must be studied thoroughly and discussed from different sides as these measures may help government to predict the terrorists’ actions and may be to ruin their plans, or may be even to detect the leaders of the terrorism campaigns.
Reference List
- Horgan, J. (2005). The psychology of terrorism. Routledge.
- Pedahzur, A. (2005) Suicide terrorism. Polity.
- Thackrah, J. R. (2004) Dictionary of terrorism. Routledge.
