Alwaght- Although in a decade there have been progresses in counterterrorism activities, the technology enabled the terrorists to transfer their radical ideologies beyond their own borders and attract fans.
In fact, the genuine challenge for the security officials appears when the ideas of the radical terrorists come into action.
Recognition of the extremist thoughts that are going to end in terror attacks is highly difficult, unless they are shared with someone else. On the other side, simply having the say is not enough to predict the terrorist assaults especially in communities which host refugees from across the globe and advocate pluralism in ideologies.
A new terror trends which is highly difficult to decode and at the same time is very effective and efficient is to carry out terrorist actions using unknown fans who are technically called "lone wolves."
To better understand the performance of the lone wolves we can refer to the book of Jeffrey Simon "Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat." Actually, Simon refers to a type of terrorism which is way different from the organized terrorism of the 1980s, 1990s and even the early decade of 21st century.
Simon recognizes the lone wolves as an individual or individuals who act without financial or logistic support of the others. They move alone, so it is severely hard to identify and arrest them.
One of Simon's emphasises is that the web is a game-changing factor because it puts a variety of opportunities at disposal of the lone wolves to learn about the techniques and targets as well as accessing the web accounts, tweets and blogs of the radical people.
Simon finds lone wolves as more creative in comparison to other terrorists. Besides being highly dangerous, the lone wolves work with high efficiency. They have no decision makers, so, they can work according to any scenario they find perfect, as they have no limit in the level of violence because they don't need to care about discontent of their loyalists and supporters. They are not concerned about crackdown on the members of the group by the government after any terrorist attacks.
The picture of the lone wolves is ambiguous in terms of the process they pass along with their fellows to become as such. In fact, this ambiguity includes the environment in which an extremist grows up, the group of friends, family and the web world connections.
The lone wolves at the present time are on the rise in terms of numbers and the degree of violence. That they don't need confirmation from the superiors and are not desperate to follow their group’s decision making process give them the possibility to do actions never precedent in the past.
According to Simon, the lone wolves, however, have their own problems including grappling with psychological disorders, or financial difficulties or adherence to a specific ideology with which they justify their measures.
The lone wolves claim that they can conduct measures at any time and in any place because the security authorities cannot bring people under close watch one by one.
While many lone wolves have difficulty joining the groups in the real world, they can get the feeling of membership just by signing up into the social networks. To put it another way, while they in the past felt alone, now and with the use of web can feel belonging to a specific group even if they are not working with any member of the group on social networks.
On the other side, their measures are seen convenient for the web groups because these acts are a kind of promotion without risk and without costs. For example, it is not yet fully obvious what kind of links the Orlando terrorist attacks' shooter had with ISIS terror organization, but ISIS is taking advantage of the attack in terms of promotion and so it moves a step ahead in the media battle. In other words, while in past few months, ISIS received considerable blows in major battlefields in Syria and Iraq, including in Iraq’s Ramadi and Syria’s Nobul, Al Zahra and Palmyra, it can use these attacks in the West to keep making headlines on the global media and so be linked to the "deadliest mass shooting in the US history."
Almost two months ago, a spokesman for ISIS had said that the world should expect tougher attacks in the holy month of Ramadan. These remarks could be considered like promotional messages addressing all of fans across the world.
The extremist groups don't need to form camps for their supporters. Twitter provides a platform for sending messages by the leaders to the loyalists. Therefore, perhaps confronting the lone wolves is the most difficult way of confrontation of the terrorist groups.
