It can happen anywhere. In a crowded shopping mall, a packed nightclub or even an airport terminal -- terrorists are targeting areas where many people gather and there is limited security.
These types of attacks concentrating on “soft targets” have become increasingly popular for terrorist organizations like the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. In the past few months, assaults on a nightclub in Orlando, Fla., an airport in Istanbul, Turkey and most recently, a holiday street celebration in Nice, France have demonstrated just how deadly these attacks can be.
Security expert, Derek Humble, says crowded locations where people let their guards down have become the targets of choice for terrorists.
“What they are doing now is attacking crowds for the sake of crowds,” Humble said.
In September 2014, a call to strike civilian soft targets by ISIS leaders was released in a propaganda audio recording by spokesperson Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, calling on followers to kill “in any manner or way.”
A few weeks later, two Canadian Forces members were run down by a radicalized Quebec man in the small town of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. The use of vehicles as weapons as demonstrated in the Quebec incident and this week in Nice has been encouraged by ISIS leaders. Nir Mamman of the Canadian Tactical Officers Association says using a vehicle to plow into a crowd is common in Israel and usually only the first stage of the assault.
“Once the vehicles are stopped, they will come out and begin shooting with AK-47s,” Mamman said. “They will also have handguns on them, knives on them, grenades on them and they will also have suicide bomb belts on them."
Some security experts believe that Canada is rife with soft targets from pedestrian malls to busy public squares. They are warning the Canadian public that police aren’t going to be able to stop every terrorist plot.
"There has to be a cultural shift in the understanding of the everyday citizen here, that we are a target,” Mamman said.
Experts say that the key to surviving a terrorist attack is to always have a plan, know where the exits are, have a family meeting point and to always stay out of the centre of large gatherings.
In the aftermath of the devastating attack in Nice, Canada is actively trying to prevent a similar incident from happening here. Federal agencies are assessing threats to dignitaries, public events and symbolic sites. Public Safety Canada, the RCMP and some municipal police forces are trying to reduce the number of youth radicalizations by working with communities. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service can intervene to disrupt a terrorist plot once a suspect has been identified.
With a report from CTV’s Peter Akman
