Tactics of terrorism

Terrorist tactics tend to favor attacks that avoid effective countermeasures and exploit vulnerabilities.

Suicide attacks
Suicide terrorism is the most aggressive form of terrorism, pursuing coercion even at the expense of losing support among terrorists' own community. What distinguishes a suicide terrorist is that the attacker does not expect to survive a mission and often employs a method of attack that requires the attacker's death in order to succeed (such as planting a car bomb, wearing a suicide vest, or ramming an airplane into a building). In essence, a suicide terrorist kills others at the same time that he kills himself. Usually these tactics are used for a demonstrative purposes or to targeted assassinations. In most cases though, they target to kill a large number of people. Thus, while coercion is an element in all terrorism, coercion is the paramount objective of suicide terrorism.

The number of attacks using suicide tactics has grown from an average of fewer than five per year during the 1980s to 180 per year between 2000 and 2005, and from 81 suicide attacks in 2001 to 460 in 2005. These attacks have been aimed at diverse military and civilian targets, including in Sri Lanka, in Israel since July 6, 1989, in Iraq since the US-led invasion of that country in 2003, and in Pakistan and Afghanistan since 2005.

Between 1980 and 2000, the largest number of suicide attacks was carried out by separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam of Sri Lanka. The number of attacks conducted by LTTE was almost double that of nine other major extremist organizations.

In Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, suicide bombings are an anti-Israel strategy perpetrated generally by Islamist and occasionally by secular Palestinian groups including the PFLP.

India has also been the victim of suicide attacks by groups based in Pakistan, a recent example taking place in February 2019. An attack by the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed group on Indian security forces Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir, India, resulted in the loss of 40 security personnel of the CRPF. This eventually resulted in the India–Pakistan border skirmishes of 2019.

Nuclear weapons
Concerns have also been raised regarding attacks involving nuclear weapons. It is considered plausible that terrorists could acquire a nuclear weapon. In 2011, the British news agency, the Telegraph, received leaked documents regarding the Guantanamo Bay interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The documents cited Khalid saying that, if Osama bin Laden is captured or killed by the Coalition of the Willing, an Al-Qaeda sleeper cell will detonate a "weapon of mass destruction" in a "secret location" in Europe, and promised it would be "a nuclear hellstorm".

While no terrorist group has ever successfully acquired and used a nuclear weapon, many political scientists and prominent government officials consider nuclear terrorism to be one of the single greatest threats in global security. There is strong evidence that terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda are actively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, and the plutonium or highly enriched uranium (HEU) needed to produce them. Weaknesses in many states’ nuclear security apparatuses have left them susceptible to theft or loss of HEU or plutonium. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Illicit Trafficking Database (ITDB), there have been 18 incidents of theft or loss of HEU and plutonium reported in ITDB's participating states.

Conventional firearms
Despite the popular image of terrorism as bombings alone, and the large number of casualties and higher media impact associated with bombings, conventional firearms are as much if not more pervasive in their use.

In 2004, the European Council recognized the "need to ensure terrorist organisations and groups are starved of the components of their trade," including “the need to ensure greater security of firearms, explosives, bomb-making equipment and technologies that contribute to the perpetration of terrorist outrages."

Stabbing
Stabbing attacks are inexpensive and easy to carry out, but very difficult for security services to prevent.