New Orleans attack: 'Vehicle bombs' have a long history and all are not terrorism

Well past the midnight, the New Year’s Day celebrations were still ongoing at the Bourbon Street in the New Orleans city when a car turned the revellers’ cheers into fearful screams. A white pick-up truck was speeding through the street and tearing through revellers.

By the time the rampage ended, at least 15 were dead and around three dozen were injured. The driver of the vehicle was killed in a shootout with police. Two police personnel were injured in the shootout.

The attacker was later identified as Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, a 42-year-old former armyman. A flag of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group and at least improvised explosive decide (IED) were also found in his truck.

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In a statement, President Joe Biden said that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had briefed him that Jabbar had had posted videos on social media “mere hours” before the attack “indicating that he was inspired” by IS.

The world is not a stranger to car-ramming acts. There have been hundreds of car-ramming attacks across America, Europe, and West Asia, which involve both extremists or racist attacks and acts of terror. Among terrorists, Palestinian group Hamas pioneered vehicle-ramming attacks, which were later adapted by Islamic State (IS), whose operatives have mounted a number of such attacks.

What drives vehicle-ramming attacks?

Even though vehicular attacks have increased in recent years, they have been around for decades.

Vehicular attacks have been carried out since as early as 1960s, according to a study by Mineta Transporation Institute (MTI) at San Jose State University.

While the MTI study traced the first such vehicular attack to 1963, it found that 70 per cent of these have occurred since 2014.

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Separately, the think tank Counter Extremism Project (CEP) in report in December 2024 noted that at least 82 vehicular terrorist attacks have been reported since 2006, which collectively killed at least 238 people and injured at least 1,278.

Broadly, two reasons have driven such attacks.

One, while guns or explosives are relatively difficult to procure or manufacture, and are also highly traceable to source, cars and other vehicles are all around us. Therefore, it’s easy to acquire a car and use it as a weapon. No one suspects when someone buys a car but everyone would suspect you if you would start purchasing bombmaking material one day.

Two, terrorist organisations have realised the potency of vehicular attacks are promoting them across the world. They urge both members as well as radicals or those on the path of radicalisation to adopt vehicular attacks as the preferred medium of attacks in countries far-off their hubs, such as America or Europe which are far removed from the home turfs of terrorist organisations in West or South Asia.

While vehicular attacks have been carried for decades in nearly all parts of the world, such as in North Carolina, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Quebec, West Bank, and Xinjiang, the uptick in recent years appears to have been in large part inspired by ISIS’ explicit calls to employ cars as weapons, notes the CEP in its report.

The report further says, “Terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas have long called for —and claimed responsibility for— vehicular terrorist attacks. Al-Qaeda’s second issue of Inspire magazine, released in October 2010, contained an article calling for vehicular attacks and referring to a pickup truck as a potential ‘mowing machine’ that can be used to ‘mow down the enemies of Allah’. Inspire Editor-in-Chief Yahya Ibrahim urged al-Qaeda followers to ‘go for the most crowded location’ and ‘pick up as much speed as you can’ in order ‘strike as many people as possible’.”

These attacks can be either a ‘remote control’ attack where a handler sitting in West Asia or Afghanistan guides the attacker or a ’lone wolf’ attack where an individual operates independently out of allegiance to a terrorist group.

In the most notable such attack, 84 people were killed and more than 200 were injured when a man drove a truck into revellers during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, France in 2016. The attack was claimed by the Islamic State.

In 2016, a man in an attack claimed by the Islamic State drove into pedestrians in Germany’s Berlin, killing 12 and injuring more than 50.

In 2017, a man drove a pick-up truck into a crowd along the Hudson River in New York City, killing eight and injuring 11. The driver, who was shot by the police, had sworn allegiance to the Islamic State.

Palestinian groups pioneered vehicular attacks

Even though vehicular attacks can be traced to 1960s, such attacks did not become a terrorists’ tactic until the 1990s when Palestinians started carrying out vehicular assaults in Israel, according to the MTI study.

It was only by early 2000s that vehicular attacks became a mainstay of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel, according to the study.

Of all the vehicular attacks so far, the majority have been reported against Israelis in Israel and West Bank.

Since 2014, after which the vast majority —70 per cent— of vehicular attacks were carried out, most of the attacks have been in Israe and West Bank (32), followed by the United States (24), and China (16), according to the MTI study.

But not all vehicular attacks are terrorist acts

Over the past decades, extremists have also adopted vehicular attacks. There have been instances of White supremacists, other racists, and sexists using vehicles to attack racial and ethnic minorities and women.

Since 2016, which marked the surge of far-right in the United States with the election of Donald Trump, the CEP says there have been at least 24 vehicular attacks against protesters that have killed two and injured 74.

In the most polarising such attack, a person drove a car into a gathering protesting a White supremacists’ gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing one person and injuring around 40 people.

In another hate crime, an ‘incel’ man in 2018 killed 10 people when he drove a van into people in Canada’s Toronto. The incel is an anti-women movement and eight of those killed were women in the case.

During demonstrations, many of which were violent and damaged public and private property, following the killing of Black man George Floyd, there were 104 vehicle attacks on protesters, according to the Chicago Project on Security and Threats of the University of Chicago.

The CEP says that the far-right has turned car attacks as a tool to intimidate people. The far-right has not just been encouraging car attacks since the rise of Trump, it has also been normalising it.

“The far right has since encouraged vehicle attacks against protesters by dehumanizing and objectifying protesters in online propaganda. Ultimately, this propaganda appears designed to delegitimize the protests, which broadly support values anathema to the far right such as racial equality and the Black Lives Matter movement specifically. Online memes promote the perversion of the “Black Lives Matter” slogan into “All Lives Splatter,” with depictions of cars driving into protesters,” says CEP.