Find the root causes of 'lone-wolf attacks'

The West has seen a slew of random attacks by lone assailants in recent weeks, leaving innocent people as well as authority figures dead or wounded and emotionally scarred. The nightmare of such “lone-wolf attacks” is compounded by the fact that they are almost always impossible to predict and difficult to prevent.

Attacks have taken place in the United States, Australia, France and Canada, some of the assailants being associated with extremist or terrorist groups, others apparently acting out of raw personal anger at perceived injustices.

Following the armed siege of a Sydney café by an Iranian-born Islamist, in which two hostages were killed, governments there and in Europe and the US have warned of potentially more lone-wolf attacks by home-grown militants.

France witnessed random knife attacks on police and pedestrians over the course of three days this past week. Another 28 people were injured in two separate vehicle-ramming assaults. In yet another incident, a Muslim convert was shot dead at a police station after slashing three officers with a knife. 

In the US last week, two New York police officers were shot dead “execution-style” by a gunman believed to be angry over police brutality and the refusal of some courts to indict or convict officers for killing unarmed black suspects. 

In October another convert to Islam charged at four other New York policemen with a hatchet, injuring two of them before being brought down with deadly force.

That same month in Canada, still another radical Muslim ran a soldier down and shot another before being killed, while a citizen who had been denied travel to Syria murdered a soldier at the National War Memorial and then engaged security forces in a shootout inside the parliament buildings. He too died in a hail of bullets.

Speaking after the Sydney tragedy, British Prime Minister David Cameron acknowledged that it’s difficult for authorities to forestall such attacks. “It’s one thing understanding the terror networks coming out of Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iraq and Syria, and trying to monitor what they’re doing and who is going and who is returning. But people who are self-radicalised, often on the Internet, who then suddenly do appalling things, that is much more difficult to prevent.”

Use of legal means and preventive measures, such as identifying and tracking suspects, is a good way for countries to stave off lone-wolf attacks. But we need to find out why more and more homegrown extremists are wreaking havoc. This is clearly a problem that must be solved at its root.

Government leaders and other authorities must examine the systems in place in their countries and determine if there is anything wrong that is directly causing people to explode in anger. If they can rectify such shortcomings, at least they might be able to prevent others among their citizenry from turning into “lone wolves”, and in the process they can help ensure the safety of innocent people.