Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium

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The Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium (TRAC) is a digital intelligence repository of research and analysis covering terrorism and political violence. It provides editorially reviewed contributions from its consortium members, research associates, and embedded sources to assist decision-makers and researchers from a variety of disciplines. TRAC cross-references incoming, real-time contributions against its entire database of regional and group profiles, spanning every ideology, target, and tactic. The website also offers a clipping service called Chatter Control to bring primary resource material from social media and news from beyond the scope of Western media outlets to its clients' attention. [1]

Contents

According to a May 2013 NPR interview, TRAC's founder Veryan Khan partnered with the Beacham Group LLC as "editorial director of tracterrorism.org and an associate publisher," preparing research for nearly a decade before launching the site. [2] Shortly after going live in 2012, TRAC had over 6,000 pages and a "master index and profiles of 3,800 identified terrorist groups and groups known to aid and abet terrorist organizations." [1]

History

TRAC was officially launched in Fall 2011 by the Beacham Group LLC, an academic and reference publisher founded in 1985. Originally Beacham Publishing Corp., the Beacham Group specializes in comprehensive reference works in subject areas such as endangered species, environmental issues, young adult literature, popular fiction, and European and American biography. [3]

Initial research for the TRAC database began in the late 1990s, as global awareness of terrorism was rising due to activities of groups like FARC, the IRA, and Pakistani groups associated with the Taliban. The PLO profile was the first profile developed and impetus for the articles on terrorism in nationalist and separatist movements. TRAC's coverage of Islamist terrorism expanded as the demand for research on terrorism responded to the 9/11 attacks in New York City.

Initially, consortium members were largely academics drawn from universities around the world. One of the first research partners, Arabinda Acharya, joined in 2009. The scope of professions represented by the consortium's 2,800 initial members widely varied from that point up to the online launch in 2012.

Components

Group profiles

TRAC currently maintains profiles on 4,500+ groups that have been known to participate in political violence or aid and abet terrorist organizations, including anarchist, nationalist, and separatist movements; racist/hate groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan); lone wolves (such as Timothy McVeigh); and extremist religious sects such as al Qaeda franchises, ISIS, Boko Haram, Westboro Baptist Church, and Bodu Bala Sena. [4] Each profile includes (when available) the group's tactics, targets, ideology, associated groups, leaders, theater of operation, and events associated with the group. [1] [5]

TRAC's profile on the Islamic State received by far the most international attention to-date since the summer of 2014. Unique page-views per month range from 10,000-20,000. Other profiles of particular interest in 2015 include Boko Haram in Nigeria. In September 2014, TRAC was the first terrorism research body to cover the Khorasan Group / The Wolf Unit (WU).

Analysis

TRAC provides original and commissioned analyses (or "articles") on terrorism topics ranging from gender and terrorism, Quranic understandings of violent Jihad, vulnerable cities, and urban terrorism. [6] Each is categorized and searchable by ideology, targets, tactics, and region. Rather than a continuous page of text, every article is broken into chapters with an outline provided adjacent to the text. Associated news stories and primary resource material archived by TRAC is also available below the outline and updated on an hourly, or as-available basis.

TRAC's articles also include analytical tools such as data models, matrices, and infographs. In 2014, TRAC provided CNN with visuals from its work to identifying every member of the Islamic State administration and an analysis of the IS video "Although the Disbelievers Dislike It." [7]

Chatter control

TRAC continuously monitors global developments through foreign language news outlets, social media, and embedded sources, posting analysis and feeds to the source as events unfold. Sources include well-known international news organizations, regional newspapers, blogs, think tank releases, terrorist group communiqués and under the radar commentary. TRAC has archived over 15,000 sources that are searchable.[ citation needed ]

Publishing center

TRAC's editorial board provides an opportunity for scholars and journalists to publish their research, which is cross-linked to relevant articles and profiles within TRAC's database. TRAC also lists 2,200+ resource centers (universities, think tanks, government agencies) with links to their websites. [8]

Media coverage

TRAC sources have been cited by Vice News, [5] The Philippine Star , [9] The Herald Scotland , [10] Gulf News, [11] and Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC). [12] TRAC's editorial director, Veryan Khan, has often been interviewed on critical developments and breaking news on terrorism for news outlets, including NPR, [2] FRI (Radio France Internationale), [13] and Al Jazeera. [14]

Reviews and awards

Related Research Articles

Islamic terrorism Terrorist acts in the name of Islam

Islamic terrorism, Islamist terrorism or radical Islamic terrorism are terrorist acts against civilians committed by violent Islamists who have a religious motivation.

Katsina Capital of Katsina State, Nigeria

Katsina is a Local Government Area and the state capital of Katsina State in northern Nigeria. Katsina is located some 260 kilometres (160 mi) east of the city of Sokoto and 135 kilometres (84 mi) northwest of Kano, close to the border with Niger. In 2016, Katsina's estimated population was 429,000. The city is the centre of an agricultural region producing groundnuts, cotton, hides, millet and guinea corn and also has mills for producing peanut oil and steel. The city is largely Muslim, and the population of the city is mainly from the Fulani ethnic group.

Magnus Ranstorp Swedish scholar (born 1965)

Per Magnus Ranstorp is a Swedish scholar who has written about Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda and other militant Islamic movements. He is the Research Director of the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College, directing a project on Strategic Terrorist Threats to Europe which focuses on radicalisation and recruitment of salafist-jihadist terrorists across Europe and the convergence between Chemical, Biological, Radioactive and Nuclear Weapons and Terrorism. Ranstorp graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota in 1985.

Islamic extremism, Islamist extremism or radical Islam is extremism associated with the religion of Islam. These are controversial terms with varying definitions, ranging from academic understandings to the idea that all ideologies other than Islam have failed and have demonstrated their bankruptcy, as well as political ones like the definition by the government of the United Kingdom which understands Islamic extremism as any form of Islam that opposes "democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs".

Boko Haram Jihadist terrorist organization

Boko Haram, officially known as Jamā'at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da'wah wa'l-Jihād, and Wilāyat Garb Ifrīqīyā, meaning "West African Province", is a jihadist terrorist organization based in northeastern Nigeria, which is also active in Chad, Niger and northern Cameroon.

Boko Haram insurgency Conflict in Nigeria

The Boko Haram insurgency began in 2009, when the jihadist group Boko Haram started an armed rebellion against the government of Nigeria. The conflict takes place within the context of long-standing issues of religious violence between Nigeria's Muslim and Christian communities, and the insurgents' ultimate aim is to establish an Islamic state in the region.

Abubakar Shekau Nigerian militant and leader of Boko Haram (born 1975)

Abu Mohammed Abubakar bin Mohammad al-Sheikawi is a Kanuri man known as the current leader of Boko Haram, a Nigerian militant group that has declared loyalty to the Islamist militant group, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). He served as deputy leader to the group's founder, Mohammed Yusuf, until Yusuf was executed in 2009.

Terrorism and social media refers to the use of social media platforms to radicalize and recruit violence and non-violent extremists.

Ansaru

The Vanguards for the Protection of Muslims in Black Africa, better known as Ansaru and less commonly called al-Qaeda in the Lands Beyond the Sahel, is an Islamic fundamentalist Jihadist militant organisation based in the northeast of Nigeria. It originated as faction of Boko Haram, but became officially independent in 2012. Despite this, Ansaru and other Boko Haram factions continued to work closely together until the former increasingly declined, and stopped its insurgent activities in 2015. Since then, Ansaru is mostly dormant though its members continue to spread propaganda for their cause.

The Global Terrorism Index (GTI) is a report published annually by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), and was developed by IT entrepreneur and IEP's founder Steve Killelea. The index provides a comprehensive summary of the key global trends and patterns in terrorism since 2000. It is an attempt to systematically rank the nations of the world according to terrorist activity. The index combines a number of factors associated with terrorist attacks to build an explicit picture of the impact of terrorism, illustrating trends, and providing a data series for analysis by researchers and policymakers. It produces a composite score in order to provide an ordinal ranking of countries on the impact of terrorism.

Timeline of the Boko Haram insurgency is the chronology of the Boko Haram insurgency, an ongoing armed conflict between Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram and the Nigerian government. Boko Haram have carried out many attacks against the military, police and civilians since 2009 – mostly in Nigeria, but also in Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

Slavery in 21st-century jihadism

Quasi-state-level jihadist groups, including Boko Haram and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, have captured and enslaved women and children, often for sexual slavery. In 2014 in particular, both groups organised mass kidnappings of large numbers of girls and younger women.

Territory of the Islamic State

The core of the territory of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant was in Iraq and Syria where the proto-state controlled significant swathes of urban, rural, and desert territory. The Islamic State also controls territory in Afghanistan as well as Nigeria, possibly holds areas in Somalia, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and used to control land in Libya, the Philippines, Egypt, and Yemen. The group also has insurgent cells in India, Algeria, Iraq, Tunisia, the Caucasus, and Saudi Arabia that do not control territory. By late March 2019, ISIL territory in Syria was reduced to only the besieged 4,000 km2 (1,550 sq mi) Syrian Desert pocket. The enclave was surrounded by Syrian government forces and its allies. The Syrian military conducted combing operations and airstrikes against the pocket, but with limited success.

2015 West African offensive

Starting in late January 2015, a coalition of West African troops launched an offensive against the Boko Haram insurgents in Nigeria.

2015 Chad suicide bombings

The 2015 Chad suicide bombings were a suicide attack which occurred the afternoon of Saturday 10, October 2015 in the town of Baga Sola, Chad, a small fishing community on Lake Chad. The attack was allegedly perpetrated by the Nigeria-based Islamic extremist group Boko Haram and resulted in the deaths of around 36 individuals, and wounded upwards of 50 more. The attacks were reportedly carried out by two women, two children, and a man with the intended targets being a busy marketplace, and a nearby refugee camp hosting tens of thousands of Nigerians. It was the deadliest attack to take place in the Lake Chad region.

This article contains a timeline of events from January 2015 to December 2015 related to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS). This article contains information about events committed by or on behalf of the Islamic State, as well as events performed by groups who oppose them.

Online youth radicalization is the action in which a young individual, or a group of people come to adopt increasingly extreme political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo or undermine contemporary ideas and expressions of the nation. As for radicalization, online youth radicalization can be both violent or non-violent.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 LaGuardia, Cheryl (27 February 2012). "Beacham Group Releases TRAC: Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium". Library Journal. Retrieved 14 October 2014.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  2. 1 2 Wen, Shawn (9 May 2013). "Researcher Creates A Database Of Global Terrorist Groups". WUNC - NPR. Retrieved 9 May 2013.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  3. Washington, Coll (12 April 2013). "Beacham Scholarship Supports Terrorism Studies". Washington College Magazine. Retrieved 14 October 2014.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  4. "Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) | Terrorist Groups | TRAC".
  5. 1 2 Hay, Mark (30 June 2014). "Meet the Violent Buddhists Starting Riots in Sri Lanka". Vice News.
  6. Zimmerman, Malia (9 February 2014). "Mysterious woman from Canada's rapid rise in ISIS puzzles intel analysts". Fox. Retrieved 9 February 2014.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  7. Thompson, Nick; Schubert, Atika (9 September 2014). "The anatomy of ISIS: How the 'Islamic State' is run, from oil to beheadings - CNN.com". CNN . Retrieved 9 September 2014.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  8. "About TRAC | TRAC". www.trackingterrorism.org. Retrieved 2019-12-05.
  9. "Local militants undergo extensive training before they arrive in Syria". The Star Online. 24 June 2014.
  10. Pratt, David (15 June 2014). "Is This the End of Iraq?". The Herald Scotland.
  11. Al Maeena, Tariq A. (17 May 2014). "Terrorists have no religious affiliation". Gulf News.
  12. Davidson, Janet (15 January 2014). "Sochi security: The mystery group behind Russia's Islamist insurgency". CBC News.
  13. "Abuja attack in response to Boko Haram leader video: Expert". Radio France International. 14 April 2014.
  14. Regencia, Ted (19 July 2014). "Islamic State's support spreads into Asia". Al Jazeera.
  15. Swogger, Bonnie (2 May 2012). "eReviews: Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium-May 1, 2012". Library Journal.