Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Kentucky Fried Chicken box that severely injured NYPD officer Rocco Pascarella
outside of One Police Plaza by blowing of his left leg. That same night, other
bombs detonated at 26 Federal Plaza and the Metropolitan Correctional Facility,
injuring Detectives Salvatore Pastorella and Anthony Senft from the NYPD Bomb
Squad.
Small Unit Tactics
The events that began on November 26, 2008, in Mumbai were heralded by much
of the media along with many analysts as the advent of a new form of terrorism. The
West was taken aback by the use of small units of heavily armed individuals con-
ducting sieges in urban areas. Small units in urban areas had already caused blood-
shed long before Mumbai. In 1972, members of the Japanese Red Army killed
26 people at Israel's Lod Airport. On December 27, 1985, the Abu Nidal Group
conducted simultaneous attacks against the El Al and TWA ticket counters inside
the Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome and passengers waiting to board a flight to
Tel Aviv at Schwechat International Airport in Vienna. Upon entering the airports,
Abu Nidal gunmen threw hand grenades toward the large crowds and fired toward
the ticket counters. In Rome, police and Israeli security guards killed three of the
four attackers before capturing the fourth. In Austria, three attackers fled in a sto-
len car before being captured by police.
In 2007 in Karbala, Iraq, a 12-man team, dressed in U.S. military uniforms,
attacked the Karbala Joint Provincial Coordination Center, where U.S. troops
were holding a meeting. The attack cell drove past Iraqi checkpoints in a con-
voy, disguised in their uniforms. The attackers entered the compound, killed one
American, wounded three, and captured three others. The three were driven some-
where and killed. The attack was quickly deemed the most sophisticated seen in
that theater of operations.
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Another variation of the small unit attack is the use of snipers. From October
2 to 22, 2002, two snipers, John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, shot
13 people, killing 10 people with a Bushmaster XM15 E2S in Maryland,
Virginia, and Washington, DC. The DC snipers got their idea from the
Provisional IRA's lethal South Armagh Brigade.
The PIRA in South Armagh practiced the tactic of “one shot, one kill”
sniping. According to the PIRA's former Chief of Staff, Sean MacStiofain,
in his memoir
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
, said, “One-shot sniping was in
fact, the theory of the guerilla rifle. It turned up once struck, and vanished,
presenting no target in return.”
