Analyzing terrorist incidents to support counter-terrorism - Events and methods

Over the past couple of decades, Pakistan has witnessed a remarkable increase in the number of terrorist events across its major provinces. These events are not random, and to date, there exists no concrete analysis which can help us in identifying important patterns in the occurrences of these events, and provide valuable assistance to counterterrorism authorities. Our work presents the first effort in this direction. We obtain a reliable database of terrorist events and implement cluster analysis with the CLOPE algorithm. We analyze clusters related to two combinations, i.e., “Terrorism Event - Terrorism Target”, and “Terrorism Event - Terrorism Method”. We annually analyze the number and content of the clusters, effectively from 2001 to 2012 and separately for each of the four major Pakistani provinces. Our work is divided in two papers. In this paper, we present some results related to the analysis of Event - Target combinations, which reveals an increase in the frequency of these combinations from 2006 onwards, particularly for the Khyber Pakhtunkhaa province. In the companion paper, we present our remaining Event-Target analyses along with the complete Event-Method analysis.