[DailySignal] When authorities arrested Ashiqual Alam last week for planning a terrorist attack against Times Square in New York City, it was the 111th Islamist terror plot or attack against the U.S. homeland since 9/11, and the 98th to be a homegrown plot.
New York City is the most common city to be targeted by terrorists in the U.S., and this is at least the fifth plot or attack against the Times Square area specifically. Many will remember the botched car bomb attack against Times Square by Faisal Shahzad in 2010.
More generally, public gathering spaces such as Times Square are the most common type of target by Islamist terrorists, especially following the spread of ISIS propaganda calling for such strikes.
Once again, though, the hard work of the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force prevented an attack. Over the course of an almost-yearlong investigation involving multiple undercover agents, the task force kept the people of New York safe.
The U.S. must maintain this proactive approach of stopping terrorism before it strikes.
At the link, considerably more interesting than the text above, is a scrollable timeline. An interesting aide-memoire, it seems to me, described as follows:
This page is The Heritage Foundation’s compilation of all Islamist terror plots and attacks against the U.S. homeland since 9/11 according to publicly available records. The list does not include activities that are merely linked to terrorism, such as traveling abroad to join a terrorist organization, but each plot requires some threat directed at the U.S. homeland. Additionally, the primary motivation of the terror plot or attack must be a radical Islamist ideology, which supports the use of violence as a means to achieve the long-run objective of imposing Islamic law, i.e., sharia. As this timeline makes clear, the threat of Islamist terror remains real and the U.S. must remain dedicated to defeating terrorism at home and abroad.
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