Why do terrorists target tourists?
A decades-old terrorist tactic has gotten uglier and more random
Sending a message by killing, or attempting to kill, tourists is a decades old terrorist tactic — one that’s gotten more vicious and indiscriminate in recent years. Deliberately.
On January 12, 15 people were injured and 10 killed by an explosion in a heavily visited area of Istanbul, where the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia draw millions of tourists a year. Tourism brings $35 billion to the country annually, representing roughly 4% of its economy — and the attacks will likely put a major dent in that figure in the coming months.
Countries, including Turkey, have tried to get better at thwarting attacks on tourists — and to do damage control when those efforts don’t work. But decades ago, when the “golden age” of tourist-targeted terrorism first began, no one was prepared.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, hijackers commandeered dozens of airplanes from the US and Cuba. The “skyjackings,” as they were then called, became so common that US airliners carried the approach plans for the Havana airport on board, just in case.
“The real attacks started coming in the 1960s, with hijacking. But then people got a lot more serious by the 1970s,” said Peter Tarlow, a Texas-based expert on the impact of terrorism on tourism, who has consulted in countries across the world. “In the 1960s, it was almost a joke. You got a free trip to Cuba. By the ’80s and ’90s, it was no longer a joke. Now it was: ‘We’re going to kill you.’”
From the ’70s though the ’90s, a series of high-profile tourist-related attacks grabbed the world’s attention: A Palestinian group hijacked five planes that originated at European and Asian airports in September 1970; the Palestinian group Black September killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972; Palestinian terrorists pushed a wheelchair-using American man, Leon Klinghoffer, off a cruise ship in 1985; an Islamist group butchered 62 people, mostly tourists, at an archaeological site in Deir el-Bahri, Egypt in 1997.
Tourist destinations and the broader industry, however, were slow to respond, even as deadly attacks continued, choosing instead to keep their efforts subtle so as not to spook travelers. Police wore “soft uniforms” — khaki pants and T-shirts, say — rather than the classic one.
“Security was not seen and not heard,” Tarlow explained.
After 2001, tourists began demanding more blatant security measures, and risk-management strategies were adopted at major tourist destinations. Governments and the travel industry identified vulnerable targets, created tourism-oriented policing units, tourist-centric hospital units, new systems of communications, and ready access to translators.
But as tourist destinations began getting more serious about preventing or mitigating attacks targeting tourists, the attackers’ tactics also changed. Attacks became more random, less targeted, like the one in Istanbul.
“In the 21st century, it became: ‘I don’t care who I kill, I just want numbers,’” Tarlow said. “They’ve made it one step further along the road to horror. … Now they don’t even care who’s coming to the square. It’s just: I want to kill some people. It went from targeted-random to random-random. No one’s even created the vocabulary for it yet.”
Easing the anxieties of potential tourists has gotten more difficult, too, largely because media coverage of attacks has become so ubiquitous and relentless — and because information spreads with lightning quickness across social media.
Even as normalcy returns to a tourist site after an attack has happened, the perceptions held by would-be travelers thousands of miles away linger for a long time.
“The further away you are, the longer it stays in people’s memories,” Tarlow said, “because it seems worse.”
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