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By Peter Bergen<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n It used to be that we worried about truck bombs. Now we have to worry about trucks used as weapons.<\/span><\/p>\n The tactic has been adopted by jihadist terrorists in the West, including in the United States, but fortunately the lethality of these attacks has been relatively low — until Friday’s attack in Nice that has killed at least 84.<\/span><\/p>\n The tactic has been a long time coming.<\/span><\/p>\n Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch encouraged its recruits in the West in its 2010 webzine, Inspire, to use trucks as a weapon. An article headlined “The Ultimate Mowing Machine” <\/span>called for<\/span><\/a> deploying a pickup truck as a “mowing machine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah.”<\/span><\/p>\n In September 2014, an ISIS spokesman similarly encouraged such attacks, saying of ISIS’ enemies, “run him over with your car.”<\/span><\/p>\n A month later, on October 20, 2014 Canadian Martin Rouleau Couture, who had traveled to Turkey in what appears to have been an unsuccessful attempt to join ISIS in neighboring Syria, ran over two soldiers in Quebec, killing one and injuring another.<\/span><\/p>\n Also in 2014, there were two such car attacks in France in the cities of Nantes and Dijon, though the motives of the attackers, one of whom shouted “Allah Akbar!” after one of the attacks, are murky. In both cases the assailants had <\/span>long histories<\/span><\/a> of mental illness, according to the BBC.<\/span><\/p>\n The tactic has also been used in the United States. In 2006, Mohammed Taheri-azar, an American-Iranian,<\/span>drove an SUV<\/span><\/a> into an area crowded with students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He later said that that the United States government had been “killing his people across the sea” and he was taking revenge and he was “thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah.” Luckily the attack killed no one but it did injure nine.<\/span><\/p>\n A year later, a pair of British terrorists opposed to the Iraq war rammed their Jeep into the arrivals area of Glasgow Airport, but killed no one.<\/span><\/p>\n We don’t know enough yet to say what prompted the Nice attack. But what the the attack in Nice shows is that we are now in an era when lone terrorists are becoming increasingly lethal.<\/span><\/p>\n