Studying the Structure of Terrorist Networks: A Web Structural Mining Approach

Because terrorist organizations often operate in network forms where individual terrorists collaborate with each other to carry out attacks, we could gain valuable knowledge about the terrorist organizations by studying structural properties of such terrorist networks. However, previous studies of terrorist network structure have generated little actionable results. This is due to the difficulty in collecting and accessing reliable data and the lack of advanced network analysis methodologies in the field. To address these problems, we introduced the Web structural mining technique into the terrorist network analysis field which, to the best our knowledge, has never been done before. We employed the proposed technique on a Global Salafi Jihad network dataset collected through a large scale empirical study. Results from our analysis not only provide insights for terrorism research community but also support decision making in law-reinforcement, intelligence, and security domains to make our nation safer.