Scott Stewart
Over the past few weeks, I've had people at
speaking engagements ask me if I thought the Islamic State or some other
militant group is using Ebola as a biological weapon, or if such a group could
do so in the future. Such questions and concerns are not surprising given
the intense media hype that surrounds the disease, even
though only one person has died from Ebola out of the three confirmed cases in
the United States. The media hype about the threat posed by the Islamic State
to the United States and the West is almost as bad. Both subjects of all this
hype were combined into a tidy package on Oct. 20, when the Washington Post
published an editorial by columnist Mark Thiessen in which he claimed it would
be easy for a group such as the Islamic State to use Ebola in a terrorist
attack. Despite Thiessen's claims, using Ebola as a biological warfare agent is
much more difficult than it might appear at first blush.
The 2014 Outbreak
In the past, there have been several outbreaks
of Ebola in Africa. Countries included Sudan, Uganda, the Republic of the Congo
and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and several comparatively small
outbreaks occurred in Gabon as well. In most cases, people who handled or ate animals
infected with the disease started the outbreaks. "Bushmeat," or
portions of roasted meat from a variety of wild animals, is considered by many
to be a delicacy in Africa, and in a continent where hunger is widespread, it
is also a necessity for many hungry people. After several months of medical
investigations, epidemiologists believe the current outbreak most likely began
when a two-year-old child in Guinea touched or perhaps ate part of an infected
animal such as a bat or monkey.
The source of the disease means it is highly
unlikely that some malevolent actor intentionally caused the latest outbreak.
Besides the fact that the current outbreak's cause has been identified as a
natural one, even if a transnational militant group such as the Islamic State
was able to somehow develop an Ebola weapon, it would have chosen to deploy the
weapon against a far more desirable target than a small village in Guinea. We
would have seen the militants use their weapon in a location such as New York,
Paris or London, or against their local enemies in Syria and Iraq.
As far as intent goes, there is very little
doubt that such a group would employ a biological weapon. As we noted last
month when there was increased talk about the Islamic State possibly weaponizing plague for a biological attack, terrorist
attacks are intended to have a psychological impact that outweighs the physical
damage they cause. The Islamic State itself has a long history of conducting brutal actions to foster panic.
In 2006 and 2007, the Islamic State's
predecessor, al Qaeda in Iraq, included large quantities of chlorine in vehicle bombs deployed against U.S. and
Iraqi troops in an attempt to produce mass casualties. The explosives in the
vehicle bombs killed more people than the chlorine did, and after several
unsuccessful attempts, al Qaeda in Iraq gave up on its chlorine bombings
because the results were not worth the effort. Al Qaeda in Iraq also included
chemical artillery rounds in improvised explosive devices used in attacks
against American troops in Iraq on several occasions. Again, these attacks
failed to produce mass casualties. Finally, according to human rights
organizations, the Islamic State appears to have recently used some artillery
rounds containing mustard gas against its enemies in Syria; the group
presumably recovered the rounds from a former Saddam-era chemical weapons facility
in Iraq or from Syrian stockpiles.
The problem, then, lies not with the Islamic
State's intent but instead with its capability to obtain and weaponize the
Ebola virus. Creating a biological weapon is far more difficult than using a
chemical such as chlorine or manufactured chemical munitions. Contrary to how
the media frequently portrays them, biological weapons are not easy to obtain, they are not easy to deploy effectively and
they do not always cause mass casualties.
The Difficulty of Weaponization
Ebola and terrorism are not new. Nor is the
possibility of terrorist groups using the Ebola virus in an attack. As we have
previously noted, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo attempted to obtain the Ebola virus as part of its biological warfare
program. The group sent a medical team to Africa under the pretext of being aid
workers with the intent of obtaining samples of the virus. It failed in that mission,
but even if it had succeeded, the group would have faced the challenge of
getting the sample back to its biological warfare laboratory in Japan. The
Ebola virus is relatively fragile. Its lifetime on dry surfaces outside of a
host is only a couple of hours, and while some studies have shown that the
virus can survive on surfaces for days when still in bodily fluids, this
requires ideal conditions that would be difficult to replicate during
transport.
If the group had been able to get the virus
back to its laboratory, it would have then faced the challenge of reproducing
the Ebola virus with enough volume to be used in a large-scale biological
warfare attack, similar to its failed attacks on Tokyo and other Japanese
cities in which the group sprayed thousands of gallons of botulinum toxin and
Anthrax spores. Reproducing the Ebola virus would present additional challenges
because it is an extremely dangerous virus to work with. It has infected
researchers, even when they were working in laboratories with advanced
biosafety measures in place. Although Aum Shinrikyo had a large staff of
trained scientists and a state-of-the-art biological weapons laboratory, it was
still unable to effectively weaponize the virus.
The challenges Aum Shinrikyo's biological weapons
program faced would be multiplied for the Islamic State. Aum Shinrikyo
operatives were given a great deal of operational freedom until their plans
were discovered after the 1995 sarin attacks on the Tokyo subway. (The group's
previous biological weapons attacks were so unsuccessful that nobody knew they
had been carried out until after its members were arrested and its chemical and
biological weapons factories were raided.) Unlike the Japanese cult, the
Islamic State's every move is under heavy scrutiny by most of the world's
intelligence and security agencies. This means jihadist operatives would have
far more difficulty assembling the personnel and equipment needed to construct
a biological weapons laboratory. Since randomly encountering an infected Ebola
patient would be unreliable, the group would have to travel to a country
impacted by the outbreak. This would be a difficult task for the group to
complete without drawing attention to itself. Furthermore, once group members
reached the infected countries, they would have to enter quarantined areas of
medical facilities, retrieve the samples and then escape the country unnoticed,
since they could not count on randomly encountering an infected Ebola patient.
Even if Islamic State operatives were somehow
able to accomplish all of this -- without killing themselves in the process --
Ebola is not an ideal biological warfare vector. The virus is hard to pass from
person to person. In fact, on average, its basic reproductive rate (the average
amount of people that are infected by an Ebola patient) is only between one and
two people. There are far more infectious diseases such as measles, which has a
basic reproductive rate of 12-18, or smallpox, which has a basic reproductive
rate of five to seven. Even HIV, which is only passed via sexual contact or
intravenous blood transmission, has a basic reproductive rate of two to
five.
Ebola's Weakness as a Weapon
The Ebola disease is also somewhat slow to take
effect, and infected individuals do not become symptomatic and contagious for
an average of 8-10 days. The disease's full incubation period can last anywhere
from two to 21 days. As a comparison, influenza, which can be transmitted as
quickly as three days after being contracted, can be spread before symptoms begin
showing. This means that an Ebola attack would take longer to spread and would
be easier to contain because infected people would be easier to identify.
Besides the fact that Ebola can only be passed
through the bodily fluids of a person showing symptoms at the time, the virus
in those bodily fluids must also somehow bypass the protection of a person's
skin. The infectious fluid must enter the body through a cut or abrasion, or
come into contact with the mucus membranes in the eyes, nose or mouth. This is
different from more contagious viruses like measles and smallpox, which are
airborne viruses and do not require any direct contact or transfer of bodily
fluids. Additionally, the Ebola virus is quite fragile and sensitive to light,
heat and low-humidity environments, and bleach and other common disinfectants
can kill it. This means it is difficult to spread the virus by contaminating
surfaces with it. The only way to infect a large amount of people with Ebola
would be to spray them with a fluid containing the virus, something that would
be difficult to do and easily detectable.
Thiessen's piece suggested that the Islamic
State might implement an attack strategy of infecting suicide operatives with
Ebola and then having them blow themselves up in a crowded place, spraying
people with infected bodily fluids. One problem with this scenario is that it
would be extremely difficult to get an infected operative from the group's
laboratory to the United States without being detected. As we have discussed
elsewhere, jihadist groups have struggled to get operatives to the West to
conduct conventional terrorist attacks using guns and bombs, a constraint that
would also affect their ability to deploy a biological weapon.
Even if a hostile group did mange to get an operative
in place, it would still face several important obstacles. By the time Ebola
patients are highly contagious, they are normally very ill and bedridden with
high fever, fatigue, vomiting and diarrhea, meaning they are not strong enough
to walk into a crowded area. The heat and shock of the suicide device's
explosion would likely kill most of the virus. Anyone close enough to be
exposed to the virus would also likely be injured by the blast and taken to a
hospital, where they would then be quarantined and treated for the virus.
Biological weapons look great in the movies,
but they are difficult and expensive to develop in real life. That is why we
have rarely seen them used in terrorist attacks. As we have noted for a decade
now, jihadists can kill far more people with far less expense and effort by utilizing traditional terrorist tactics, which makes the threat of a
successful attack using the Ebola virus extremely unlikely.
Scott Stewart, Stratfor, October 23, 2014
"Evaluating
Ebola as a Biological Weapon is republished with permission of
Stratfor."
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