Does terrorism work? It depends what the aim of the perpetrator is – and in the case of Friday night’s Magdeburg Christmas market attack it’s not as clear cut as it may have seemed in the immediate aftermath.
When the suspect, 50-year-old Saudi doctor Taleb A., drove through the market in an act that killed several people and injured scores more, the Western world was immediately cast back to December 2016, when Tunisian man Anis Amri ploughed a truck through a Berlin Christmas market in a deadly attack for which Islamic State later boasted credit.
