Abstract
The world faces the ongoing challenge of terrorism and extremism, which threaten the stability of nations, the security of their citizens, and the integrity of political, economic, and social systems. Given the complexity and multifaceted nature of this phenomenon, combating it requires a collective effort, with tailored methods to address its various aspects. Identifying the terrorist organization responsible for an attack is a critical step in combating terrorism. Historical data plays a pivotal role in this process, providing insights that can inform prevention and response strategies. With advancements in technology and artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in military applications, there is growing interest in utilizing these developments to enhance national and regional security against terrorism. Central to this effort are terrorism databases, which serve as rich resources for data on armed organizations, extremist entities, and terrorist incidents. The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) stands out as one of the most widely used and accessible resources for researchers. Recent progress in machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and natural language processing (NLP) offers promising avenues for improving the identification and classification of terrorist organizations. This study introduces a framework designed to classify and predict terrorist groups using bidirectional recurrent units and self-attention mechanisms, referred to as BiGRU-SA. This approach utilizes the comprehensive data in the GTD by integrating textual features extracted by DistilBERT with features that show a high correlation with terrorist organizations. Additionally, the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique with Tomek links (SMOTE-T) was employed to address data imbalance and enhance the robustness of our predictions. The BiGRU-SA model captures temporal dependencies and contextual information within the data. By processing data sequences in both forward and reverse directions, BiGRU-SA offers a comprehensive view of the temporal dynamics, significantly enhancing classification accuracy. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we compared ten models, including six traditional ML models and four DL algorithms. The proposed BiGRU-SA framework demonstrated outstanding performance in classifying 36 terrorist organizations responsible for terrorist attacks, achieving an accuracy of 98.68%, precision of 96.06%, sensitivity of 96.83%, specificity of 99.50%, and a Matthews correlation coefficient of 97.50%. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, the proposed model outperformed others, confirming its effectiveness and accuracy in the classification and prediction of terrorist organizations.