UNSC calls for new strategies to counter terrorists using AI, drones

UNITED NATIONS — The Security Council has called for adapting strategies to fight terrorists using new technologies like artificial intelligence, drones, and satellites as it commemorated the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre.

"The Security Council reiterated its commitment to countering terrorism, an acute threat to international peace and security," it said in a press statement adopted unanimously on Friday.

"The terrorist threat is evolving, and the council must adopt its response and establish an effective system to counter terrorist use of new technologies, drones, satellites, social media, artificial intelligence," the statement said.

The Council, riven by power conflicts, showed an unusual show of solidarity at the meeting called by France on terrorist threats to international peace in observance of the 2001 attacks by al-Qaida, a group it has declared terrorist.

The 15 members observed a minute of silence to honour the victims of the attacks against the US, the biggest of which was on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre seven kilometres away in Manhattan where nearly 3,000 people were killed.

US Permanent Representative Mike Walz said every country on the Council had been hit by terrorism "and maybe this explains why, on a council that often disagrees on almost everything, sometimes it seems like, condemning terrorism remains one of those few things we all do together and do so unanimously".

Walsh, who, as an officer in the US Army's elite Green Beret fighting force, had served in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, said, "Millions around the world have since been murdered, maimed, displaced, recruited, forced to live under terrorism's shadow".

Council President Jerome Bonnafont said during the meeting that terrorists use "our own innovations against us" by hijacking new technologies and harnessing new financing systems.

Council members had earlier visited the World Trade Centre monument, with the names of the victims etched on black granite around a pool of water.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who is on a visit to India for the BRICS summit, called the heinous terrorist attacks "an assault on humanity itself" that "left an enduring mark on our world".