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Terrorismforskaren Raffaello Pantucci avhandlar och kategoriserar ensamvargar i A Typology of Lone Wolves: Preliminary Analysis of Lone Islamist Terrorists. Svenske självmordsbombaren Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly nämns som exempel på att ensamvargarna kan ses som en del i al-Qaidas taktik, i inledningen av boken:

"... within an Islamist context, it is possible to discern a growing importance and emphasis being placed by influential ideologues like Abu Musab al-Suri and Anwar al-Awlaki on individual jihad and of small cells taking up action wherever they are able to in furtherance of Al Qaeda’s more general global ambitions.Similarly, Al Qaeda’s American spokesman Adam Gadahn openly praised Nidal Hassan Malik (the man who opened fire at Fort Hood), calling upon other Muslims to follow his lead. According to prominent terrorism analyst Bruce Hoffman, Al Qaeda’s new strategy ‘is to empower and motivate individuals to commit acts of violence completely outside any terrorist chain of command.’

While it may be a slightly premature conclusion to reach that it is such ideologues’ influence that is behind the growth of the phenomenon of Lone Wolves using extreme violent Islamism as their justification, it would seem as though Al Qaeda is starting to move in this direction. In the January 2011 edition of Inspire magazine, AQAP published an article that praised Roshonara Choudhry (the British woman who tried to kill MP Steven Timms and who will be looked at in greater detail later) and Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly (an Iraqi-Swede who blew himself up outside a shopping mall in Stockholm around Christmas 2010) and offered them as individuals drawn by a ‘borderless idea.’ Clearly there is an interest from Al Qaeda ideologues to try to bridge the gap between the random nature of these individuals and their jihadist global outlook."