This assumes there is some incentive for terrorists to attack big cities. It could be strategically valuable for terrorists to just randomly attack tiny village

This assumes there is some incentive for terrorists to attack big cities. It could be strategically valuable for terrorists to just randomly attack tiny villages, where the response time for emergency services equipped to deal with heavily-armed moderately-trained militants is long enough for them to wipe basically the whole place out, and after which they can strike fear into any village and cause the governments to spend a ton turning all of them into fortresses.