Terrorism Still Thriving, State Department Says
by Jim Lobe
Four years into the “global war on terror,” terrorism appears to be thriving, according to the 2005 edition of the annual “Country Reports on Terrorism” released here Friday by the U.S. State Department.
While the control and reach of al Qaeda, which carried out the spectacular Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, have weakened over the past four years, smaller autonomous groups and individuals that are “extremely difficult to detect or counter” have increasingly moved into the vacuum, according to the 265-page report.
And while its ability to mount “global acts of terrorism” has diminished, “AQ and its affiliates political will has not been undermined” and it remains the most prominent terrorist threat to the United States and its allies, the report stated.
At the same time, Washington’s anti-terrorist campaign was bolstered during 2005 by cooperation from three governments – Sudan, Libya, and Syria – that the State Department itself lists as “state sponsors of terror,” according to the report.
In a rare note of public praise and in marked contrast to recent statement by senior George W. Bush administration figures, the State Department noted that Damascus “made efforts to limit the movement of foreign fighters into Iraq.”
The report still labels Iran as the “most active” state sponsor of terrorism, citing its support for Hizballah and Palestinian groups and for “insurgents in Iraq” and Tehran’s refusal to hand over al Qaeda officials it claims to have arrested after the Taliban ouster. Other “state sponsors,” besides Syria, Libya and Sudan, include Cuba and North Korea.
Iraq itself “remains a key front in the global war on terror,” according to the report, but has not yet become “the safe-haven for terrorism that Afghanistan was before September 11,” despite efforts by al Qaeda and other predominantly Sunni groups to achieve that goal.
Still, Iraq accounted for nearly one-third of the 11,111 terrorist attacks tallied by the State Department during 2005, and for some 55 percent of the 14,600 people killed as a result of those attacks.
Those global totals were an all-time record; indeed, the total number of incidents cited in the 2004 report was 3,129 – less than a third of the 2005 tally.
But State Department officials were quick to emphasize that they had made critical changes in their methodology in 2005 that necessarily resulted in sharp increases in the number of incidents included in the report. This year’s results, they said, could not be compared with those of previous years.
While past reports were based on acts of “international terrorism” – that is, incidents involving the citizens or territory of two or more countries – the latest report counted all confirmed acts of “terrorism,” which it defined as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”
Nonetheless, the tripling of terrorist incidents was seized on by Amnesty International USA as evidence that the U.S. strategy in its war on terror was failing. “Perhaps the United States government needs to honestly assess if it’s pursuing the best strategy in winning the ‘war on terror,’” said Eric Olson, acting director of AIUSA’s government relations office.
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