DAR AL HARB/ISLAM: THE ATTACKS ARE NOT NECESSARILY ESCALATING BUT THEY ARE BECOMING DEADLIER

Are terrorist attacks getting deadlier?
Casualties mount as `unholy alliances that 5 years ago were unthinkable are now being considered'
by Olivia Ward
FOREIGN AFFAIRS REPORTER

Seven years ago today, Islamist guerrillas killed nine Algerians in a highway ambush and bomb attack.

A makeshift bomb was defused in eastern Chechnya, 400 kilograms of explosives seized on the railway tracks in southern Russia, and a bomb plot by dissident Northern Ireland republicans fizzled in turbulent Portadown.

Fast forward to the roundup of terrorism news in our pages today – with beheadings, bombings and gun battles splashed across the globe – and the year 2000 looks like the good old days.

As American politicians debate troop withdrawal from Iraq, a swelling chorus of voices are blaming the four-year-old invasion for an upswing in global terrorism and insecurity at home.

The invasion, they say, was oxygen for anti-Western jihadi groups whose radical views repel many Muslims but attract a cadre of the young and restless who dream of destroying their "ideological enemy."

U.S. State Department figures add to the gloom, showing a worldwide spike in terrorism of more than 25 per cent in the last year alone, mostly due to attacks in Iraq. But the recent foiled bombings in London and Glasgow – two years after the disastrous London transit attacks – are reminders of a real and present danger to the West.

Meanwhile, weary lines of international travellers submit to lengthy searches of their hand luggage, shoes, electronics and airport novels as they wait for their holidays to get off the tarmac. The unlucky may be taken aside, questioned, or even "rendered" to brutal overseas jails.

There is no end in sight. "This is not the kind of war where you can measure success with conventional numbers," State Department official Frank Urbanic admonished reporters last April. "We cannot aspire to a single decisive battle that will break the enemy's back, nor can we hope for a signed peace accord to mark victory."

But is our fear of out-of-control terrorism grounded in reality?

Surprisingly, one of the world's largest terrorism databases indicates the answer is a qualified No.

"It isn't that attacks themselves are escalating, but an increasing number of casualties and fatalities are resulting from each attack," says Gary Ackerman, research director for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. "In other words, they are getting deadlier."

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Pertinent Links:

1) Are terrorist attacks getting deadlier?