Following the 9/11 attacks, successive U.S. administrations have promulgated three consistent objectives: First, to prevent additional mass casualty attacks on our homeland. Second, to find and punish those responsible. And third, to shatter the larger transnational terrorist movement’s capability and capacity to be a future threat.
But when extremist groups walk away from negotiations—as happens ten per cent of the time—they often get crushed. Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers pioneered the suicide vest. It was the only terrorist group to assassinate two world leaders—India’s Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991, and the Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa, in 1993. At its peak, it controlled strategic chunks of the country. But years of sporadic peace talks broke down in 2006. In 2009, the Sri Lankan military crushed the Tigers in a relentless offensive.
The news that researchers have recreated an extinct cousin to the smallpox virus using only commercially available technology and items purchased over the Internet renews concerns that bioterrorists could do the same if detailed information about the methods were published.
The surge in pirate activity in Somalia’s waters has been perplexing, not least since it contradicts popular expert opinion, which posits that sea-piracy is in a state of terminal decline in the Gulf of Aden. With NATO, the European Union, India, China and Japan still maintaining an active security presence in the region, regularly deploying warships to escort merchant traffic, maritime observers feel pirates have neither motivation nor incentive to carry out fresh attacks.
Lone wolves are an old problem, but in recent decades, the number of attacks by them has grown. And it won’t fall anytime soon: ISIS has embraced the tactic, and recent successes may well inspire copycats. And although lone wolves usually kill few people, they have an outsize political impact. In both the United States and Europe, they are fuelling Islamophobia, isolating Muslim communities, and empowering populist demagogues.
This past year brought no relief to those fighting the scourge of terrorism. Terrorists carried out horrific attacks around the globe, including at airports in Brussels and Istanbul, at crowded festivals in Berlin, Nice, and Baghdad, at restaurants in Bangladesh, and at various locations throughout Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
Produced annually by the Institute for Economics and Peace, the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) analyses and studies the direct and indirect impact of terrorism on 163 countries. This year’s results present a juxtaposition of the dynamics of terrorism in modern society. On one hand, they show a 10% fall (since last year) in the number of deaths attributed to terrorist incidents – the first decline since 2010. On the other hand, the overall score on this year’s index has deteriorated by 6%, due to many countries experiencing record levels of terrorism.
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Unsurprisingly, terrorism remains the preferred tactic of relatively weaker non-state actors who believe they can achieve their political objectives through violence. There has been a slight change in the perpetrators responsible for the most attacks. The Taliban replaced the self-proclaimed Islamic State as the number-one global perpetrator for terrorism attacks, with 1,093, which represents an alarming increase of 69 percent since 2013.
TThe indisputably courageous political activism of the Syrian people against a rather intolerant Assad regime, which has led to the Syrian civil war can be very well understood in the context of Syria’s economic situation.
The vacuums left by the United States have benefited the most violent and sectarian elements of the region, fueling civil conflict and allowing the Islamic State to expand its territorial reach. Although al Qaeda in Iraq was defeated, the failure to address the country’s underlying issues allowed IS — the son of AQI — to emerge.
