User:Haberstr/History of terrorism organized chronologically & geographically

My major abridgement of the existing 'history of terrorism' (as of 3/23/09) 'terrorist group' material is not intended to disparage the great effort expended to develop that material. My main intentions were to reduce the overall size of the entry to acceptable Wikipedia limits, to create space for essential introductory sections, and to revise group names out of section titles. I suggest the detailed material eliminated should be moved to the various main articles for those groups and incidents. For example, Narodnaya Volya should be improved by the good material developed for its 'history of terrorism' subsection. In my cuts, I tried to keep the specifics about (ostensibly) 'terrorist' acts, and, if possible, to edit out details about non-terrorist activities.

HISTORY OF TERROR AND TERRORISM

The history of terror and terrorism is a chronology of prominent events, individuals, groups and entities popularly associated with or associated by prominent scholars with terror and terrorism. The subsections are organized by state or region. The preliminary section below, “Definitional issues,” points out several of the major historical and present-day issues, transformations, and possible expansions in how “terrorism” and “terror” have been defined.

Definitional issues

Main article: Definition of terrorism

In part because the word is politically and emotionally charged, there has never been an internationally agreed upon definition of terrorism, nor is there likely to be one in the foreseeable future, according to Walter Laqueur, a major historian of terrorism. The diversity of definitions is indicated by a 1988 United States Army study, which found over 100 definitions of the word with 22 definitional elements. Laqueur has written that “Any definition of political terrorism venturing beyond noting the systematic use of murder, injury and destruction or the threats of such acts toward achieving political ends is bound to lead to endless controversies.” The Handbook of International Law states that “[o]nly the elements of the use or threat of force and seeking to create a climate of fear seem to be generally agreed.” Such disagreements occurred during the 1970s and 1980s at the United Nations, when its attempts to define terrorism foundered primarily on differences over use of the term to describe violence in the context of anti-colonial struggles. In November 2004, a United Nations Security Council report, noting that its definition did not constitute international law, described terrorism as any act "intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act." To avoid the editorializing implicit in the use of disputed and emotionally charged terminology, many major media agencies, notably the BBC and Reuters, avoid the phrase "terrorist" (or "freedom fighter") except when it is in attributed quotes, in favor of comparatively neutral and more specific terms such as "militant", "guerrilla", "assassin", "insurgent", "paramilitary" or "militia."

State terror and state terrorism

UN efforts to define terrorism have also been hampered by disagreement over whether state actors or only non-state actors can commit acts of terrorism. Also, however the term is defined, the United Nations, international alliances and states generally have limited their international legal and security focus to terror employed by non-state actors.

The Handbook of International Law describes state terrorism as referring either to terrorist acts committed by one state against another or its nationals, or to “widespread acts of cruelty committed by a state against its own people,” by rulers such as Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot. However, terrorism scholar Gus Martin extends this by defining state terrorism as “[t]errorism from above committed by governments, . . . directed externally against adversaries in the international domain or internally against domestic enemies.”

Historical roots of terror and terrorism

States probably preceded non-state groups in the systematic use of terror. For example, following the revolt led by Spartacus in the first century BC, the Roman state intimidated its slave populace by lining roads with the crucified bodies of defeated slaves. Non-state groups may have first employed terrorist methods in the first century AD ( Sicarii Zealots) or in the 11th century (the Al-Hashshashin). Although the concept was unstated, "Propaganda of the deed" – the notion that a violent and spectacular act would intimidate or spark revolt against an enemy, and for some scholars an indicator of terrorism – may have first been employed by the Sicarii Zealots, an offshoot of the Zealots who had rebelled against Roman rule. The Sicarii saw Jewish high priests and wealthy merchants of the day as collaborators with the Romans, and felt justified killing them. The killings began in the AD 60s. The Sicarii (the word means “dagger men” ) reputedly hid short daggers under their cloaks, mingled in throngs at major festivals, and then murdered their victims and disappeared into the panicked crowds.

Artistic rendering of Hassan-i Sabbah.

Al-Hashshashin (a.k.a. the Assassins), in contrast to the Sicaris, focused on the assassination of prominent political leaders; and some scholars are uncomfortable classifying assassination as terrorism, although the dramatic way the killings were carried out was meant to terrify and intimidate al-Hashshashin opponents. Al-Hashshashin were an offshoot of the Ismā'īlī sect of Shia Muslims. Led by Hassan-i Sabbah and opposed to Fatimid rule, the Hashshashin militia seized Alamut and other fortress strongholds across Persia in the late eleventh century. The Hashshashin did not have a large enough army to challenge their enemies directly, so they assassinated city governors and military commanders both as retribution and in order to curry favor among more militarily powerful neighbors.

Several centuries later, in the November 5 1605 Gunpowder Plot, which some scholars read as anticipating that variety of modern terrorist acts undertaken against key symbols of state power, Guy Fawkes led a group of conspirators in an attempt to destroy the English Parliament by detonating a large quantity of gunpowder they had placed under the building. Fawkes’ men planned to kill King James I and the members of both houses of Parliament, and, in the resulting anarchy, implement a coup and restore the Catholic faith to England. The plan was betrayed and thwarted. The conspirators' intended strike at a symbol of power has been seen as a precursor to the '9/11' attack on the Word Trade Center.

The Reign of Terror (1793-1794)

Main article: The Reign of Terror

"Enemies of the people" headed for the guillotine during the Reign of Terror.

The Reign of Terror (September 5 1793 – July 28 1794) or simply The Terror (French: la Terreur) was a period of eleven months during the French Revolution when the ruling Jacobins employed violence, including mass executions by guillotine, in order to intimidate their enemies and compel obedience to the state. The Jacobins sometimes referred to themselves as “terrorists,” and the word originated at that time.. Some modern scholars, however, do not consider the Reign of Terror a form of terrorism, in part because it was carried out by the French state. The number of those killed ascertained to have been executed by the Jacobins total approximately 17,000 though, since the records are by now means complete, many historians calculate that perhaps 40,000 people died as a consequence of the reign of terror.

The nineteenth century

During the 19th century the word terrorism began to be applied to non-governmental groups, in particular to violent advocates of Anarchism, who were very active during the century. The term was also applied to individuals such as John Brown, to a racist group, Ku Klux Klan, and to nationalist groups such as the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. Modern historians have also seen the Civil War, and in particular the conduct of General William Sherman’s forces, as the first large-scale wartime effort to terrorize and subdue a civilian population. Perhaps the era’s most important and influential practitioner of political violence was the anti-tsarist group Narodnaya Volya, which assassinated Tsar Alexander II in early 1881.

The United States

John Brown in 1859

Between 1856 and 1859, Abolitionist John Brown (1800 - 1859) took up arms against slavery, and there is scholarly disagreement whether his military-style acts should be considered acts of terrorism. His most famous armed attack was in 1859, on the armory at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Local forces would soon recapture the facility and Brown was tried and executed for treason.. Brown's death made him a martyr among some abolitionists, and a hero to some on Union side of the Civil War. While it is also disputed whether terrorism is the proper term for describing the conduct of states during wartime, the historian J. F. C. Fuller describes General William Sherman as the first of the “modern totalitarian generals” for his conduct during the Civil War, as he “made war universal, waged it on his enemy's people and not only on armed men, and made terror the linchpin of his strategy.” Soon after the Civil War, six Confederate Civil War veterans from Tennessee formed the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a white supremacist group. With the open or covert support of many state governments and local police, the KKK spread into nearly every southern U.S. state, using violence and acts of terror such as cross burning to oppress and intimidate African Americans and other groups.

Propaganda of the deed

An unyielding advocate of Italian federalism, Carlo Pisacane was arguably the originator of the theory of 'propaganda by deed'. The idea exerted great influence on revolutionaries and terrorists, in Europe and especially Russia. “The propaganda of the idea is a chimera,” Pisacane wrote. “Ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former, and the people will not be free when they are educated, but educated when they are free.” Pisacane and others believed that targeted violence could draw attention to a cause, and inform, educate and rally the public behind it. Individuals inspired by Pisacane’s credo attempted many assassinations between 1878 and 1920.The Russian anti-tsarist group Narodnaya Volya was perhaps the first group to put the credo into practice.

Russia

In a mid-19th century Russia growing impatient with the slow pace of Tsarist reforms, anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin maintained that progress was impossible without destruction. Bakunin’s advocacy coincided with technological developments, of increasingly powerful, stable, and affordable explosives, and therefore a closing gap between the firepower available to the state and dissidents. Significant too was the unplanned shooting by Vera Zasulich in 1878 of an elite military officer she saw beating a person of a lower class, and the wave of anti-tsarist feeling the incident generated.

Inspired by Bakunin and Zasulich to take up political violence, populists in 1878 founded Narodnaya Volya (Народная Воля in Russian, known as People’s Will in English). The group also put ‘propaganda of the deed’ into practice, and this inspired later political and revolutionary violence: they believed targeted killing of 'leaders of oppression' would inspire and mobilize popular rebellion, and that the developing technologies of the age - symbolized by bombs and bullets - enabled revolutionaries to strike directly and with discrimination. The group espoused a “direct struggle” philosophy, an early manifesto advocating “demonstration of the possibility of struggling against the government, [and] in this manner lifting the revolutionary spirit of the people and its faith in the success of the cause. . .” The group killed several prominent political figures and, on March 13, 1881, assassinated Russia’s Tsar Alexander II. However, the killing failed to spark the expected revolution, and Alexander III was a more oppressive leader than his predecessor. Russian authorities imprisoned or executed nearly all of the group, and it effectively ceased existence by the mid-1880s.

Ottoman Empire

Inspired by Narodnaya Volya, several nationalist groups in the weakening Ottoman Empire began using propaganda of the deed in the 1890s, often for the purpose of eliciting intervention by Europe’s Great Powers. There were two prominent Armenian groups, the Hunchakian Revolutionary Party and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. The goal of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, many of whose members had been part of Narodnaya Volya or the Hunchakian Revolutionary Party, was to spark European intervention that would force the Ottoman Empire to cede independence to its Armenian territories. On August 24, 1896, twenty-six members commandeered the Imperial Ottoman Bank in Constantinople, demanding an Armenian state and threatening to blow up the bank. The demands were not met and the crackdown that followed destroyed the group. In the Ottoman Empire’s Macedonian territories, the nationalist revolutionary Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) was founded by Hristo Tatarchev in 1893. In pursuit of an independent Macedonia, the IMRO assassinated prominent political figures and tried to provoke uprisings. On July 20, 1903, the group incited an uprising in the town of Monastir, declared the town independent and asked European powers to intervene in their support. The demands were ignored and the rebellion crushed.

The early twentieth century

While the century began with the assassination in 1901 of US President William McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, terrorism early in the twentieth century would come to be associated primarily with nationalism (in fact, a Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, played a central role in setting off World War I) and the totalitarian state terror practiced by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Many nationalist groups employed terror, with the Irish Republican Army’s campaign against the British in the 1910s being a major ideological and methodological forerunner and inspiration to future nationalist political violence. In the 1930s, the Zionist groups Irgun and Lehi bombed civilian areas in pursuit of creation of the state of Israel. Like the IRA and the Zionist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood used bombings and assassinations in an attempt to free Egypt from British control. The 1930s also saw the rise of the totalitarian Soviet Union and Germany, whose dictators Stalin and Hitler practiced ‘terrorism from above’ on an unprecedented scale.

The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand (1914)

Main article: Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

On June 28 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot to death in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, by Gavrilo Princip, one of a group of six assassins. The murders produced widespread shock across Europe. The Austro-Hungarian Empire presented to Serbia a list of demands focused in part on ending the funding and operations of organizations which may have provided support for the assassination. Serbia conditionally accepted only some of those demands, Austria-Hungary broke off diplomatic relations and soon declared war, and this set in motion a series of events which led to World War I.

Europe

Ireland

Shortly after the failed revolution of April, 1916 (the Easter Rising or Easter Rebellion), independence-minded Irish militias joined with Michael Collins to found the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The IRA and its tactics – which included terrorization of the enemy’s colonial police force and citizens loyal to the occupying power – would serve as inspiration to many non-state revolutionary groups, and to British Special Operations Executive (SOE) efforts to aid WWII resistance groups. On November 21, 1920, which came to be known as Bloody Sunday, the IRA simultaneously carried out attacks on more than 300 police stations, killed a dozen police and intelligence officers and burned down the Liverpool docks and warehouses. Ireland would become ungovernable except by military means, and London agreed to a 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty that gave Dublin authority over an independent Irish nation which encompassed 26 of the island's 32 counties.

State terror in 1930s Germany and Soviet Union

The 1930s also saw the rise of the totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union and Germany of Stalin and Hitler, both of which employed terror on an enormous scale. However, and unlike some of the Jacobins who ruled France during its Reign of Terror, the regimes never applied the words ‘terror’ or 'terrorist' to the police and the NKVD (in the Communist Soviet Union) and Gestapo (in Nazi Germany) agents who enforced state repression, but only to those who opposed the two dictatorships. Historian R. J. Overy writes, “What is now defined as ruthless state terror was viewed by Hitler and Stalin as state protection against the enemies of the people.” Effectively establishing and reinforcing obedience to regime and national ideology, both regimes used surveillance, imprisonment (often in Soviet gulags or German labor or concentration camps), torture, and executions against enemies of the state real and imagined. There were differences between the two terror regimes, however; one was the “arbitrariness” of Stalinist terror, which contrasted with “the absolute predictability” of state terror as practiced by the Nazis. Writes historian of Stalin’s ‘Great Purge,’ which reached its peak between 1936 and 1938, “Some were victims of terror for deviating from the party line – others were victims for no apparent reason other than Stalin's moodiness.”[14] No one was above suspicion except Stalin himself.[ http://www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture10.html] Meanwhile, in Hitler’s Germany, those who “were not Jews, Slavs, Gypsies or communists, liberals, non-Germans, or insane or weak,” were generally free of arbitrary terror.[15]

The Middle East

British Mandate of Palestine

[Image:King david hotel bombing1.jpg|left|thumb|The King David Hotel after the bombing]] Attacks on civilians were common in Palestine during the years preceding the founding of Israel in 1948. Two prominent clandestine militant groups on the Zionist side were Irgun and Lehi. Irgun, founded in 1931, attacked Arab civilians – bombing, for example, a crowded Arab market – and these attacks were early examples of non-state group political violence deliberately targeting civilians. The group also sought to end British rule, and, in addition to smuggling Jews into Palestine, it assassinated British police, commandeered government buildings, and sabotaged railways. Most active between 1945 and 1947, the group’s most famous attack was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, the British Military headquarters in Jerusalem, in which 91 soldiers and civilians died. Lehi (a.k.a. the Stern Gang) had splintered from Irgun in 1940 after Irgun signed a truce with the British. Lehi assassinated prominent politicians, for example (on November 6, 1944), Lord Moyne, the British Minister of State for the Middle East.

Egypt

The Muslim Brotherhood was a nationalist group founded in British-controlled Egypt in 1928 as a social-welfare and political-activism movement, but in the late 1940s it began to attack British soldiers and police stations and to assassinate prominent politicians it accused of collaborating with the British. In 1948, a group member assassinated Egyptian Prime Minister Nuqrashi. Egypt’s British-friendly government was overthrown in a 1952 military coup, but shortly thereafter the Muslim Brotherhood had to go underground in the face of a massive crackdown. After it was convicted in 1954 of attempting to assassinate Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, the group was banned in Egpyt until the early 1970s.

World War II

In Europe, the vast array of anti-Nazi guerilla, partisan, and resistance movements used what some scholars classify as terrorist tactics.. Resistance groups were aided and sometimes organized by Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), which drew many of its methods from those earlier employed by the Irish Republican Army. Resistance to Japanese occupation in Asia also sometimes employed tactics associated with terrorism. In China, for example, there were frequent assassinations of both ‘puppet’ and ‘anti-Japanese’ officials and civilians, and bombings of banks and government offices with many untargeted civilians losing their lives.

Casualties of a mass panic during a Japanese air raid in Chongqing

Some scholars consider the deliberate bombardment of civilian populations a form of state terror, and, during the military conflicts leading up to World War II and the war itself, terror bombing of enemy civilian populations in order to break morale was first put into action. Beginning early in the 1930s and with greatest intensity between 1938 and 1943, the Japanese used incendiary bombs against Chinese cities such as Shanghai, Wuhan and Chonging. Lord Cranborne, the British Under-Secretary of State For Foreign Affairs, commented on a 1937 bombing: "The military objective, where it exists, seems to take a completely second place. The main object seems to be to inspire terror by the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians..." In Europe in 1937, the bombardment of Guernica (April 26, 1937), carried out by Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe, caused widespread destruction and civilian deaths in the Basque town. According to the BBC, the goal of General Francisco Franco, commander of the nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War, was "to terrorize the people in the Basque region. . ." In May 1940, during World War II itself, the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam in an effort to force Dutch capitulation, and the threat to bomb Utrecht in the same fashion forced Netherlands’ surrender. In a bombing campaign against Britain called "the Blitz" (September, 1940, to May, 1941), Germany carried out intensive bombardment of British cities such as London and war industry centers such as Coventry. Britain, perhaps in response, adopted a bombing policy against German cities euphemistically called area bombardment whose objective was in part to ‘de-house’ and demoralize the German civilian population. The Dresden bombing (February 13-15, 1945) was an instance of area bombardment that left the city in ruins and claimed between 25,000 and 40,000 lives. Late in the war, in its air attacks on Japan, U.S. forces used a mix of incendiaries and high explosives to burn large sections of Japanese cities to the ground. A military aide to General Douglas MacArthur called an incendiary attack on Tokyo "one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history."

1945 to 1980

The post-war era saw a further rise in nationalism, with many World War II resistance groups quickly becoming powerful nationalist militias. The Việt Minh who had fought the Japanese would fight the returning French (and later the Americans), and elements of the Malayan resistance would fight the British during the Malayan Emergency. Inspired by Mao’s Chinese revolution of 1949 and Castro’s Cuban revolution of 1959, many national independence movements fused nationalist and socialist impulses. Whether any of these anti-colonial armies and guerilla armies were terrorist groups has been disputed, but most at times employed tactics generally regarded as terrorist. One anti-colonial revolt, the Mau Mau Uprising in [[Kenya], saw particularly widespread terrorist acts by the revolutionists and terrorism in the British colonial power’s response. Spain's ETA, Quebec’s FLQ, and factions of the Palestinian Territories’ PLO also employed what are generally considered terrorist tactics. In the late 1960s, groups such as Ireland’s Provisional IRA, Turkey’s PKK, and Armenian’s ASALA violently fought what they considered occupation of their homelands with methods characterized as terrorism.

The era also saw the U.S. and the Soviet Union carry on their cold war, in part through support or creation of irregular and guerilla forces targeted at the other side; some of these groups sometimes engaged in acts generally described as terrorism. For example, during the Vietnam War the Viet Cong received training from Soviet and Chinese military advisers, while in the 1980s Afghanistan the U.S. and Great Britain funded and trained Al Queda forces fighting the Soviets,

Meanwhile, in 1960s Japan, Europe, and the U.S., a revolutionary mood on college campuses gave rise to such violent leftist groups as the Japanese Red Army, the German Red Army Faction, the Italian Red Brigade, and the American Weather Underground; the groups sympathized with the Third World left and sought with bombings and assassinations to spark anti-capitalist revolutions.

The Middle East, North Africa and Western Asia

Algeria

Inspired by the Indochina rebellion that had forced France out of Vietnam, and supported by Egypt’s new President Gamel Abdel Nasser, Algerians began large-scale resistance to French occupation in 1954 with the founding of the Front de Liberation National (FLN). Against the French the nationalist group employed non-violent protest, conventional warfare, and violent tactics generally considered terrorist. One tactic employed by the FLN was to establish control over a rural Algerian village and coerce the peasants of that village to execute the French loyalists among them. On the night of October 31, 1954, the FLN’s coordinated wave of seventy bombings and shootings -- now known as the Toussaint attacks – targeted French military installations and the homes of Algerian loyalists. In 1955 the FLN staged an uprising against loyalists in Philipville, Algeria. The uprising -- and the heavy-handed response of the French government -- convinced many Algerians to support the FLN and the independence movement. The FLN eventually secured Algerian independence from France in 1962, and transformed itself into Algeria’s ruling party.

Israel and the Palestinians

As a result or in the wake of Israel’s 1948 war of independence, more than half of Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from Israel, and another exodus, of an estimated half million, took place after the 1967 war in which Israel occupied the remaining territory of the British Mandate of Palestine territory. Small nationalist and guerilla organizations, also inspired by Egypt’s Nasser and the Algerian independence movement, were created among the Palestinian refugee populations and among Palestinians in the West Bank, occupied by Jordan, and Gaza Strip, occupied by Egypt. The preeminent group became Fatah, a Palestinian nationalist group established in [[Kuwait] by Yassir Arafat in 1958. Fatah joined with other secular Palestinian nationalist groups to form the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964, and the PLO began armed operations in 1965. The PLO's membership is made up of separate and contentious paramilitary and political factions, the largest of which are Fatah, PFLP, and DFLP. Factions of the PLO have advocated or carried out acts generally considered terrorist. Fatah and PLO head Arafat publicly renounced terrorism in December 1988 on behalf of the PLO, but Israel has stated it has proof that Arafat continued to sponsor terrorism until his death in 2004.

Plaque in front of the Israeli athletes' quarters commemorating the victims of the Munich massacre.

The Fatah splinter group Black September was founded by Abu Iyad in 1970. The group is best known for seizing eleven Israeli athletes as hostages at the September 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. All of the athletes and five Black September operatives died during a gun battle with the West German police, in what became known to some as the Munich massacre. An operation to avenge the killings -- Operation Wrath of God -- was launched by Israel which killed civilians and dozens of members of the PLO and its factions.

Other factions of the PLO that launched operations generally considered terrorist were the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) (founded in 1967 by George Habash), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) (founded in 1968), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) (founded in 1969). The factions lost influence and funding with the rise of Hamas in the 1990s.

Turkey

Kurdish nationalism blossomed first in the early 20th century, was denied a nation of its own during the 1920s break up of the Ottoman Empire, and lay dormant until the 1970s. In 1978, the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (Kurdistan Workers Party) was founded by Abdullah Ocalan. Inspired by the Maoist theory of people's war, the group sought to create an independent Kurdish state consisting of parts of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. In 1984, the PKK transformed itself into a paramilitary organization and launched conventional attacks as well as bombings of Turkish governmental installations. Suppression of Kurdish nationalist militancy cost an estimated 30,000 lives. Authorities captured Öcalan in 1999; he was found guilty of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Europe

Cyprus

[[:Image:Grivas.gif|thumb|right|George Grivas]] The Greek National Organization of Cypriot Fighters (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston, or EOKA) was a nationalist group founded in British-controlled Cyprus in 1955. Its founder, George Grivas, was covertly supported by the Greek government. The group sought the expulsion of British troops from the island, self-determination, and union with Greece. To achieve these means, EOKA carried out a four year spree of IRA style shootings of British soldiers and police. EOKA also organized Hagannah style attacks on civilians. In December 1958 a cease-fire was declared and in 1960 Cyprus achieved independence from the United Kingdom; however, the settlement explicitly denied the possibility of a union between Cyprus and Greece.

Spain

Euskadi Ta Askatasuna or ETA (Basque for "Basque Homeland and Freedom"; IPA: [ˈɛːta]), is an armed Basque nationalist separatist organization. Founded in 1959 in response to General Francisco Franco's suppression of the Basque language and culture, ETA evolved from an advocate for traditional cultural ways to an armed revolutionary Marxist group demanding Basque independence. Many of ETA's victims are government officials. The group's first known victim was a police chief who was killed in 1968. In 1973, ETA operatives killed Franco’s apparent successor, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, by planting an underground bomb below his habitual parking spot outside a Madrid church. In 1995, an ETA car bomb almost killed Jose Maria Aznar, then the leader of the conservative Popular Party, who later served as Spain’s prime minister. The same year, investigators disrupted a plot to assassinate King Juan Carlos. More recently, in March 2008, ETA killed a former city councilman in northern Spain two days before an election. In 2003, the Spanish Supreme Court banned the Batasuna political party, which was considered the political arm of ETA, and successive efforts by Spanish governments to negotiate with ETA have failed.

Ireland and Great Britain

[[:Image:Manchesterbomb-devestation.jpg|thumb|200px|right|The devastation on Corporation Street in Manchester after the IRA bombing of 1996]] The Provisional Irish Republican Army is a Irish nationalist and leftist movement founded in December 1969 when several militants including Seán Mac Stíofáin broke off from the Official IRA and formed a new organization. Led by Mac Stíofáin in the early 1970s and a group around Gerry Adams since the late 1970s, the Provisional IRA sought to create an all-island Irish state. Between 1969 and 1997, during a period known as the Troubles, the group conducted an armed campaign, including bombings, gun attacks, assassinations and even mortar attacks on 10 Downing Street. On July 21, 1972, in an attack later known as Bloody Friday, the group set off twenty-two bombs, killing nine and injuring 130. On July 28, 2005, the Provisional IRA Army Council announced an end to its armed campaign. The IRA is believed to have been a major exporter of terrorism selling arms and providing training to other groups such as the FARC in Columbia and the PLO . In the case of the latter there has been a long held solidarity movement, which is shown by the many murals around Belfast.

Germany

Ulrike Meinhof

The Red Army Faction was a New Leftist group founded by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof in West Germany in 1968. Inspired by Che Guevara, Maoist socialism, and the Vietcong, the group sought to raise awareness of the Vietnamese and Palestinian independence movements through kidnappings, taking embassies hostage, bank robberies, assassinations, bombings, and attacks on US air bases. The group is best known for the “German Autumn” wave of terror in fall of 1977: on April 7, the RAF shot Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback; on July 30, they shot Jurgen Ponto, then head of the Dresdner Bank in a failed kidnapping attempt; and on September 5, they kidnapped Hanns Martin Schleyer (former SS and one of the most powerful industrialists in West Germany) and executed him four weeks later, on October 19.

Italy

Prime Minister Aldo Moro

The Italian Red Brigade was a New Leftist group founded by Renato Curcio in 1970. With PLO support, the group sought to create a revolutionary state and to separate Italy from the Western Alliance. On 16 March 1978, the Brigade kidnapped former Prime Minister Aldo Moro and murdered him 56 days later. The murder of Moro began an all-out assault against the Brigade by the Italian law enforcement and security forces. The murder of a popular political figure also drew condemnation from the Italian left-wing radicals and even the imprisoned ex-leaders of the Brigade. The Brigade lost most of their social support and the public opinion turned strongly against them. In 1984, the ailing Brigade split into two factions: the majority faction of the Communist Combatant Party (Red Brigades-PCC) and the minority of the Union of Combatant Communists (Red Brigades-UCC). The members of these groups carried out a handful of assassinations before almost all of them were arrested in 1989.

The Americas

Canada

The Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) was a Marxist nationalist group that sought to create an independent, socialist Québec. Georges Schoeters, who founded the group in 1963, had been inspired by Che Guevara and the FLN. The group sought the overthrow of the Quebec government, the independence of Quebec from Canada, and the establishment of a French-Canadian workers society. It organized bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations against politicians, soldiers, and civilians. On October 5, 1970, the FLQ kidnapped James Richard Cross, the British Trade Commissioner. Shortly afterwards, on October 10, group members kidnapped the Minister of Labor and Vice-Premier of Québec, Pierre Laporte, and killed him a week later. The events of October 1970 contributed to the loss of support for violent means to attain Québec independence, and increased support for the political party, the Parti Québécois, which took power in 1976.

The United States

[[:Image:WEATHERUNDERGROUND3.jpg|right|thumb|250px|Weathermen leaders John Jacobs (center) and Terry Robbins (with sunglasses) at the Days of Rage, Chicago, October 1969.]] In a time of protest centered on the Vietnam War, the late 1960s gave rise to radical politics and sometimes political violence. Prominent was the American Weather Underground (a.k.a. the Weathermen), a violent faction of the leftist group Students for a Democratic Society, which in 1969 collapsed and was taken over by the Weathermen. Weathermen leaders, inspired by China’s Maoism, the Black Panthers, and the 1968 student revolts in France, sought to raise awareness of its revolutionary anti-capitalist and anti-Vietnam War platform. It did so in part this by destroying symbols of government power. On October 7, 1969, the group held an anti-war demonstration in downtown Chicago and blew up a statue dedicated to the police who died in the 1886 Haymarket Riot. Over the next five years, the Weathermen bombed corporate offices, police stations, and Washington D.C. government sites such as the Pentagon. After U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War ended in 1975, most of the group disbanded. The late 60s and early 70s were also a time of rising ethnic pride and identity, of which the Black Panthers were an iconic symbol. The group was founded with the declared purpose of self-defense of African-Americans, and was famous for displaying, legally, loaded firearms. From the fall of 1967 through the end of 1969, nine police officers were killed and 56 were wounded in confrontations with the Panthers, and the confrontations were believed to have resulted in ten Panther deaths and an unknown number of injuries.. Writers such as Black Panther and socialist Angela Davis and American writer and political activist Ward Churchill have alleged that law enforcement officials went to great lengths to discredit and destroy the organization. In 1969 in New York City the Jewish Defense League (JDL) was founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, with a declared purpose the protection of Jews from harassment and antisemitism. FBI statistics show that, from 1980 to 1985, 15 terrorist attacks were attempted in the U.S. by members of the group. The National Consortium for the Study of Terror and Responses to Terrorism states that, during the JDL's first two decades of activity, it was an "active terrorist organization," and the FBI’s Mary Doran described the JDL in 2004 Congressional testimony as "a proscribed terrorist group". Rabbi Kahane later founded the far-right Israeli political party Kach.

Puerto Rico

A prominent incident on the U.S. mainland of political violence in the cause of Puerto Rican nationalism was a failed assassination attempt on U.S. President Harry Truman in 1950, during in which two people died. Two decades later, in 1974, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN, “Armed Forces of National Liberation”) was founded in Puerto Rico. For the next decade, the group used bombings and targeted killings of civilians and police to try to create an independent Puerto Rico. On April 3, 1975, FALN took responsibility for four nearly simultaneous bombings in New York City. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) currently classifies the FALN as a terrorist organization.

Colombia

Several paramilitary groups formed in Colombia in the 1960s and afterwards, including the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), and the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). The leftist and rightist groups have conducted numerous attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure and are classified by the United States as terrorist organizations.

South and East Asia

Japan

[[:Image:Kozo okamoto and fusako shigenobu.jpg|thumb|Kōzō Okamoto (L), JRA member]] The Japanese Red Army was a New Leftist group founded by Fusako Shigenobu in Japan in 1971. With support from the PFLP, the group murdered, hijacked a commercial Japanese aircraft, and sabotaged a Shell oil refinery in Singapore in an attempt to overthrow the Japanese government and start a world revolution. On May 30, 1972, Kōzō Okamoto and other group members launched a machine gun and grenade attack on Israel's Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, killing 26 people and injuring 80 others. Two of the three attackers then killed themselves with grenades.

Sri Lanka

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, (also called "LTTE" or Tamil Tigers) is a militant Tamil nationalist political and paramilitary organization based in northern Sri Lanka. Since it was founded in 1976, it has actively waged a secessionist resistance campaign that seeks to create an independent Tamil state in the north and east regions of Sri Lanka. This campaign has evolved into the Sri Lankan Civil War, one of longest-running armed conflicts in Asia. Since its formation, the LTTE has been headed by its founder, Velupillai Prabhakaran. The group has carried out a number of bombings, including a car bomb attack carried out on April 21, 1987 at a bus terminal in Colombo which killed 110 people.

Africa

South Africa

Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) was the military wing of the African National Congress, which was opposed to the racist apartheid policies of the South African government. MK launched its first guerrilla attacks against government installations on 16 December 1961. It was subsequently classified as a terrorist organization by the South African government and was banned. It waged a guerrilla campaign and was responsible for many bombings. Its first leader was Nelson Mandela and he was tried and imprisoned for his involvement in such acts. With the end of apartheid in South Africa, the Umkhonto we Sizwe was incorporated into the South African armed forces.

1980 to Present

Terrorism as an international phenomenon, already evident in the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, was more pervasive in this era, especially in relation to the United States and Israel, whose militaries and civilians were the common targets of cross-border violence. During this time as well, religious groups became much more active, while secular groups receded from prominence. An exemplar of the trends was the 9/11 assault on New York City’s Twin Towers by Al Queda, an Islamic group. However, secular acts of violence did not disappear and nationalism – represented by, for example, the Chechyan separatists and Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers – continued to motivate local and regional attacks against what were perceived to be occupying powers.

The Americas

Nicaragua

The Contras were a counter-revolutionary militia formed in 1979 to oppose Nicaragua's Sandinista government, funded in part by the United States. The Catholic Institute for International Relations summarized contra operating procedures in their 1987 human rights report: "The record of the contras in the field, as opposed to their official professions of democratic faith, is one of consistent and bloody abuse of human rights, of murder, torture, mutilation, rape, arson, destruction and kidnapping." Americas Watch - subsequently folded into Human Rights Watch - stated that "the Contras systematically engage in violent abuses... so prevalent that these may be said to be their principal means of waging war." It accused the Contras of targeting health care clinics and health care workers for assassination; kidnapping civilians, torturing civilians; executing civilians, including children, who were captured in combat; raping women; indiscriminately attacking civilians and civilian houses; seizing civilian property; and burning civilian houses in captured towns. Several U.S. news publications alleged that Americas Watch gave too much credence to alleged Contra abuses and systematically tried to discredit Nicaraguan human rights groups such as the Permanent Commission on Human Rights, which blamed the major human rights abuses on the Sandinistas.

Oklahoma City bombing (1995)

The Oklahoma City bombing was considered a terrorist act against the U.S. Government. The attack on April 19 1995 was aimed at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, a U.S. government office complex in downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The attack claimed 168 lives and left over 800 injured. Timothy McVeigh was convicted and executed for carrying out the bombing. McVeigh wanted revenge for U.S. government actions at Waco and Ruby Ridge, and he also said he hoped the spectacular act would inspire a popular rebellion against the U.S. government.

9/11 (2001)

September 11 2001 - The North and South towers of the World Trade Center burn.

In the September 11, 2001 attacks, nineteen attackers affiliated with al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners and crashed two of them into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. As a result of the attacks, both of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers completely collapsed. Not including the hijackers, nearly 3,000 people died during the attacks, and the attacks prompted drastic changes in United States foreign and domestic policy and security protocol, and placed national security at the forefront of American political dialogue. The War on Terrorism is the ongoing US military response to the attack, which is now the focus of American security and foreign policy.

The Middle East, North Africa and Western Asia

Al Qaeda

Al-Qaeda (Arabic: القاعدة‎, meaning "The Base") is an international Sunni Islamist extremist movement founded by Osama bin Laden in 1988 to end foreign influence in Muslim countries and create a new Islamic caliphate. On October 12, 2000, Al-Qaeda carried out the USS Cole bombing, suicide bombing the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Cole while it was harbored in the Yemeni port of Aden and killing seventeen U.S. sailors. On September 11. 2001, nineteen terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners and crashed two of them into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. As a result of the attacks, both of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers completely collapsed. Nearly 3,000 people died during the attacks.

Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and Lebanon

Hezbollah (“Party of God”) is an [[Islam|Islamic] political and paramilitary organization founded in Lebanon shortly after that country’s 1982 civil war. Inspired by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution, the group has sought an Islamic revolution in Lebanon and the destruction of the State of Israel and Israeli forces in Lebanon. Led by Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah since 1992, the group has carried out kidnappings and suicide bombings against the Israeli military. Hamas (حماس Ḥamās, an acronym of حركة المقاومة الاسلامية Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamat al-Islāmiyyah, meaning "Islamic Resistance Movement") is an Islamic Palestinian political and paramilitary organization which, since June 2007, has governed the Gaza strip section of the Palestinian Territories. Beginning in 1993, Hamas launched numerous suicide bombings against Israel and, on March 27, 2002, bombed the Netanya hotel, killing 30 and wounding 140. Hamas ceased the suicide attacks in 2005 and renounced them in April, 2006. Hamas has also been responsible for Israel-targeted rocket attacks, IED attacks, and shootings, but reduced most of those operations in 2005 and 2006.

Baruch Goldstein (December 9, 1956 – February 25, 1994), an American-born Israeli physician, perpetrated the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in the city of Hebron, in which he shot and killed between 30 and 54 Muslim worshippers inside the Ibrahimi Mosque (within the Cave of the Patriarchs), and wounded another 125 to 150 victims. Goldstein was lynched and killed in the mosque. Goldstein was a supporter of Kach, an Israeli political party founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane that advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the Palestinian Territories. In the aftermath of the Goldstein attack and Kach statements praising it, Kach was outlawed in Israel. Today, Kach and a breakaway group, Kahane Chai, are classified as terrorist organizations by Israel, Canada,, the European Union and the United States.

Egypt

Egyptian Islamic Jihad (a.k.a. Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiyya) is a militant Egyptian Islamist movement dedicated to the overthrow of the Egyptian government and replacing it with an Islamic state. It is led by Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is accused of participating in the World Trade Center 1993 bombings. The group began as an umbrella organization for militant student groups and was formed after the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood renounced violence in the 1970s. In 1981, the group assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. In November 1997 six of the group, dressed in police uniforms, machine-gunned 58 Japanese and European tourists and four Egyptians at the Temple of Hatshepsut (Deir el-Bahri) in Luxor. The attack became known as the Luxor massacre.

East Asia

Japan

thumb|right|Aftermath of Sarin Gas attack Aum Shinrikyo, now known as Aleph, was a Japanese religious group founded by Shoko Asahara responsible for a 1995 sarin gas attack on Tokyo subway commuters. The group began in 1984 as a yogic meditation group, but, seeking to attract a larger audience and make the group more influential politically, Asahara began issuing bold and controversial statements. In 1990, Asahara and 24 other members stood in the General Elections for the House of Representatives under the banner of Shinri-tō (Supreme Truth Party). After none of them were voted in, the group began to militarize. Between 1990 and 1995, the group attempted several apparently unsuccessful acts of biological terrorism using botulin toxin and anthrax spores. On June 28, 1994, Aum Shinrikyo members released sarin gas from several sites in the Kaichi Heights neighborhood of Matsumoto, Japan, killing eight and injuring 200 in what became known as the Matsumoto incident. in the Kaichi Heights neighborhood. Seven months later, on March 20, 1995, Aum Shinrikyo members released sarin gas in a co-ordinated attack on five trains in the Tokyo subway system, killing 12 commuters and damaging the health of about 5000 others in what became known as the subway sarin incident (地下鉄サリン事件, chikatetsu sarin jiken). In May 1995, Asahara and other senior leaders were arrested and the group's membership rapidly decreased.

Europe

Lockerbie bombing (1988)

thumb|200px|right|Nose section of Clipper Maid of the Seas On December 21 1988, Pan American World Airways’s Pan Am Flight 103 flight between London's Heathrow International Airport and New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport was destroyed mid flight over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. 189 of the XXX victims were Americans, it stood as the deadliest attack against the United States until the September 11, 2001 attacks. Pan Am entered bankruptcy partly as a result of the attack. On January 31, 2001, Libyan Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was convicted by a panel of three Scottish judges of bombing the flight. He was sentenced to 27 years imprisonment for the attack. In 2002 Libya offered financial compensation to the families in exchange for lifting of UN and U.S. sanctions.

Russia and Chechnya

thumb|left|Shamil Basayev Led by Shamil Basayev, Chechyan separatists carried out several attacks from the 1994 until 2006. In the Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis, Basayev-led separatists took over 1,000 civilians hostage in a hospital in the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk. When Russian special forces attempted to free the hostages, 105 civilians and 25 Russian troops were killed. In the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis, 50 Chechyan separatists took 850 hostages in a Moscow theater, demanding the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya and an end to the Second Chechen War. On September 1, 2004, in what became known as the Beslan school hostage crisis, 32 Chechyan separatists took 1,300 children and adults hostage at Beslan’s School Number One. When Russian authorities did not comply with the rebels’ demands that Russian forces withdraw from Chechnya, 20 of the adult male hostages were shot. After two days of stalled negotiations, Russian special forces stormed the building. In the ensuing melee, approximately 300 hostages were killed, along with 19 Russian servicemen and all but one of the rebels. Shamil Basayev is believed to have participated in organizing the attack. Like Basayev’s hospital and theater hijackings, the attack at the Beslan school was propaganda of the deed.