Terrorist Attacks at All-Time High, State Report Finds
State Department report finds sharp rise in terror attacks, deaths in 2006.
April 30, 2007 — -- Terrorist attacks around the world are at an all-time high, according to a new State Department report.
The report also suggests that al Qaeda and the Taliban have been resurgent despite setbacks to their leadership. Instead, they have changed their tactics and added to what the report for the first time calls a "global insurgency."
The State Department's 2006 Country Report on Terror, an annual worldwide survey of terrorism, notes that terror attacks increased 25 percent last year from the previous year. The 14,338 attacks worldwide killed 20,498 people.
The majority of those attacks took place in Iraq and Afghanistan, countries the United States has referred to as the front lines in the war on terror. Almost half of the terror attacks in the world occurred in Iraq last year. There, 6,630 attacks killed approximately 13,000 people.
Not even the death of al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, touted by the Bush administration as a major development in the war on terror, was able to stem the tide of terror in Iraq.
"The June 7 death of [al Qaeda in Iraq's] leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, damaged the group's leadership but did not diminish attacks against coalition forces and Iraqis nor did it halt overall increasing attack trends by the group," the report says.
Afghanistan is going in the wrong direction too, according to the report. The Taliban and al Qaeda have regrouped after their 2001 ouster from power, resulting in a 50 percent increase in terrorist attacks in Afghanistan last year -- to 749 from 491 in 2005.
"Despite this progress, the Taliban-led insurgency remained a capable and resilient threat to stability," the report says, citing effective Taliban propaganda as a major reason for the group's resurgence.
Despite the staggering number of attacks, the report does not cite Iraq in its list of terrorist safe havens.
"Iraq is not currently a terrorist safe haven, but terrorists, including Sunni groups like al Qaeda in Iraq, Ansar al-Islam and Ansar al-Sunna, as well as Shia extremists and other groups view Iraq as a potential safe haven and are attempting to make it a reality," the report says, echoing language used in the 2005 report.
