By Warren P. Strobel
Knight Ridder Newspapers, 21 April 2006
WASHINGTON — The number of terrorist attacks documented by U.S. intelligence agencies jumped sharply in 2005, topping 10,000 for the first time, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials and documents.
Officials caution that much of the increase, due to be reported publicly next week, stems from a change last year in how terrorist attacks are counted, coupled with a more aggressive effort to tally such violence worldwide.
But the documents show, and officials confirm, that some of the rise is traceable to the war in Iraq, where foreign terrorists, a homegrown insurgency and sectarian strife have contributed to political bloodshed.
More than half the deaths from terrorism worldwide last year occurred in Iraq, said a counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Roughly 85 percent of the U.S. citizens who died from terrorism during the year died in Iraq. The figures, which weren't released, cover noncombatants but not combat deaths of U.S., Iraqi and other coalition soldiers.
"There's no question that the level of terrorist attacks in Iraq was up substantially," said the official, who's familiar with the methods used by the National Counterterrorism Center to track terrorism trends. The center is part of the U.S. intelligence community.
There were 3,192 terrorist attacks in 2004, the center reported in July.
Last year, while compiling the 2004 numbers, analysts switched to a broader definition of what constitutes terrorism. The same definition was in use for the 2005 data, but analysts had more time to use the new method.
In the past, intelligence analysts had counted only "international terrorism," defined as attacks involving citizens or territory of more than one country. But officials concluded the definition undercounted terrorism. The 2004 sinking of a ferry in the Philippines by Filipino guerrillas that left 132 people dead was omitted, for example.
U.S. government officials and many private analysts say that while the data are useful in analyzing trends, numbers alone provide a limited portrait of how the struggle against terrorism is going.
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Citation: Warren P. Strobel. "Sharp rise reported in terrorist attacks," Knight Ridder Newspapers, 21 April 2006.
Original URL: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002943717_attack21.html
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