Encyclopedia of Terrorism. Editor: Harvey W Kushner. Volume 1, Sage Reference, 2003.
Terrorism, in various forms, has been practiced throughout history and across a wide variety of political ideologies. There are as many definitions for the word terrorism as there are methods of executing it; the term means different things to different people, and trying to define or classify terrorism to everyone’s satisfaction proves impossible. However, most definitions of terrorism hinge on three factors: the method (violence), the target (civilian or government), and the purpose (to instill fear and force political or social change).
The adoption of terrorist techniques by insurgent groups, especially in the developing world, has led to a perception of terrorism as a natural outgrowth of the anticolonial struggle, merely another weapon of revolutionary guerrillas in their campaigns for independence. This understanding—or, in the eyes of many terrorism experts, misunderstanding—of the term terrorism is also expressed in the old cliché, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
From another viewpoint, terrorism can also be something a government does to its citizens for a variety of reasons: to maintain political power, to put down struggles of liberation, or to pacify populations after an annexation. Under this rubric, the actions of the former South African regime in defending apartheid and the Argentinean “Dirty War” of the 1970s would qualify as terrorism. Some would even argue that the United States itself conducts terrorist activities against selected targets while attacking other counties for promoting terrorist activities. This form of terrorism, usually called state terrorism, is discussed in an entry under that name. The following is a historical discussion of terrorism in the more traditional understanding of the term—violence against civilian targets with the intent of instilling fear and creating political or social change.
Historical Roots of Terrorism
The word terrorism is an artifact of the French Revolution. The régime de la terreur, which took place from 1793 to 1794, was a systematic attempt to unearth traitors and send them to the guillotine. At first the violence, or terror, had a positive connotation since it was used to punish subversives and other dissidents whom the new regime regarded as enemies of the people. But in time the revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre was executed along with the 40,000 others who were guillotined during the régime de la terreur. Soon thereafter, the Englishman Edmund Burke, a vocal critic of the revolution, described the proponents of the revolution as terrorists.
Terrorism as a practice is thought to have begun in first-century Judea, where Jewish men would use a short dagger (sica) to slit the throats of occupying Romans and their collaborators in full view of the public. Sicarri, as these dagger-men were called, would also attack wealthy Jews and kidnap their servants for ransom. The Sicarri were part of a group known as Zealots, who sought to overthrow the Romans. The term Zealot is derived from the name of this movement. Later on in seventh-century India, members of the thuggee cult ritually strangled their victims in an apparent act of sacrifice to the Hindu goddess Kali. (The term thuggee and the modern term thug are derived from the Hindu thag, which referred to highwaymen who made their living by robbery.)
The philosophical antecedents of modern-day terrorism were also formed by the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin in the middle of the 19th century. In his Principles of Revolution (1869), Bakunin wrote that no other action except terrorism by individuals or small groups could cleanse the Russian soil. Later in 19th-century Russia, the anarchist organization known as Narodnaya Volya, or People’s Will, launched a wave of bombings and assassinations. They targeted the czar, the royal family, and other government officials, whom they believed the embodiment of a corrupt regime.
Terrorism theory came to the United States with the arrival of German radicals such as Karl Heinzen and Johann Most, who advanced the philosophy of using weapons of mass destruction in a systematic campaign of terrorism. Both believed that science would empower the masses with the invention of new weapons that could then be used in terrorist enterprises, and they argued that bombs should be detonated where the enemy gathered, be it a church or meeting place. Heinzen and Most did not practice what their writings recommended, but others did. The most famous incident involving American anarchists occurred in Chicago in 1886 during the Haymarket riot, when a bomb killed eight policemen.
At the turn of the 19th century, terrorism in the form of political assassination became a major global phenomenon. Those assassinated included General Martinez Campos in Barcelona, Spain, in 1892; French president Sari Carnot in 1894; Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary in 1898; King Umberto of Italy in 1900; and U.S. president William McKinley in 1901. Although a few of the assassins were anarchists, they all acted on their own, without the knowledge or support of the groups to which they belonged.
World War I was ignited by the murder of the Austrian chancellor at the hands of a Serbian nationalist. Interestingly, few terrorist activities took place in the period following the war, perhaps because political assassination paled against the backdrop of the death of millions of individuals. How could the death of one man shock the millions of people suffering the ravages of war? After the war, Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Palestine all witnessed a dearth of individual acts of terrorism while experiencing the growth of state terrorism. Individual terrorism was anathema to both fascistic and communistic points of view; instead these totalitarian ideologies employed the collective terrorism of the “state.”
Post-World War II Terrorism
In the post-World War II years, terrorism became a strategy of choice for nationalist groups in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia in their struggle for independence. In predominantly agrarian societies, this terrorism took the form of guerrilla warfare, with China and Indochina as the classic examples. In urban areas such as Palestine and Cyprus, acts of terror were committed within city limits.
A number of these national political movements, which owed much of their success to violence, adopted a strategy that would have lasting significance in the war of semantics surrounding the use of violence. These newly created Third World countries, as well as their brethren from the communist bloc states, advanced the argument that their fight against colonial oppression was not terrorism but rather the hard work of dedicated freedom fighters. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1962) was particularly influential in this regard; Fanon urged colonized peoples to throw off their rulers in a “collective catharsis” of violence. The text helped solidify the association of violence with liberation struggles that was first raised by the anarchists of the late 19th century.
The 1960s saw terrorism spring up throughout the world. In Latin America, the Tupamaros’s form of terrorism, which included kidnappings and bank robberies, ultimately toppled Uruguay’s imperfect democratic government and inadvertently replaced it with a military dictatorship. In Argentina, left-wing terror organizations such as the Montoneros and the EPA waged a broad terror campaign against foreign economic interests as well as the Argentinean authorities. The writings of Brazilian Carlos Marighella had even more of an impact on terrorist events throughout the world than it did on events in Latin America or his native Brazil. Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (1969), a practical guide for terrorism, was read throughout the worldwide terrorist community.
A wave of extreme left-wing terrorism also emerged in Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1960s and 1970s. The Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, and the Japanese Red Army in Japan, all inspired at some level by Marighella, not only embarked on terrorist campaigns at home but ventured abroad to attack international interests. The most infamous of these organizations’ attacks was the 1972 massacre at Ben-Gurion Airport (Lod Airport) in Israel by members of the Japanese Red Army.
Modern Terrorism: The United States
The upsurge in terrorism of the 1960s was not limited to Europe and Asia. It affected the United States in a number of ways. Frustrated with the slow pace of social change (and, in the eyes of some, simply bored with their middle-class privilege), some radical activists broke off from Students for a Democratic Society to found the violent group Weatherman. Similarly frustrated with the mainstream civil rights movement, black militants formed the Black Panther Party. Puerto Rican nationalists, Jewish extremists, and single-issue terrorist organizations such as animal rights groups also became active in this era.
While the so-called new left terrorism of groups like Weatherman had exhausted itself by the late 1970s, the next decade saw a variety of terrorist groups espousing a virulent philosophy of white supremacy and related incendiary rhetoric activate themselves throughout the United States. During this period, minorities of all stripes found themselves targeted by such hate-mongering and terrorist organizations as the Order and the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, among others. As the 1980s came to end, however, a combination of aggressive law enforcement combined with little support by the general public for white supremacist rhetoric sounded the death knell for extremist right-wing terror organizations. There were still some leftover true believers but their ranks were rapidly slimming.
Things changed in the 1990s. The ranks of the extremist right were quickly replenished, inspired by the impacts of three events. The first event involved a bungled federal government attempt to arrest Randy Weaver, a white separatist who sold an illegal firearm to an undercover government agent, atop Ruby Ridge in the mountains of Idaho. The 1992 siege ended with the deaths of a federal marshal, Weaver’s son, and his pregnant wife; it quickly came to symbolize the heavy hand of a threatening federal bureaucracy. The tragic end to the FBI’s 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, reinforced this view, even though David Koresh and his followers had little to do with the right-wing movement. The 1994 enactment of the Brady Bill, which required a five-day waiting period for gun purchases and was named for U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s press secretary who was severely disabled during a botched assassination attempt, became the third issue to rejuvenate the extreme right, as it caused many to fear federal gun control legislation.
On April 19, 1995 this tension came to a head when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 and injuring many more. The act itself was so egregious that it caused a significant shakeout within the right-wing extremist movement that till this date has yet to recover. Meanwhile, the attacks of single-issue terrorists, such as antiabortion and environmental groups, have continued—although in a post-September 11 era, many are finding they have lost a significant amount of the public sympathy they previously had.
Modern Terrorism: Europe and the Middle East
Throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, many Middle Eastern terrorist groups sent their recruits to the Soviet Union for training in low-intensity warfare, which is a benign-sounding name for terrorism. The Soviets viewed terrorism as compatible with their efforts to support wars of national liberation, even though violence against civilian populations is inconsistent with traditional Marxist-Leninist thinking on class struggle. The Soviets also hoped that their support of Palestinian terrorism against Israel would enhance their position within the Arab world.
Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow was where Palestinians would go to learn terrorist tactics. Their curriculum included liberal doses of Marxist ideology interspersed with demonstrations on how to handle Kalashnikov assault rifles and make bombs. Lumumba graduates would often return home to assume leadership roles in many of the Palestinian terrorist groups that sponsored their stay at the university, most notably, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Soon, Palestinian terrorist groups such as the PLO were running their own terror academies.
Sources close to the Palestinians reported that in the early 1980s there were more than 40 terrorist organizations taking advantage of the PLO schooling. Among the biggest customers were the Turks. Turkey itself was no stranger to the hand of the terrorist, experiencing nearly 2,500 political murders in 1978-1979 alone. Other groups trained by Palestinians include the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA).
For nearly a decade, Soviet-trained and -supported terrorism operated with impunity in the Middle East and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. As, however, events in the Middle East or Europe would threaten to affect public opinion—or more significantly, threaten to inspire U.S. intervention—Soviet leaders would rein in their client terrorists. Some actions of the more radical Middle Eastern terrorist groups eventually caused the Soviets to become less enthusiastic about the potential destabilizing benefits of low-intensity warfare. Nearly three decades after the Soviet Union trained its first batch of Palestinian terrorists, the Soviets themselves began to sense their own vulnerability to terrorism; indeed, the Russians are now themselves faced with an ongoing threat of terrorism in Chechnya.
Turning Points: The Iranian Revolution, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf War
A significant turning point in the history of terrorism was the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini influenced the creation of Hezbollah (Party of God) in Lebanon in 1982. The recruits of Hezbollah, drawn from the poorest segments of society, were not only interested in carrying out the goals of the revolution but also concerned with the social conditions of their fellow Shiites throughout the Middle East. Hezbollah’s outreach in Lebanon during the 1980s solidified Lebanese Shiite support and helped spawn smaller terrorist groups, the most recognizable of which was the Islamic Jihad (jihad is commonly translated as “holy war”).
Nearly a decade after the Iranian revolution, a military coup destroyed Sudan’s inept democracy. The mastermind behind Sudan’s Islamic counterreformation was Sheik Hassan Abdallah al-Turabi. In 1991, the sheik took the first giant step toward realizing the goal of Islamic reconciliation by hosting a major conference of Islamic politicians and intellectuals, as well as known terrorists, in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. The group ultimately endorsed a six-point manifesto for advancing extremist Islamic regimes throughout the Muslim world.
The 1991 Persian Gulf War saw a dramatic short-term increase in the number of international terrorist incidents. Yet it took only one year for the U.S. State Department to record one of the largest one-year decreases in these occurrences since the United States began keeping such records. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, also in 1991, may have played a role, depriving terrorist groups of a significant source of money, weapons, and safe havens. Aid from training camps inside other Soviet bloc countries also dried up with the collapse of the Soviet-sponsored Warsaw Pact.
Another key factor in changing the face of terrorism was Yasir Arafat’s tactical mistake—siding with Iraq before and during the Persian Gulf War. Long before the war began, Arafat knew he could not run his PLO with the capricious support of Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi or the cash-and-carry conditional backing of the former Soviet Union. He set out to create alternative sources of funding that would give the PLO the stability it needed to carry on a protracted terrorist campaign. A significant portion of his funding came from the conservative and vulnerable oil states, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Arafat’s unconditional support of Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War shut down this extraordinary flow of oil money.
Instead, the money flowed into the coffers of Arafat’s competitor, the Islamic Resistance Movement or Hamas. Hamas was formed by Sheik Ahmed Yassin in 1987 during the first intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation of the territories. Hamas members seek their identity in their Islamic roots. Hamas is uncompromising and maximalist, insisting on the total liberation of the sacred land of Palestine as demanded by Allah, who will repay martyrs for this cause with life everlasting.
The militancy of Hamas is a common feature of the new terrorists. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up an embattled communist government, thousands of young warriors of Islam, including the Saudi Osama bin Laden, from as far away as Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United States answered the call to fight a jihad, holy war, at the side of their Afghan brothers. Stirred by the preaching of incendiary clerics, 10,000 or more Muslims streamed into Peshawar, Pakistan, for weapons training and indoctrination. The CIA, eager to humble the Soviets in what turned out to be the last superpower tussle, invested billions of dollars in weaponry and training to turn these young warriors of Islam into a cadre of freedom fighters capable of driving out the Soviets. Those who survived the decade-long war helped turn Afghanistan into a veritable boot camp for terrorists.
Veterans of these Afghan classrooms have taken their jihad abroad not only to Sudanese terror camps but also to Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Burma, Egypt, India, Morocco, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and the United States. It was Afghanistan where Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, convicted of seditious conspiracy and a variety of other charges, went to visit. It was Afghanistan where the men convicted for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center learned strategy and tactics and where the “mastermind” of the bombing, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, fought. It was Afghanistan where bin Laden began to consolidate his control over an army of jihad fighters bent on the destruction of the United States.
The New Terrorism
The new terrorists who were trained in the terror camps of Afghanistan and Sudan were not privy to the Soviet training techniques. In fact, their militant Islamic instructors had more field experience that the Soviet trainers of the past. They learned their bomb-making and other terrorist tactics while fighting in Afghanistan.
The militant fundamentalism of this new breed of terrorists is reinforced by trainers who focus on the verses in the Koran and the hadiths (the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) that form the basis of Islamic law and idealize the glory of dying for Allah. Students graduate with a religious zeal that makes them more implacable foes than their graying Soviet-trained counterparts. The new students of terrorism are easily inspired by a spiritual leader like bin Laden, with his frequent calls for war against Americans and Jews.
The new terrorists are less hierarchically organized than their secular predecessors and, consequently, more difficult to spot, track, and intercept. In the past, terrorist groups organized themselves very much like a large corporation, that is, pyramidally and linearly, with a discernible descending or ascending power structure. Knowing the structure of the terrorist group made fighting terrorism easier. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies could contain terrorist organization by infiltrating them at either the top or the bottom. It is much more difficult for today’s law enforcement agencies to infiltrate militant Islamic groups, such as bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, that are fluid and not structured the same way as secular groups of earlier periods.
However, the lack of obvious hierarchy does not mean that the work of this new breed is less devastating than earlier generations of terrorists—indeed, the willingness of members of terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda to participate in suicide attacks opens up heretofore unknown possibilities for devastation. On September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers took over four U.S. domestic flights, successfully crashing two of the hijacked planes into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and one into the Pentagon near Washington, D.C. The fourth flight, now believed to be headed for the White House, crashed in rural Pennsylvania after passengers overpowered the hijackers. The September 11 hijackings are the most devastating terrorist attacks on U.S. targets to date, by any measure.
The routing of the Taliban by the U.S. military campaign of late 2001 certainly put a damper on the ability of Al Qaeda to quickly initiate a terror campaign; surviving members (including, it is believed, bin Laden himself) are presently in hiding somewhere in the world, maybe in Pakistan. Although badly routed, Al Qaeda is not finished; the U.S. government believes the group holds assets in more than 60 countries, and continues to warn of possible attacks on U.S. interests at home and abroad.