The 50 Worst Terrorist Attacks (2 page)

What we need are nations filled with Malala Yousafzais.

We welcome comments from our readers, particularly regarding refining the criteria for inclusion, which incidents we might have missed, and any other contributions you have. Please send them to us in care of ABC-CLIO.

This book is a different writing experience from our previous reference texts and required more patience from family and friends, and the great team at ABC-CLIO. We particularly wish to acknowledge and thank Steve Catalano and Robin Tutt of ABC-CLIO, and Linda Kay Berglund, Susan's sister, who assisted with the indexing.

During the last 50 years, the world has seen the rise of a particularly virulent threat to international order—terrorist attacks. The theory and several methods of terrorism have long histories, arguably tracing to the Old Testament with the first political assassination; however, the use of terrorism by nonstate actors on so grand a scale is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The authors have written several volumes chronicling transnational terrorism, and we are often asked to rank events according to most important, worst, deadliest, or an alternative superlative. So far we have refused to do so, being hesitant of trivializing these horrific, shocking, and destructive acts. We changed our minds as we found that the reverse may be a more present danger. As a global community, we are so awash in terrorism—through news, academic articles, government reports, fiction and nonfiction books, films, and television shows—that we are at risk of accepting a general climate of terrorism in which we stop recognizing the individual acts and stop feeling for the reality of the victims. To end terrorism, we must not become inured to terrorist acts. This book attempts to direct attention again to individual acts by listing the most important terrorist attacks in history by year within each decade from 1960 to 2013, including the incidents, key actors involved, victims, and government responses. Both domestic and international terrorist attacks are examined within security and political contexts to shed light on how the events unfolded.

We begin this book's examination of terrorism with the 1960s, because of that decade's importance in the evolution of terrorism on several fronts. The 1960s saw the end of the Algerian insurgency, which featured terrorism
on a seemingly unrelenting scale. The rise of the Palestinian struggle, with the commencement of different styles of attacks by Fatah, the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and various splinter groups, moved international terrorism to the front pages. Turbulence in the West, spurred by a youthful radical leftist movement, led to the rise of major terrorist groups who went on to infamy for their exploits in the following decades. Types of attacks evolved with the growth of the new groups. Aerial hijacking in the 1960s moved from mere lone nut and simple “take me to (name a country)” transportational capers to more complex operations designed to garner media attention and general horror. Kidnappings of political figures and business executives for more than mere financial gain grew.

This book uses the definition of terrorism that we have found useful in our previous books. We consider terrorism to be the use or threat of use of violence by any individual or group for political purposes. The perpetrators may be functioning for or in opposition to established governmental authority. A key component of international terrorism is that its ramifications transcend national boundaries, and, in so doing, create an extended atmosphere of fear and anxiety. The effects of terrorism reach national and worldwide cultures as well as the lives of the people directly hurt by the terrorist acts. Violence becomes terrorism when the intention is to influence the attitudes and behavior of a target group beyond the immediate victims. Violence becomes terrorism when its location, the victims, or the mechanics of its resolution result in consequences and implications beyond the act or threat itself.

Unlike our previous books, we have also included several major domestic terrorist acts whose effects essentially stayed within the borders of one country, although with regional or global media coverage. Listing only international attacks might give a false sense of the extent of terrorism in a country or a period. Much the way incident counts can give a false sense of security or insecurity, so too would merely including international attacks give an inaccurate picture of the
worst
, however defined (
Figure 1
).

In like manner, looking at trends in outliers, such as the
worst
, can also skew our perceptions. Some have argued that post-9/11 is a new era in terrorism. That may be true for terrorist attacks that can be categorized as
worst
events, but overall trends in “garden variety” attacks have continued throughout the five most recent decades.

In addition to the definition of terrorism, we also need to consider what constitutes a
worst
act. Tallying deaths, injuries, and property damage, while methodologically straightforward, is ultimately unsatisfying. Perpetrators of terrorism are seeking publicity; killing for killing's sake (although increasing in popularity in recent years among the jihadi culture) doesn't quite fulfill our intuitive sense of
worst
. We thus have sought to include incidents that spilled ink and pixels as well as blood and treasure. As a sanity check, we have shared our
50 Worst
list with experts in the field of terrorism,
as well as various worthies in other fields to ensure that the terrorists' message did get through to others beyond the terrorism-watching set. Inherent to such a method, however, is a somewhat Western-centric bias. Many media outlets that we used in putting together the list are Western-based. One also tends to consider
worst
those incidents nearer to one's own interests; an attack that injures you or kills one of your family, colleagues, or friends is for you the worst event possible, although it may recede or vanish statistically when compared with multiple-casualty tragedies.

Figure 1
International Terrorism: 1968–2011

We have also included some incidents because they created a new technique; attacked a new type of target; crossed a moral, technological, or operational threshold; or otherwise added to the repertoire of terrorism in general. These novel attacks tended not to be as deadly as some incidents that did not make the cut, but are more historically important in the evolution of terrorism as a technique and security problem.

Our criteria for inclusion is limited to single events or events that are so tied together—multiple hijackings or bombings on the same day—as to have been treated as a single incident. Thus, the 1970 Dawson's Field hijackings and the 9/11 attacks, although involving four separate hijack teams, nonetheless had the effect of a single operation. Serial attacks by a single perpetrator or unknown individuals, such as letter bombers sending scores of parcel bombs—consider the Unabomber's 17-year campaign
or the Amerithrax attacks of October 2001—while cumulatively important did not include a specific event that rises to the level of others included in the
50 Worst
. In the interests of comprehensiveness, however, we have included such events in a separate section. Similarly, we have included a separate discussion of incidents that were foiled before they could achieve the effects intended by the perpetrators.

Although the
50 Worst
are notable for their deadliness, terrorist attacks overall—at least the 13,000-plus international attacks covered by the ITERATE dataset—rarely include casualties in the dozens, much less hundreds. As shown in
Figure 2
, even the worst year of the half-century tallied just over 4,000 casualties. Given the potential threat inherent in chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear (CBRN), and cyber attacks, terrorists more often than not have kept their attacks under a certain deadly threshold.

Moreover, looking strictly at international attacks, Americans have tended to be disproportionately popular targets of terrorists, whether in garden-variety bombings and shootings or in the
50 Worst
spectaculars. Some of the domestic attacks that rose to the level of
50 Worst
, however, did not include Americans (
Figure 3
).

Figure 2
International Terrorism Casualties: 1968–2009

Figure 3
Frequency of International and American Related Terrorist Incidents: 1968–2009

Expanding the years covered by our list to pre-1960 include prototerrorist incidents, such as assassinations and anarchist bombing campaigns. Examples include the 1865 assassination of American president Abraham Lincoln by bitter-enders, the 1914 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand that sparked World War I, and the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel by Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary group active in the 1930s and 1940s.

We have seen several trends in the
50 Worst
that reflect shifts in terrorist behavior in general over the past half-century. Among them has been a shift in the type of terrorist tactic(s) employed. Terrorism has generally been a battle between offense and defense. Once security forces determine methods to harden a likely target against a certain type of attack, terrorists have generally not thrown in the towel. Rather, they have innovated, constantly putting the burden on the defensive forces to keep up.

There has also been a changing of the guard between terrorist groups and individuals making the list. Although terrorism as a tactic probably cannot be completely eradicated—the existence of evil is part of the human condition—specific terrorist groups have been eliminated, through aging of the principals, their deaths, imprisonment, or maturity beyond
their radical youth; changing political fortunes; ending of patron state support; government/private security methods becoming more effective; or other reasons.

We can see this evolution of
worst
group identities most clearly in a ranking of groups whose depredations appear in the
50 Worst
list. Some groups—radical West European leftists, leftist Palestinians—enjoyed their heydays in the 1970s but then dropped off the list—as they did in more “normal” attacks. Most disturbingly, the religious-based Islamist radicals have shown greater staying power than their leftist forebears, most of whom have become extinct. For the moment, al Qaeda and its affiliates have established themselves as the single
worst
group of the half-century in terms of conducting the most spectacular terrorist incidents.

Exclusion of a group from this list does not mean that they were not active, nor a major threat, during this period. Groups such as the Abu Nidal/Black June Organization, the Basque Nation and Liberty, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, and scores of other groups conducted numerous attacks during this period. None of their attacks, however, rose to the level of a
50 Worst
event.