Report shows global terror up sharply

WASHINGTON – The State Department’s annual report on global terrorism released Friday concludes that the number of reported terrorist incidents and deaths has increased exponentially in the years since the United States invaded Iraq, largely because of Iraq itself.

The report also said that while the United States has made some gains in fighting terrorism, al-Qaida and its affiliate groups remain a grave threat to U.S. national security at home and abroad – in Iraq and elsewhere.

Of potentially greater concern, the government said, is mounting evidence that small, autonomous cells and individuals are becoming more active.

Such “micro-actors” are said to be engaging in more suicide bombings, and using increasingly sophisticated technologies to communicate, organize and plot their attacks, including the Internet, satellite communications and international commerce, according to the 292-page report.

The report said there were 11,111 attacks that caused 14,602 deaths in 2005 alone. Those figures stand in stark contrast to previous State Department reports, which cited 208 terrorist attacks that caused 625 deaths in 2003, and 3,168 attacks that caused 1,907 deaths and 6,704 injuries in 2004.

But officials from the State Department and the National Counterterrorism Center were quick to say that they believed the dramatic increase was due largely to the fact that they were using a far more inclusive definition of what constitutes a terrorist attack than in previous years.

The biggest single factor was the inclusion of attacks within Iraq, which in previous years were largely excluded, according to the report.

At least 30 percent of all terrorist incidents last year occurred in Iraq, as did 55 percent of related fatalities, or about 8,300 people, the report said. Fifty-six Americans were killed in terrorist acts, 47 of them in Iraq. A total of 40,000 people were killed or wounded, including about 6,500 police and 1,000 children, the report said.

Libya and Sudan continued to take “significant steps” to cooperate in fighting terrorism, and may someday be taken off the list of countries sanctioned by the United States because of their alleged support of terrorism. But they remain on the list, along with Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria.

Henry A. Crumpton, the State Department’s ambassador at large for counterterrorism, said the new methodology will lead to better analysis of terrorist trends in the future, using this year as the benchmark.

But he acknowledged that the new methodology makes it all but impossible to compare successes and failures in the U.S.-led war on terrorism in 2005 with that of previous years.