Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

Readers’ NotesNote on transliterations of Arabic and Persian words and names: I havenot adopted a single, consistent phonetic transliteration of the names orwords cited in this dictionary that were originally written in the Arabicscript. Popular literature and journalistic usages have made most readersfamiliar with inexact transliterations of Arabic and Persian words,and their use has completely outpaced the efforts of linguistic puriststo devise a consistent, universally observed scheme of transliterationfor such words. For instance, most readers are already more acquaintedwith Koran than with the more precise Quran, or with Hezbollah ratherthan Hizballah. Therefore, to make this reference volume more accessibleto a wider readership, I have used current and more common spellingsrather than more unfamiliar, alternative spellings. Other Arabic andPersian names have been phonetically transliterated whenever a popularusage was not already current. Users of this volume should note thatcross-references in each dictionary entry are printed in boldface type.The other form of cross-referencing is See also, which indicates relateditems that are not explicitly mentioned in the entry.Since many of the terrorist organizations or parties are better knownby their common names in the English-language press than by theiroriginal names in the language of the country or ethnic group in whichthey appeared, they are listed in the dictionary under their most commonlyused name and therefore not always under their formal, nationalname. To find such organizations or parties, readers can look up theformal, national name in the list of acronyms and abbreviations, whereit is followed by the English name under which the organization canbe found. Those acronyms, which are already in common use in newscoverage of the group, are used whenever possible.The usual convention for calendar dates in this volume is daymonth-year,for example, 4 July 1776. This convention has not beenfollowed in the case of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacksxi