Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

INTRODUCTION • lxviiments that are regional in scope. The power of the Internet and televisionwill bring together widely scattered groups into coordinated actions, asseen in the demonstrations in Europe directed by the Kurdish communityto protest the Turkish government’s arrest and subsequent sentencing todeath of Abdullah Ocalan, head of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).It is not a large step to move from using the Internet for mobilizing transnationaldemonstrations to coordinating transnational terrorist operations.Moreover, while there appears to have been some normalizing ofrelations between former state sponsors of terrorism, such as Libya andIraq, and the West, particularly the United States, the militancy and deepanti-Western hatred accompanying Islamic fundamentalism will in alllikelihood continue to grow. Whether they are aided by the deep pocketsof bin Laden or by Iranian state sponsorship, both the Sunni insurgentsof Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan and the Shi’ite militias inIraq and Lebanon will continue to fight. These groups will be joined byothers not only to overthrow what they view to be the feudal, “apostate”regimes of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates, but also to direct attacksagainst their most profound enemy, the “Great Satan,” that is, the UnitedStates. It should be noted that most of these groups view their warfareagainst Israel as a proxy war with the United States. They will practicetheir own form of “electronic armed propaganda” by resorting to theInternet in addition to using the bomb, the shoulder-launched missile,and the M-16 or AK-47.The most ominous possibility is the growing likelihood of incidentsof mass terrorism involving biological, chemical, or nuclear/radiologicalweapons. The motivation for using such weapons is clearly presentamong millennialist cults and fundamentalist groups, and active attemptsto deploy such weapons have been evident, both in the sarin gasattack in Tokyo in 1995 and in post-2003 attempts by Iraqi insurgents tocreate improvised explosive devices coupled with sarin artillery shellsand chlorine gas canisters against U.S. troops and fellow Iraqi citizens.The emergence of groups lacking inner restraints in their resort toterrorism coupled with the increased availability of such weapons underscoresthe real threat of mass-casualty WMD terrorism, both to theUnited States and to its allies overseas. Such threats would most likelyinvolve biological or chemical attacks, since most of these groups donot possess the technology to process fissionable material into a weaponnor the resources to acquire a nuclear device. Nonetheless, it remainsrelatively easy for such groups to acquire nonfissionable radioactive