NCJ Number
191293
Date Published
1998
Length
18 pages
Annotation
The chapter discusses the old and new breed of terrorism.
Abstract
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 deprived Palestinian terrorist groups of a significant source of money, weapons, and safe havens. The Persian Gulf War saw a dramatic increase in international terrorist incidents. Hamas is a militant mass movement with support among Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has long been acknowledged as the official voice of the Palestinian people. The new terrorism began long before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The start of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 motivated Iran to embark on a systematic campaign of supporting militant Islamic fundamentalist movements throughout the Muslim world. Central to the battle was destroying the United States. The first regime to follow Iran’s lead came nearly a decade later, when a military coup destroyed Sudan’s democracy. In 1993, Sudan jointed Iran on the State Department’s short list of state sponsors of terrorism, serving as a convenient transit point, training center, and safe haven for Iranian-backed terrorist groups. The new students of terror come to training academies directly from a life of poverty and repression. The new students of terror are harder to combat because they are able to carry out their terror with a wide variety of readily available and less sophisticated devices. They are easily inspired by their spiritual leaders. This kind of inspiration has led to suicide bombings. A potentially new and more dangerous form of terrorism is freelance terrorism. Loosely affiliated groups of terrorists are difficult to identify and do not easily conform to the rigid categorizations used by Western law enforcement agencies. Many of these international terrorist groups are in communication with one another in the United States.