It said only 17 private US citizen were killed in terrorist attacks last year—one in Israel, one in Iraq and 15 in Afghanistan. The US does not list soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan as victims of terrorism; it has always considered a solider in a combat zone to be a legitimate target of the enemy. It also excludes US diplomats and all other US government employees from the terrorist tabulation.
The annual report has, for some reason, dropped the usual terminology calling Iran “the most active state-supporter of terrorism.” This year’s report says only that Iran “has remained an active state sponsor of terrorism in 2011.” But the report doesn’t charge the other three states listed—Cuba, Sudan and Syria—with sponsoring any terrorist actions abroad last year.
It cites Cuba only for giving sanctuary and medical care to members of a Basque and a Columbian terrorist organization. But it specifically says, “There was no indication that the Cuban government provided weapons or paramilitary training” for either group.
Similarly, with regard to Sudan, the report says the government there has given sanctuary to terrorists but hasn’t aided terrorist actions and even “was a cooperative counterterrorism partner of the United States.”
The report said Syria allowed many Palestinian terrorist groups to maintain offices in Damascus and safe haven. The main terrorism charge, however, was that: ”Syria provided political and weapons support to Hezbollah in Lebanon and continued to allow Iran to resupply the terrorist organization with weapons.”
The section on Iran, however, went on at great length to describe how the regime there “continued to provide financial, material and logistical support for terrorist and militant groups throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.”
The report lists 49 “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” or FTOs including the Mojahedin-e Khalq and the Baluchi Jundollah, both of which oppose the Islamic Republic. Of those 49 FTOs, the report says Iran gives financial aid to eight. Five are Palestinian groups: the Abu Nidal Organization; the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade; the Palestinian Islamic Jihad; the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command; and HAMAS. The others are the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which it says now gets only “modest” Iranian aid, and the Iraqi Shia Kataib Hezbollah, described as Iran’s main tool for violence inside Iraq.
A tabulation of terrorist actions with the report says 10,283 attacks in 70 countries resulted in more than 12,500 deaths during 2011, the period of the report. That is a 12 percent decline in deaths from 2010.
But terrorism was highly concentrated with 64 percent of all the attacks last year in just three countries—Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Furthermore, by far the majority of terrorist actions came from Sunni groups, not Shia ones. Worldwide, more than 56 percent of all attacks and 70 percent of all fatalities were attributed by the report to Sunni groups.
The report said, “In cases where the religious affiliation of terrorism casualties could be determined, Muslims suffered between 82 and 97 percent of terrorism-related fatalities over the past five years.” The report did not try to break that number down between Sunnis and Shia.
While suicide attacks gets much of the media attention, the report said only 2.7 percent of all terrorist attacks in 2011 were suicide attacks, although those attacks accounted for 21 percent of the fatalities.
It said improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were still the most frequently used and deadliest of terrorist weapons.