The rise of terrorism

The Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON -- A pair of terror attacks in Egypt this week are the latest sign that Al Qaeda is successfully exploiting the war in Iraq to win new adherents and is outsourcing its wider struggle against the West to home-grown militant groups in other Arab countries, according to US intelligence officials and terrorism specialists.

Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, have effectively used the carnage in Iraq through the Internet and other means, the analysts said, to inspire grass-roots militant groups with grievances of their own to destabilize Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other key US allies.

The National Journal:

Terrorists killed 14,602 people and carried out approximately 11,000 attacks last year, according to a report [PDF] scheduled for release Friday morning by the State Department and the National Counterterrorism Center. That's more than double the incidents and fatalities in 2004, when 3,192 attacks killed 6,060 people, NCTC reported last July.

The report cautions that numbers from the two years are not "meaningfully" comparable because of the "substantial" increase in effort devoted to counting all incidents this year. In previous years, the report had counted only international terrorist incidents; in both 2004 and 2005, the report counted all terrorist incidents, whether domestic or international.

Fatalities in Iraq, where the report concludes that terrorist attacks on noncombatants "significantly" increased last year, drove much of the jump, accounting for 8,299 deaths. India had the second most fatalities, with 1,357 dead, followed by Colombia, with 810, and then Afghanistan, with 682.