In a report to be released next week, US government figures will show that the number of terrorist attacks in the world jumped sharply in 2005, totalling more than 10,000 for the first time. That is almost triple the number of terrorist attacks in 2004 -- 3,194. Knight Ridder's Washington bureau reports that counterterrorism experts say that there are two reasons for the dramatic increase: a broader definition of what consitutes a terrorist attack, and the war in Iraq.
More than half the fatalities from terrorism worldwide last year occurred in Iraq, said a counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the data haven't been made public. Roughly 85 percent of the US citizens who died from terrorism during the year died in Iraq. The figures cover only noncombatants and thus don't include combat deaths of US, Iraqi and other coalition soldiers.
"There's no question that the level of terrorist attacks in Iraq was up substantially," said the official, who's familiar with the methods used by the National Counterterrorism Center to track terrorist trends. The center is part of the US intelligence community.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0421/dailyUpdate.html
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