US intel report: Major increase in terrorist incidents | csmonitor.com:


UPDATE 4/29/06: The actual report released today :

The report said there were 11,111 attacks that caused 14,602 deaths in 2005. Those figures stand in contrast to prior State Department reports, which cited 208 terrorist attacks that caused 625 deaths in 2003; and 3,168 attacks that caused 1,907 deaths in 2004.

But officials from the State Department and the National Counterterrorism Center were quick to say that they believed the dramatic increase was due largely to the fact that they were using a far more inclusive definition of what constitutes a terrorist attack than in previous years.

The biggest single factor was the inclusion of attacks within Iraq, which in prior years were largely excluded, the report said.

At least 30% of terrorist incidents last year occurred in Iraq, as did 55% of related fatalities, or about 8,300, the report said. Fifty-six Americans were killed in terrorist acts, 47 of them in Iraq. A total of 40,000 people were killed or wounded, including about 6,500 police and 1,000 children, the report said.

"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."

And Knight Ridder's story makes it clear that this figure only includes non-combatant casualties.

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.