The international terrorist threat is evolving as al-Qaeda-linked groups and other militants become increasingly violent and Syria spawns a new generation of global terrorists, the US warned on Wednesday.
The US Department of State’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2013 showed that the number of attacks worldwide rose last year to more than 9,700, rising about 43 percent from the 6,700 seen in 2012.
Yet officials cautioned that even though about 17,800 people were killed in these attacks — up from 11,000 in 2012 — most of the strikes were smaller and more localized than in previous years.
US counterterrorism efforts to combat al-Qaeda (AQ) have “degraded” the group’s core leadership, but “subsequently, 2013 saw the rise of increasingly aggressive and autonomous AQ affiliates and like-minded groups in the Middle East and Africa,” the report said.
Al-Qaeda’s leadership was also struggling “to maintain discipline within the AQ network and communicate guidance to its affiliated groups,” US Counterterrorism Coordinator Tina Kaidanow said.
Orders by al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri to minimize collateral damage “were routinely disobeyed,” such as in the attack carried out by Somalia-based extremists al-Shabaab on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi last year.
Syria’s civil war has proved a fertile breeding ground for thousands of foreign fighters, particularly from North Africa, the Gulf and Europe to join the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They have flourished amid the chaos as money flows from the Gulf to Sunni terror groups, particularly those operating in Syria.
Yet al-Assad has also been aided by Shiite militia, such as the Lebanon-based Hezbollah group, which is funded and supported by Iran.
Many governments are “becoming increasingly concerned that individuals with violent extremist ties and battlefield experience will return to their home countries or elsewhere to commit terrorist acts,” the report said, adding that this has fueled growing “concern about the creation of a new generation of globally committed terrorists, similar to what resulted from the influx of violent extremists to Afghanistan in the 1980s.”
The decline of the al-Qaeda leadership and its inability to finance terror activities has encouraged groups to turn to alternative sources of income, including a lucrative spate of kidnappings.
Extremist violence last year was also increasingly marked by “sectarian motives,” which the US said was a “worrisome trend.”
Cuba, Iran, Syria and Sudan remained on last year’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, although the report said there was no sign that Havana “provided weapons or paramilitary training to terrorist groups.”
Africa “experienced significant levels of terrorist activity” last year, the report said, fingering al-Shabaab as the continent’s main threat.
Boko Haram, which two weeks ago kidnapped dozens of schoolgirls at gunpoint in Nigeria, also remain a serious concern.
Kaidanow also said that revelations by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about US counterterrorism practices had been “incredibly damaging.”
The report also highlighted successful efforts by French and allied African forces to push back al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other extremist groups in northern Mali, while noting that the number of rocket attacks on Israel by Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula was the lowest in more than a decade.
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