TERRORISM.

Terrorism has a well established placed in modern European history. Although scholars argue over the precise definition of terrorism, most agree that it involves the use of violence to spread fear and so compel individuals, groups, or a government to behave in a certain way. Terrorism targets not only those whom it kills and maims but also those who observe the mayhem as well. While states have historically been the main and the most extensive employers of terror, primarily to keep their own people in line, the termterrorism has generally been reserved for nonstate actors. The very illegitimacy of the perpetrators shapes the popular perception of terrorism, as does the targeting of innocent civilians. Although terrorists do not care whom they kill, their choice of targets is far from random. Terrorists deliberately choose highly symbolic targets to achieve the maximum psychological effect when they strike.

THE MADRID BOMBINGS

On 11 March 2004 Spain suffered the worst terrorist attack in European history since the 1972 Munich Olympics. During morning rush hour 10 bombs exploded on 4 commuter trains killing 177, mortally wounding 13, and leaving nearly 1,500 injured. The perpetrators had not been suicide bombers. Instead they had placed back packs filled with explosives on the trains, disembarked, and detonated the bombs using cell phones.

No one doubted that the explosions had been carried out by terrorists, but two groups immediately emerged as suspects. Prime Minister JoséMaria Aznar quickly blamed Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Freedom), known to the rest of the world by its initials, ETA. Other than the explosives used in the bombs, however, nothing about the attacks bore the signature of the Basque separatist group that had plagued Spain for decades. ETA espoused Marxism and so would be unlikely to attack trains packed with working-class Spaniards. Like most insurgent groups, ETA avoided inflicting mass casualties. ETA had also declared a truce.

These factors and evidence that later emerged led experts to conclude that the attacks had been perpetrated by an Al Qaeda affiliate. Al Qaeda specia lized in multiple, near-simultaneous attacks designed to produce mass casualties. Because of its contribu tion to the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, Spain became a legitimate target and its proximity to Morocco made it a tempting one. An attack launched on the eve of a Spanish election also fit Al Qaeda's preference for striking on symbolic dates.

Any doubt as to the affiliation of the terrorists disappeared on 3 April when Spanish security forces raided a Madrid apartment building. Faced with cer tain capture the five Moroccans, one Tunisian, and one Algerian in the apartment detonated their remaining explosives, killing themselves along with a Spanish policeman. In the rubble of the building, the authorities found a video in which three men issued an ultimatum to the Spanish government demanding its withdrawal from Iraq. Ironically, the newly elected socialist government, swept into power by anger over Aznar's handling of the Madrid bombings, announced its decision to with draw Spanish troops from the coalition. Al Qaeda then issued a statement proclaiming that Spain would no longer be attacked. The United States in turn criticized the Spanish government for "knuck ling under to terrorism."

Beneath this twisted and largely inaccurate interpre tation of events loomed a disturbing new reality. The terrorist group named in the captured video, the Al Mufti and Ansar Al Qaeda brigades, had been virtually unheard of before the attack. Created by Serhane ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, a convicted drug dealer who had been radica lized in prison, the group apparently existed solely to carry out the Spanish bombings. It funded itself and neither received nor needed much direction from Al Qaeda, although the umbrella organization certainly approved its actions. The ability of a terrorist organization that had morphed into an ideological movement capable of gen erating new cells and organizations with limited or no direction from the central organization represented a new threat that would manifest itself in London sixteen months after Madrid.

The attack had one positive effect. Madrid shook the European Union out of its lethargy. After 11 March, the European Union began to take the terrorist threat seriously. The attacks led to The Council of Europe Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism.

What the historian Eric Hobsbawm calls "the short twentieth century" (Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991) actually began with one of the most infamous acts of terrorism in European history. On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip (1894–1918), a member of the Serbian secret society the Black Hand, assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand (1863–1914), the heir

THE LONDON BOMBINGS

At 8:57 a.m. on 7 July 2005 terrorists detonated three bombs on rush-hour commuter trains in the central London Underground. Fifty minutes later a fourth bomb ripped apart a double-decker bus, erasing any remaining doubt that the explosions represented a well-coordinated attack. Fifty-six people died in the incident, including all four suicide bombers, and seven hundred were injured. Two weeks later another terrorist cell attacked the London Underground again. This time the bombs failed to detonate. Initially, the attacks seemed to provide further evidence of Al Qaeda's irrepressible commitment to violence and its unlimited resource fulness in carrying it out. Closer examination of the attacks, however, reveals a more complex picture and the British response seems far more impressive than terrorist success. Nonetheless, the terrorists did plan and execute a complex operation. Analysis of this attack reveals a great deal about the evolving nature of the Al Qaeda threat and the importance of effective response to mitigate the consequences of an incident.

In many respects the terrorist cell launched a carefully planned and well-executed attack. The cell kept its identity and intentions hidden from Britain's superb intelligence services during the months of planning that preceded the operation. Al Qaeda had evolved into a highly decentralized organization in which local cells form for a specific mission and disappear in carrying it out. They required little direction or support from the umbrella organization. Surveillance camera foot age examined after the incident revealed that the suicide bombers carefully rehearsed the strike well in advance. On the day of the attack three of the terrorists detonated their bombs at almost the same time. The fourth bomber may have improvised a plan because he found his target Underground station closed for repairs. In addition to causing ser ious loss of life, injury, and economic dislocation, the terrorists timed the attacks to coincide with the G-8 Summit that was being held in Scotland at the time and the attacks immediately followed the announce ment that London had been chosen as an Olympic venue for 2012.

The success of the operation does not, how ever, hide some very amateur mistakes made in planning and carrying it out. As deadly as the attacks proved to be, they might have been much worse. The terrorists detonated two of their bombs in "cut-and-cover" underground tunnels. In these older lines dug very near the surface, trains pass each other moving in opposite directions on parallel tracks. The adjacent empty track allowed the two blasts to dissi pate, thus reducing their effect. The one bomb deto nated in a deep, single-track tunnel accounted for twenty-six of the fifty-six fatalities. The terrorists, who lived in the English Midlands, probably lacked accu rate information on the construction of different Underground tunnels. They also left behind a great deal of physical evidence, including their car contain ing more bomb materials.

Terrorist mistakes notwithstanding, the London Metropolitan Police and emergency responders deserve a lot of credit for mitigating the conse quences of the attack. They quickly cordoned off the affected area, rapidly evacuated the central London Underground, effectively triaged the wounded and sent them to several hospitals (to avoid overloading any one of them), and promptly shut down the cell phone network to prevent the possible use of mobile phones to detonate a bomb. Without such an effective response, devel oped and constantly improved through years of practice during the Irish Republican Army's campaign of terrorism in the United Kingdom, many more people might have died.

The subsequent investigation by the security services (police, Scotland Yard, and British intelli gence) proved to be equally impressive. The authorities quickly developed an accurate picture of the terrorist cell and its connection to the Al Qaeda organization. Such detective work paid divi dends following the 21 July attacks, when the authorities rolled up the cell that tried to bomb the Underground on that day, and will probably aide future operations against Al Qaeda. In the final analysis though, the terrorists received their big gest setback from the citizens of London, who, refusing to be cowed by the violence, got up, dusted themselves off, and got on with their lives. In their banner headlines, the evening newspapers delivered the final blow to Al Qaeda, declaring what the terrorists had hoped to avoid: "London is open for business."

apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The terrorist organization believed that the province, which had been annexed by the Habsburg Monarchy, rightfully belonged to Serbia. The assassination unleashed a chain of events that sparked the First World War, but it would not have done so had not years of rising militarism, entangling alliances, and diplomatic crises made the Great Powers receptive to war as necessary and perhaps inevitable. Without these preconditions, the murder of the archduke would have been no different from the assassinations of Tsar Alexander II (r. 1855–1881) of Russia in 1881 or President William McKinley (1843–1901) of the United States twenty years later: shocking but wholly ineffective at producing lasting change. Viewed in this light, Gavrilo Princip should be considered the last of the nineteenth-century anarchists, not the first of the twentieth-century terrorists.

TERRORISM AND COMMUNIST REVOLUTION

The ineffectiveness of individual terrorist acts, no matter how dramatic, led Vladimir Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov; 1870–1924) to reject them explicitly. In his 1901 essay, "Where to Begin?" Lenin explained that while he did not reject terror per se, violence independent of revolutionary organization and propaganda would accomplish nothing. For the father of Soviet communism, timing was everything. Isolated acts of violence perpetrated before the proletariat had been prepared for true revolution were at best futile and at worst self-serving acts of petit-bourgeois gratification that could actually delay communism because of the repression that they inevitably provoked.

Terror in the service of revolution, however, was another matter. Lenin willingly used terror to obtain and maintain power, and his successor Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) took state terrorism to an unprecedented level. Stalin ruthlessly suppressed opposition and then turned repression on the general population, sending hundreds of thousands to certain death in the forced labor camps of the gulag system and summarily executing tens of thousands more. Terrorism became so pervasive that the secret police received quotas of "counterrevolutionaries" to apprehend, a grim reminder that states have historically been the worst perpetrators of terror.

INSURGENT TERROR

Another use of terror Lenin would have approved had he lived to see it was in support of "wars of national liberation." Contrary to current notions, insurgency and terrorism are not synonyms. Insurgents will make use of terror as one weapon in an arsenal, but they do not engage in terror for terror's sake. Insurgency, as practiced during the first half of the twentieth century, was a revolutionary movement to gain control of a state from within. Through a combination of propaganda, guerrilla warfare, and terrorism, insurgents sought to attack the both the legitimacy of a government and its ability to function. Building on discontents within a population, insurgents used propaganda to persuade people that government could not meet their needs and that regime change was necessary. Insurgents also organized guerrillas, bands of irregular fighters operating out of uniform and in loose formations, to attack police and small military units in hit-and-run raids. After an attack, insurgent guerrillas melted back into the general population in which they hid. Such attacks often sought to provoke the government into conducting indiscriminate reprisals that encouraged more support for the insurgency. Insurgents used terror both to spread fear among those who supported the government and to keep their own supporters in line. Because insurgents begin from a position of relative weakness, insurgency is by definition protracted war.

Because guerrillas have traditionally lacked the legitimacy of regular forces, threatened states have often labeled them as "terrorists." The same label as has been applied to partisans or resistance fighters. Like insurgent guerrillas, partisans operate out of uniform and hide within the general population. Rather than support a revolutionary movement, however, they seek to repel an invader occupying their country and often coordinate efforts with their own regular forces and/or those of their allies. During World War II, resistance movements and partisan bands sprang up all over Nazi-occupied Europe. On the eastern front the retreating Soviet army left stay-behind bands to harass German forces, interdict supply lines, and attack the enemy wherever possible. These units often operated in forested areas of Ukraine and Byelorussia.

In more urbanized western Europe, resistance groups operated in towns and cities, maintaining regular jobs and devoting off hours to fighting the occupation. Although resistance fighters would carry out military missions and assassinate German officers, their real contribution lay in the intelligence they provided allied forces massing in England. This intelligence proved valuable to the planners of Operation Overlord, the June 1944 invasion of Normandy. In preparation for the landings, resistance groups conducted diversionary raids and interdicted supply lines along the French coast and into the Low Countries. For the remainder of the war they harassed the retreating Germans and helped liberate Europe.

Resistance to Nazi occupation, however, came at a steep price. The Germans practiced a policy of schrechlichkeit (terror) throughout occupied Europe. They tortured captured agents for information and summarily executed one hundred hostages for each German killed by the Resistance. In retaliation for the assassination of SS Lieutenant General Reinhardt Heidrich by Czech partisans in 1942, the Nazis destroyed the entire village of Lidice and murdered its inhabitants, men, women, and children. Such brutal repression limited the effectiveness of many resistance movements.

Those considered terrorists by the Nazi occupiers have gone down in the histories of their respective countries as freedom fighters. Without equating World War II resistance fighters with Al Qaeda, the experience of occupied Europe serves as a reminder that whether one is or is not labeled a terrorist depends at least to some degree on the perspective of the labeler.

ANTICOLONIAL INSURGENCIES

The end of World War II saw many resistance groups morph into insurgent revolutions. In former Yugoslavia, partisans associated with Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) seized power in the wake of retreating Axis armies. Throughout Europe's colonial empires but particularly in Asia, Marxist-Leninist ideology blended with anticolonial nationalism to produce highly effective insurgencies. Many insurgent leaders sought to emulate Mao Zedong (1893–1976), who seized control of China using his own brand of communist insurgency, the "People's War." In a decades-long struggle Mao gained support among China's impoverished peasants, gained control of ever expanding rural areas, and then used these areas as a base to "drown the cities" in a sea of mobilized peasants. Mao described his insurgents as fish swimming in this sea of peasant support. He proposed a strategy evolving through four phases from propaganda through conventional war. Variations of his approach would guide communist insurgents for decades to come.

One such practitioner was Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) of Vietnam, then called "French Indochina." Having fought to expel the Japanese for four years, Ho was not about to hand his country back to the French. His Vietminh organization conducted a highly effective Maoist insurgency, assassinating pro-French village leaders, while the colonial forces lay cooped up in cities and fortified garrisons, out of touch with the Vietnamese people. Like Mao, Ho bided his time until his forces could challenge the French in open battle. His opportunity came in 1954 when the French established a remote fortified outpost at Dien Bien Phu. By interdicting an important Vietminh supply route, the French hoped to draw the insurgent general Vo Nguyen Giap's (b. 1912) forces into battle and destroy them with superior French firepower. Instead Giap besieged the outpost, overran its airstrip, and forced the garrison to surrender. This humiliating defeat led to French withdrawal from Indochina, which was divided into communist North and democratic South Vietnam. Determined to check the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, the United States backed the South, first with supplies and advisors and then with American forces. A long, costly, and demoralizing war ended with American withdrawal in 1973 and the unification of Vietnam under communist rule in 1975.

While insurgents drove the French from Indochina and the Dutch from the East Indies, the British in Malaya and Singapore fared better. Faced with a communist insurgency after retaking the colonies from the Japanese, they devised a comprehensive strategy to defeat the insurgents and establish a democratic, pro-Western government. Based on the concept of winning the hearts and minds of disaffected people, this strategy combined economic, political, and social reform with limited military force. The British improved living conditions for the Chinese peasants among whom the insurgents operated, offered them citizenship, and promised Malaya independence. These improvements encouraged many to support the government and even to provide intelligence on the insurgents operating in the jungle. This low-cost, long-haul approach took twelve years to succeed, but it produced decisive results. Building on their success in Malaya, the British defeated the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya during the 1950s. In the period 1970–1975 they helped the government of Oman defeat a communist insurgency in Dhofar province.

Elsewhere in their empire, the British had less success. A three-year insurgency spearheaded by the Irgun Zvai Leumi but tacitly backed by the Jewish Agency led them to withdraw from Palestine in 1948. During the conflict the Irgun perpetrated one of the most dramatic terrorist acts of the postwar period, the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Despite a warning to evacuate the building, some ninety people died in the attack. In combating the insurgents, the British found that tactics that had worked well in the Malayan jungles proved less effective in the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Political pressure from the administration of U.S. president Harry Truman (1884–1972) on behalf of the Zionists restrained the British from being firmer than they might have been. At the end of the day, however, they saw little in Palestine worth the cost of a protracted struggle and handed the League of Nations mandate over to its successor, the United Nations.

As the Palestine campaign illustrated, urban insurgency is far more challenging than its rural counterpart, a lesson reinforced by the British campaign in Cyprus (1954–1959) and the French campaign in Algeria (1954–1962). In both cases the security forces had more success in the countryside than they did in the cities. The British achieved a limited victory, never actually defeating the insurgents but preventing them from gaining control of the island. The French responded to insurgent terror with state terror of their own, using torture to gain intelligence on the insurgent organization and its members. Public condemnation of such tactics made the campaign untenable, as did the realization that France had little to gain from continued hostility. The government of Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) bowed to the inevitable and gave Algeria independence.

OTHER INSURGENCIES

While most national liberation movements ended with the demise of European empires by 1970, two campaigns persist in the early twenty-first century. A separatist movement in the Basque region of Spain demands independence from Madrid and creation of a new state out of Basque provinces in Spain and France. In Northern Ireland, Catholic insurgents have revived the dream of reuniting the six counties of the North with the twenty-six counties of the Irish Republic, created in 1921. Both movements have made extensive use of terror to achieve their objectives.

"Basque Fatherland and Liberty," better known as "ETA" from the acronym formed by its Basque name, began its campaign of violence in the 1960s. ETA drew support from a Basque population deprived of its language, culture, and institutions by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1892–1974) and sympathy from a Spanish population unhappy with the regime. Initially, ETA violence followed the insurgent pattern of attacks on police and government institutions within the Basque region itself and in the Spanish capital. The insurgents achieved their greatest success with the assassination of Admiral Louis Carrero Blanco, Franco's hand-picked successor, in 1973. This crowning achievement also began the decline in ETA's fortunes. A return to democracy followed Franco's death in 1974. A new Spanish constitution granted the Basque provinces limited autonomy. Basque language and culture revived, and still the violence continued. A bombing that killed twenty-one in Barcelona in 1987 produced widespread outrage and national protests against what most Spaniards now considered mere terrorism devoid of any reasonable political objectives. An extradition treaty with France deprived ETA of its safe haven in Basque territory across the Pyrenees, and a government crackdown reduced the organization's effectiveness. ETA declared a ceasefire in 1998, and many considered the organization finished. However, the Madrid train bombings of 11 March 2004 raised the disturbing possibility that a new generation of ETA members had joined forces with Al Qaeda.

Conditions in Northern Ireland during the 1960s had much in common with those in Spain. A Catholic minority population suffering systematic discrimination in what had become a Protestant-dominated apartheid state rose up in the summer of 1969. What began as a civil rights movement quickly transitioned into a nationalist insurgency, as a revived "Provisional" Irish Republic Army (PIRA) gained control of Catholic neighborhoods. PIRA launched a systematic campaign of terror that would last thirty years. Beginning with attacks on police and British soldiers in the province, it expanded to the British mainland and even attacked the United Kingdom's NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) forces on the Continent. Protestant paramilitaries responded to the PIRA threat and launched their own terrorist campaign against the Catholic community. After a rocky start marked by horrific blunders such as the Bloody Sunday massacre (1972), the British security forces developed effective counterinsurgency methods and fought PIRA to a draw by the early 1990s. This stalemate created the opportunity for a political settlement. Sinn Féin, PIRA's political wing, and the British government agreed to a cease-fire in 1994, which led to the 1998 Good Friday Accords. With a few setbacks a fragile peace has been maintained ever since.

IDEOLOGICAL TERRORISM

Not all postwar terrorism served national liberation or anticolonial movements. Some organizations committed acts of terror in the service of broad ideological agendas rather than specific, attainable political goals. A wave of such terror swept Europe during the 1960s, perpetrated by a generation of disillusioned middle-class youth. In Germany the Red Army Faction (RAF), better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang for two colorful leaders (Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof), launched a campaign based on Marxism and aimed to rid Germany of perceived Nazi influences. The RAF assassinated industrial leaders, staged bombings, and perpetrated bank robberies. Sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, the group forged links with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) with whom it hijacked an Air France flight to Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976. With abstract ideology and broad, diffuse goals, the movement failed to attract enough new followers to stay in business. The movement also suffered a serious setback with the suicide of Baader in 1977 but continued sporadic attacks until 1991. With most of its leaders dead or in prison, the RAF officially dissolved itself in 1998.

Italy's Red Brigades followed the pattern of Baader-Meinhof, racking Italy with a campaign of bombings and assassinations in the 1970s. For both groups, terror became not a means to an end but an end in itself. With little real prospect of success, which they could hardly even define, attacks seemed to validate a heroic if hopeless struggle. Like their German counterpart, the Red Brigades perpetrated a series of bombings and assassinations to which the Italian government responded half-heartedly. The situation changed dramatically with abduction and murder of the former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. The heinous act outraged the Italian people and raised the Red Brigades from a nuisance to a serious threat. The assassination prodded the government into decisive action. A concerted counterterrorism campaign by the Carabinieri led to a series of arrests that left the organization shattered by 1982.

The Dutch faced a brief but intense episode of terrorism in 1977, when South Moluccan immigrants living in the Netherlands launched a campaign to prevent annexation of their homeland by Indonesia. They wished to publicize their cause and seemed to believe, rather oddly, that the Netherlands could still influence events in its former colony. The campaign reached a climax in June, when terrorists seized a Dutch commuter train and school. Dutch Royal Marines stormed the train, killing all six terrorists and freeing the hostages, while another unit liberated the school, freed the hostages, and captured the terrorists without loss of life.

Greece has faced more than its share of terrorist attacks, most from domestic groups entwined in the country's complex politics. Two organizations, the 17 November Group and the Revolutionary People's Struggle (ELA) have operated since the 1970s. The groups have since concentrated on attacks aimed at forcing Greece out of NATO and NATO forces out of Greece.

Greece's NATO ally and sometime adversary Turkey has also faced considerably more terrorism than other European nations. By far its greatest threat comes from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a Marxist ethnic separatist movement seeking independence for the Kurdish region of southeastern Turkey and its eventual union with adjoining Kurdish regions in Syria, Iran, and Iraq. Formed in 1974, PKK has conducted an insurgent campaign in Kurdish areas and terrorist attacks throughout Turkey and against Turkish targets abroad. The Turks have long maintained that some European governments turn a blind eye to PKK activities on their soil and accuse Greece of actually abetting the organization. Islamist extremist groups, some linked to Al Qaeda, compound Turkey's security concerns. One or more of these organizations launched a horrific series of attacks against synagogues and banks in November 2003.

The Russian Federation has seen a local insurgency largely of its own making turn into a nasty terrorism campaign with international ramifications. A badly handled counterinsurgency campaign to prevent secession of Chechnya in the north Caucasus led the rebels to form links with Al Qaeda. The terrorists took the war into the Federation with attacks on Moscow apartment buildings (1999), a Moscow theater (2002), and a school in Beslan (2004). In both the theater and school incidents the terrorists took hostages, scores of whom were killed.

MIDDLE EAST TERRORISM

Terrorist groups often defy easy classification, but those in the Middle East are particularly difficult to pin down. A series of terrorist organizations have arisen directly or indirectly connected to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. These organizations often combined elements of insurgent movements and purely terrorist organizations motivated by political, ideological, and/or religious agendas. Founded in 1959, the Al Fatah movement of Yasser Arafat (1929–2004) carried out attacks against Israel from the West Bank during the early 1960s. Following Israeli occupation of the territory during the Six-Day War in 1967, Arafat moved to Jordan and from there to Lebanon and finally Tunisia, each of which served as base for terrorist activities. In 1974 Arafat gained control of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), an umbrella under which terrorist groups like the PFLP and the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) could gather.

Other organizations developed out of the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians. In an effort to route the PLO out of Lebanon, the Israeli Defense Forces invaded the country in 1982. Operation Peace of Galilee forced Arafat to leave for Tunisia, but it also gave rise to another even more militant organization, the Shiite Hezbollah group supported by Iran. Hezbollah attacked Israeli forces in southern Lebanon and northern Israel, contributing to final Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. An even more troubling organization arose in the occupied territories themselves. Demonstrations marking the twentieth anniversary of the Israeli occupation in 1987 turned violent and gave birth to Hamas, an Arabic acronym for "Islamic Resistance Movement." While they do not endorse some of its methods, Palestinians and their supporters consider Hamas to be a legitimate resistance movement struggling to end an illegal occupation. Israelis consider it a mere terrorist organization.

Zionism has also spawned its share of terrorist organizations. The Jewish Defense League founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane (Martin David; 1932–1990) in 1968 conducted numerous terrorist attacks against alleged anti-Semites. In 1971 Kahane emigrated with his family to Israel, where he set up the ultraconservative Kach party. Kach has perpetrated or encouraged terrorist attacks and vigilante violence against Arabs in the occupied territories, including the 1983 attack on an Islamic school in Hebron and the 1994 massacre of twenty-nine Muslims praying at Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs Mosque. Israeli security forces foiled an effort by Kahane's followers to blow up the Dome of the Rock (Mosque of Omar) atop Jerusalem's temple mount, the third holiest site in Islam.

Although rarely directly targeted by Middle East groups, Europeans have suffered from attacks carried out in Europe. The most notorious of these occurred during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany. Members of Black September, an Al Fatah strike group named for the Jordanian attack on Palestinians in that country, kidnapped Israeli athletes, eleven of whom died in an abortive rescue attempt. In 1985 another Palestinian terrorist organization, the Abu Nidal Group, launched simultaneous attacks on the ticket counters of Israel's El Al airline at the Rome and Vienna airports. The Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi (b. 1942) appears to have masterminded or at least supported the April 1986 bombing of a Berlin discotheque and the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988. In the attack, 270 people died, eleven of them British subjects killed on the ground.

Unlike Germany, which suffered when terrorists attacked foreigners on its soil, France has been the direct target of attacks by terrorists involved in the Algerian civil war. In December 1994 the Groupe Islamique Armée (Armed Islamic Group, or GIA) hijacked an Air France flight en route from Algiers to Paris, intending to crash it in to the Eiffel Tower. French commandos stormed the plane, freeing the hostages and preventing the attack. GIA perpetrated a series of bombings in France over the next few years until a crackdown on the organization in preparation for France's hosting the 1998 World Cup crippled the organization.

AL QAEDA AND ITS AFFILIATES

On 11 September 2001 the United States experienced a devastating attack in the worst terrorist incident to date. Suicide bombers hijacked four airplanes, crashing two into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon. A fourth plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania when passengers tried to regain control of the aircraft. More than three thousand people died in the attacks.

The perpetrator was an organization almost unheard of until a few years before. Al Qaeda ("the base" in Arabic) had been formed from the mujahidin (holy warriors) who had flocked to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invaders in 1979. Gathered around the Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden (b. 1957), the terrorists sought to replace the secular regimes governing most Muslim countries with Islamic republics governed by sharia law. Bin Laden's rage turned on the Saudi royal family and its American allies whom the monarchy allowed onto the sacred soil of the kingdom during the 1990–1991 Gulf War. Al Qaeda bombed the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 and the destroyer U.S.S. Cole in Aden Harbor in 2000. Intelligence analysts later determined that Al Qaeda had probably perpetrated the bombing of the Khobar Towers housing U.S. troops in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, in 1996.

Although not initially targets themselves, the European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) agreed that the 9/11 attacks fell under Article 5 of the organization's founding document, the Washington Treaty. This collective defense clause deemed an attack on one as an attack on all. European nations supported the U.S. war against Afghanistan, where Bin Laden was known to be hiding, allowed the use of American bases on its soil to support the effort, and readily granted fly-over rights to American aircraft. They also provided troops to the follow-on mission after the Taliban regime had been toppled.

European support for America's "Global War on Terrorism" waned with the U.S. decision to invade Iraq. Neither the United Nations nor many of the NATO allies was persuaded that any significant link between Al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein (b. 1937) existed or that the dictator possessed weapons of mass destruction in a quantity representing any serious threat to his neighbors. The United States had the support of Britain and that of the new NATO members in central and Eastern Europe, many of whom were awaiting ratification by the U.S. Senate of the accession treaties bringing them into the alliance. The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and growing resentment over the unilateralism of the administration of President George W. Bush (b. 1946) has led to a cooling of relations between the United States and Europe. Resentment deepened after Europe itself became a target of Al Qaeda.

On 11 March 2004 terrorists detonated a series of bombs on commuter trains and in the station in Madrid, Spain, killing 191 people. An unheard-of Al Qaeda affiliate claimed credit for the attack, although the explosives used were similar to those employed by ETA, fueling fear that Basque terrorists had perhaps formed an unholy alliance with the Islamic extremists. The attacks led to the ouster of the prime minister Jose Aznar's party from power in elections a few days later. Far from "knuckling under" to terrorism, Spanish voters were angered by Aznar's rush to blame ETA for the Madrid bombings and by his earlier willingness to send troops to Iraq contrary to the wishes of the vast majority of Spaniards. The new government's decision to withdraw its contingent from the American-led coalition followed by the terrorists' promise that there would be no further attacks against Spain was, however, widely seen as an Al Qaeda victory.

The Madrid bombings encouraged the European Union to take the terrorist threat more seriously. Brussels began to develop an EU-wide policy to supplement responses by member states. The EU Council issued a Declaration on Combating Terrorism and specifically tasked a unit within the EU Commission with the "Fight against terrorism, trafficking and exploitation of human beings and law enforcement co-operation." As might be expected, agreement on defensive measures such as protecting ports and infrastructure has been easier to achieve than consensus on how to attack terrorist organizations.

CONCLUSION

Any doubts that terrorism is a permanent part of the new European security landscape were swept away by the assassination of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam on 2 November 2004. The murderer, a Muslim extremist, was angered by van Gogh's recent film criticizing Islam's treatment of women. In combination with the Madrid bombings the van Gogh murder underscored an inescapable truth: the terrorism that plagued the Continent in the 1970s had returned in a new, potentially far more deadly form. The challenge will be to develop an effective counterterrorism policy that preserves both Europe's high regard for civil liberties and the freedom of movement that its citizens enjoy within the new European Union borders.

See alsoAl Qaeda; British Empire; Colonialism; Counterinsurgency; ETA; Guerrilla Warfare; Indochina; IRA; Ireland; Islam; Islamic Terrorism; Israel; Minority Rights; Northern Ireland; Palestine; Partisan Warfare; Purges; Red Army Faction; Red Brigades; Resistance; Sinn Féin; Warfare.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Mockaitis, Thomas R., and Paul Rich, eds. Grand Strategy in the War against Terrorism. London, 2003.

Tom Mockaitis