This week the National Counterterrorism Center issued a new accounting of terrorist incidents for 2004 as it unveiled its Worldwide Incidents Tracking System. This is the third time that the US government has tried to generate these statistics. By statute since 1985 the State Department has been required to prepare an annual report on global terrorism for Congress. Since 1986 it has prepared a public summary entitled “Patterns of Global Terrorism.” In early April 2005, “Patterns for Global Terrorism” did not come out and there were leaks of an internal dispute over how to count incidents. It was rumored that elements in the Bush administration were unhappy because the National Counterterrorism Center, created by the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004, believed the number to be higher than the State Department. And a higher number, it was argued, would be inconsistent with the government’s view that it was winning the War on Terror.
On April 27, the State Department and the National Counterterrorism Center held a joint news conference to issue companion reports on terrorism in 2004. Besides providing consensus numbers on worldwide incidents, the press conference symbolized a handoff from State to the NCTC, which would in future be responsible for compiling and analyzing terrorism data.
At that press conference State and the NCTC explained that there had been 625 significant international terrorism incidents in 2004 causing the deaths of 1907 and the wounding of over 7,000 people. By significant, they meant terrorist incidents involving the killing, wounding or kidnapping of non-combatants or where there had been at least $10,000 in physical damage. John Brennan, the interim chief of the NCTC, also promised a fuller accounting of all attacks against non-combatants in June. No explanation was given why this would be necessary.
This past week, a little behind schedule, the NCTC issued these numbers, which got some play but little analysis. Surprisingly, the number of incidents and deaths for 2004 was in some categories four times what State and the NCTC had described in April. According to the new survey there had been 3,192 incidents in 2004, not 625, causing the deaths of 6,060 people and the wounding of 16,091. What caused this dramatic change in the index of world terror? Well, the NCTC’s new Worldwide Incidents Tracking System is designed to include all acts of terrorism, domestic as well as international. The previous official US database counted only international incidents. Did this mean that domestic terrorism accounted for an additional 4,000 dead and 9,000 wounded last year, more than those killed and wounded by all acts of international terrorism combined? Where, how and why? Has international terrorism been eclipsed by a new scourge?
The answer lay in a sentence in the methodology section of the April 2004 NCTC report, “A Chronology of Significant International Terrorism for 2004:” “The distinction between terrorism and insurgency in Iraq is especially problematic….As a result, the list of incidents provided here includes incidents involving non-Afghan/non-Iraqi civilians.” In other words, incidents where Iraqi civilians were blown up were not included in official US statistics. At the April conference, in response to a question Brennan explained that 554 people had died and 1155 were wounded in terrorist attacks in Iraq, by which he meant Turks, Americans and Jordanians.
The principal reason why the figures for worldwide terrorism are so much greater now is that Iraqi civilians are included in the new survey. A comparison of the NCTC’s April 2005 assessment and what was released this week reveals the fact that 2,154 Iraqi civilians died and 4,556 were wounded in bombings and assassinations in 2004. In other words, one third of all terrorist victims worldwide last year were Iraqi civilians. Another statistic frames the issue even more dramatically. No other country suffered higher casualties from terrorism in 2004 than Iraq. Last year, 2,121 Russians were either killed or wounded by terrorists. In spite of the Beslan massacre, the Russians only came in fourth after India which suffered 2,434 casualties and Spain with 2,133 victims. At the top in the grief index, by far, are the Iraqis with nearly 7,000 casualties. The people we dragged into our fight with al Qaeda are now bearing the brunt of world terrorism.
I don’t know how anyone can look at this statistic and not scream. What can one say of a counterterrorism strategy that manages to induce more terrorism? What do those 6,700 Iraqi victims have to do with our fight with bin Laden? That was last year's toll and we know already that it is likely to be worse this year. We opened the door to terrorist incidents in Iraq and now lack the power even with the fledgling Iraqi security forces to close it. I won’t go into the fact that the new NCTC database does not really differentiate between Baathist-insurgency attacks and Qaeda-inspired attacks because the difference is irrelevant to dead Iraqis and their families.
The significance of the Iraqi civilian casualties figure in this new database seems to have escaped major media attention. Instead the press covered the new statistics as if the larger number of incidents proves that we are losing the struggle against our main terrorist enemy. Actually the number of incidents says very little about our effectiveness in fighting al Qaeda since the NCTC now counts small acts of arson and does not include foiled attacks. What the statistics do make clear, however, is the new problem of terrorism for Iraqis. Saddam was evil. But he’s gone and now the Iraqis need to believe that what they have in return is better. Given the number of Iraqis who were blown up in 2004 and so far in 2005, it is no wonder that the United States is having a hard time making the case for the current form of “liberation.” The new NCTC statistics speak volumes about our misguided strategy in fighting international jihadism and the unintended toll on Iraqi innocents. They deserve more scrutiny.