A (partial) list of Al Qaeda/Islamic Jihadist attacks:
* 1993: Six people killed in bomb attack at the World Trade Center in New York.
* 1993: US Marines attacked in Mogadishu, Somalia.
* 1994: Explosion on a Philippine Airlines jet bound for Tokyo killed one and injured ten.
* 1995: 7 killed by truck bombing in in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia at US Headquarters.
* 1996: 19 US servicemen killed in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, when the Khobar Towers housing complex was blown up by a suicide bomber.
* 1998: American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania attacked in suicide truck bombings. Approximately 230 people killed.
* 2000: USS Cole attacked by suicide speedboat. Seventeen sailors were killed and 39 others were injured in the blast which blew a hole in the port side of the destroyer.
* 2001: 2,986 people killed as hijacked planes are flown into New York’s Twin Towers and the US Pentagon, and in a fourth hijacked airliner. The Pentagon is damaged, the Twin Towers are destroyed.
* 2002: Five people killed when terrorists hurled grenades into a church in Pakistan.
* 2002: Twenty one people, including 18 German tourists, killed when an ancient synagogue was bombed in Tunis.
* 2002: French oil tanker, the Limburg, attacked by a suicide speed boat off the coast of Yemen. One crew member died.
* 2002: 202 people, mostly Australians, killed by a bomb in a Bali nightclub.
* 2002: Sixteen dead, including three bombers, at the Israeli Paradise Hotel in Mombassa, Kenya. Two missiles missed an Israeli plane carrying 200 people.
* 2003: Suicide bombers hit three compounds for foreign workers in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The 34 dead included nine attackers.
* 2003: Fourteen suicide bombers attacked four targets in the Moroccan capital Casablanca. Forty one people were killed.
* 2003: Twelve killed by car bomb outside Marriott Hotel in Indonesian capital Jakarta.
* 2003: Housing complex in Riyadh attacked by suicide car bomb. Seventeen dead, 100 hurt.
* 2003: Two synagogues in Istanbul attacked, killing 23 and wounding at least 300.
* 2003: Attacks on British Consulate and HSBC bank in Istanbul killed 27 and injured more than 450. Among the dead was Consul-General Roger Scott.
* 2004: In Madrid, Spain ten bombs remotely detonated on four trains in the rush hour killed 191 commuters and wounded 2,000.
* 2004: Gunmen stormed residential buildings for foreign workers in Khobar, Saudi Arabia. Twenty two workers killed.
* 2004: Gunmen attacked a BBC crew in Suweidi, Saudi Arabia. Irish cameraman Simon Cumber was killed and BBC correspondent Frank Gardener injured.
* 2004: American engineer Paul Johnson murdered by his kidnappers in Riyadh.
* 2004: At least 40 people killed when three suicide bombings hit resorts on Egypt’s Red Sea coast. At the Taba Hilton, a huge car bomb killed at least 30 people.
* 2004: Five staff and four gunmen killed in a raid on US consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
* 2004: 344 civilians were killed, at least 172 of them children, and hundreds more wounded in the town of Beslan, Russia as jihadist terrorists took over a primary school. The terrorists rigged bombs and held the children and adults captive for three days.
* 2005: 50 people killed and more than 700 wounded in London, England when 4 timed bombs explode, three in the Underground train system and a fourth on a double-decked London bus.
(Data for this list compiled from various sources, including Wikipedia, The Sun, and Paul Berman.)
This list is not complete. It does not, for example, reflect the hundreds of attacks in Israel which have maimed and killed thousands of civilians in that country. Nor does this list pretend to be an exhaustive catalog all “successful” al Qaeda/Jihadist attacks in other countries. Nor does this list reflect the untold number of attacks which were foiled at the last minute by fate or quick-thinking police officers or customs agents (eg: Shoe bomber Richard Reid was foiled in 2001 trying to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami, the failed speedboat attack in 2000 that was apparently a “trial run” for the bombing of the USS Cole.)
***JASON ADDS: I often hear the debate between “war” and a “law enforcement issue” when one speaks of terrorism. You can pretty much tell which side of the aisle someone sits on by their answer. So which is it? I say it is both. Within the nations connected by freer trade and globalization it is clearly a law enforcement issue. They have the rule of law. They have law enforcement that is mostly integrous. Outside of that “Connected Core” as Dr Thomas Barnett would put it, it is war. So it is both/and, not either/or. Blair knows we are not going to bomb the london neighborhoods the Al Qaeda cells are located in in London. And Yemen knows they better go after their cells or we will bomb those site there. Both/And.
July 8th, 2005 | Global War On Terror, Jihad Watch, Politics