Report: Iraq to blame for 25% rise in global terrorism
Iraq’s sectarian warfare fueled a sharp increase in global terrorism in 2006, the U.S. State Department reported Monday.
The total number of terrorist attacks was up more than 25 percent from the previous year, according to the State Department’s annual report on global terrorism.
Incidents in Iraq accounted for nearly half of the 14,000 attacks and about two-thirds of the more than 20,000 fatalities worldwide. The number of deaths blamed on attacks increased by about 40 percent.
The spike comes from the eruption of sectarian killings and bombings that followed the February 2006 bombing of the al-Askariya mosque in the Iraqi city of Samarra, according to Frank Urbancic, the State Department’s acting counterterrorism coordinator.
That attack, blamed on al Qaeda in Iraq, destroyed a revered Shiite Muslim shrine and led to a wave of reprisals between Iraq’s Sunni and Shiite communities.
The number of people killed in terrorist attacks in Iraq rose from 8,262 in 2005 to 13,340 last year, said Russell Travers, deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
cnn
Stumble it!