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United States Identifies State Sponsors of Terrorism, Cites WMD Concern in New Report By Marina Malenic WASHINGTON — Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria continue to provide terrorists with secure locations and support in fund raising, weapons acquisition and recruiting, the State Department said yesterday in its Country Reports on Terrorism for 2004 (see GSN, April 27). “More worrisome is that these countries also have the capabilities to manufacture weapons of mass destruction and other destabilizing technologies that could fall into the hands of terrorists,” the report says. “State sponsors of terrorism impede the efforts of the United States and the international community to fight terrorism,” the report says. “These countries provide a critical foundation for terrorist groups.” Libya and Sudan remain on the list of state sponsors, but have shown significant cooperation against terrorism, according to the report, while Iraq as of October is no longer designated as a sponsor of terrorist activity. Al-Qaeda remained the primary terrorist threat to the United States last year, according to the report. While the United States has made headway in reducing the group’s overall capabilities and membership, al-Qaeda continued to disperse its ideology among smaller, localized groups. “There is a declining role for a significantly degraded al-Qaeda and a rising role for groups inspired by al-Qaeda,” State Department counsel Philip Zelikow said yesterday in a briefing on the report. Meanwhile, the newly created National Counterterrorism Center separately issued a set of international terror incident statistics for 2004. There were 651 significant international terrorist attacks in which 9,321 people were killed, wounded or taken hostage. One percent of the victims were U.S. citizens, according to the center’s data. The attacks resulted in 1,907 deaths. This year’s numbers for total significant terrorism incidents are a more than three-fold increase over last year’s totals. The data in that report were revised after the Bush administration was charged with underreporting the number of attacks (see GSN, June 23, 2004). The agency is also compiling new data based on what officials said is a more precise methodology. Those statistics are expected to be released in June. “It is going to be a much more comprehensive data set,” said John Brennan, the agency’s interim director, at yesterday’s briefing Until this year, the State Department has included such data in its annual Patterns of Global Terrorism, based on a congressionally established definition of terrorism. The State Department document was renamed Country Reports this year.
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