Terrorist Group Profiles

This valuable new title profiles more than twenty terrorist organizations operating in the Middle East and their affiliate groups worldwide. Designed as a complete, indispensable guide, the book's profiles describe essential characteristics, external relations and financial support and more.

A reprint of a U. S. government study designed to provide the American people detailed information about key terrorist groups and thereby strip away much of their mystique. We anticipate it will be useful to researchers, students, the media, and others who follow terrorist issues.The study is divided into geographic sections that begin with an overview, followed by coverage of the key regional terrorist groups. Information includes an estimate of each group?s membership strength, identities of key leaders, ideological orientation, target audiences, and a narrative description of the group?s background.By providing such detailed information, we can help the American people understand better the terrorist phenomenon and place it in perspective as one of many challenges we must confront in this complex and sometimes violent age.

This valuable new title profiles more than twenty terrorist organizations operating in the Middle East and their affiliate groups worldwide. Designed as a complete, indispensable guide, the book's profiles describe essential characteristics, external relations and financial support and more.

Terrorist groups with a shared enemy or ideology have ample reason to work together, even if they are primarily pursuing different causes. Although partnering with another terrorist organization has the potential to bolster operational effectiveness, efficiency, and prestige, international alliances may expose partners to infiltration, security breaches, or additional counterterrorism attention. Alliances between such organizations, which are suspicious and secretive by nature, must also overcome significant barriers to trust—the exposure to risk must be balanced by the promise of increased lethality, resiliency, and longevity. In Why Terrorist Groups Form International Alliances, Tricia Bacon argues that although it may seem natural for terrorist groups to ally, groups actually face substantial hurdles when attempting to ally and, when alliances do form, they are not evenly distributed across pairs. Instead, she demonstrates that when terrorist groups seek allies to obtain new skills, knowledge, or capacities for resource acquisition and mobilization, only a few groups have the ability to provide needed training, safe haven, infrastructure, or cachet. Consequently, these select few emerge as preferable partners and become hubs around which other groups cluster. According to Bacon, shared enemies and common ideologies do not cause alliances to form but create affinity to bind partners and guide partner selection. Bacon examines partnerships formed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Al-Qaida, and Egyptian jihadist groups, among others, in a series of case studies spanning the dawn of international terrorism in the 1960s to the present. Why Terrorist Groups Form International Alliances advances our understanding of the motivations of terrorist alliances and offers insights useful to counterterrorism efforts to disrupt these dangerous relationships.

This unique volume explores Europe's most dangerous communist terrorist organizations and reveals how they use violence as a means of political communication and persuasion. It outlines seven terrorist groups from Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Belgium, Italy and Turkey and gives their modus operandi, rationale and political messages in translated communiqués never before available in English.

This book improves our understanding of terrorists’ motivations and rationality and may, ultimately, also indicate how to respond to the phenomenon of terrorism. In his research studies, Eric van Um explores the political rationality of terrorist groups. The political rationality model builds on rational choice theory. It demands that terrorist groups take into account the costs and benefits of their available options and choose the option promising them the highest political utility. Testing the explanatory power of this model is relevant, as rational choice approaches have become very prominent in terrorism research. But, at the same time, their empirical power remains highly contested. Increased knowledge of the political rationality model not only promises added value for terrorism research itself, but also for social sciences more generally.