As a service to its media subscribers, Friday’s attacks in Paris, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) released a condensed list of large scale attacks by radical Islamist groups since the attack on the twin towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, in 2001. The readers are invited to guess which frequent target of Islamist terrorist attacks, large and small scale and all the scales in between—was not included in the AFP list?
Let’s see, in a descending timeline, AFP listed:
November 13, 2015: FRANCE – An unprecedented string of attacks leaves at least 120 dead and more than 350 injured.
November 12, 2015: LEBANON – An attack claimed by IS on a stronghold of Lebanon’s Shiite movement Hezbollah in southern Beirut, leaves 44 dead.
October 31, 2015: EGYPT – A Russian jet leaving Egypt crashes in the Sinai peninsula, leaving all 224 people on board dead in Russia’s worst air disaster.
October 10, 2015: TURKEY – 102 people are killed and more than 500 injured in a suicide attack in front of Ankara’s train station, where activists were gathered for a peace demonstration.
June 26, 2015: TUNISIA – 38 tourists, including 30 Britons, are killed when a Tunisian student armed with a Kalashnikov rifle opens fire in a beach resort.
April 2, 2015: KENYA – A day-long siege of the eastern Garissa University kills 148, including 142 students.
January 7-9, 2015: FRANCE – Two men armed with Kalashnikov rifles storm the Paris offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo killing 12 people including eight cartoonists. A policewoman is killed just outside Paris the following day, while a gunman takes hostages at a Jewish supermarket, four of whom are killed.
September 21-24, 2013: KENYA – An armed commando storms the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi, a favourite of Kenyan and expatriate shoppers. The attack, claimed by Al-Shebab, leaves 67 dead.
November 26-29, 2008: INDIA – 166 people are killed when Islamist gunmen storm luxury hotels, the main railway station, a Jewish center and other sites in the booming metropolis of Mumbai.
July 7, 2005: BRITAIN – Four coordinated suicide attacks during the peak travel period on three underground trains and a London bus kill 56 and injure 700.
March 11, 2004: SPAIN – A dozen bombs explode in Madrid and in its suburbs on four trains, leaving 191 dead and nearly 2,000 missing.
October 12, 2002: INDONESIA – Attacks on a bar-restaurant and a discotheque on the island of Bali leaves 202 dead, mainly tourists.
September 11, 2011: UNITED STATES – Four passenger aircraft are diverted and three deliberately slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC. The fourth plane crashes in Pennsylvania. The attacks, claimed by Al-Qaeda, and which leave around 3,000 dead, are the deadliest in history.
Thank God, Israel never experienced the kind of mass terrorist attacks described above. But Several thousand Israelis have been killed in vicious attacks by Arabs of all stripes, since the signing of the Oslo accords of 1994, and then since the September 11, 2001, which is the date picked by AFP to start their record keeping.
The fact that these thousands of Israeli victims did not receive even a footnote in this list suggests a terrible oversight on the part of the AFP list makers, or a permeating notion at the agency that the Israeli victims don’t count.
For the full list of Israeli terror victims since the Oslo accords Declaration of Principles (Sept 1993) between Israel and the PLO, click here.
We picked just the larger-scale attacks, and just those since the fall of 2001.