History of terrorism

[1] Depending on how broadly the term is defined, the roots and practice of terrorism can be traced at least to the 1st-century AD Sicarii Zealots, though some dispute whether the group, which assassinated collaborators with Roman rule in the province of Judea, were in fact terrorist.

It was a period of eleven months during the French Revolution when the ruling Jacobins employed violence, including mass executions by guillotine, in order to intimidate the regime's enemies and compel obedience to the state.

[19] During the 1st century AD, the Jewish Zealots in Judaea Province rebelled against the Roman Empire, killing prominent collaborators such as the Sadducees running the Second Temple and the Hasmonean dynasty.

[54][55] The French anarchist Paul Brousse (1844–1912) popularized the phrase "propaganda of the deed"; in 1877 he cited as examples the 1871 Paris Commune and a workers' demonstration in Bern provocatively using the socialist red flag.

Reflecting this new understanding of the term, in 1895 Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta described "propaganda by the deed" (which he opposed the use of) as violent communal insurrections meant to ignite an imminent revolution.

[57] Founded in Russia in 1878, Narodnaya Volya (Народная Воля in Russian; People's Will in English) was a revolutionary anarchist group inspired by Sergei Nechayev and by "propaganda by the deed" theorist Pisacane.

That same year German anarchists Max Hödel and Karl Nobiling attempted to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm I, giving Chancellor Otto von Bismarck a pretext to pass the Anti-Socialist Laws banning the Social Democratic Party.

In the years 1894 to 1896 anarchists killed President of France Marie Francois Carnot, Prime Minister of Spain Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, and the Empress of Austria-Hungary, Elisabeth of Bavaria.

[68][69][70] During the Civil War, pro-Confederate Bushwhackers and pro-Union Jayhawkers in Missouri and Kansas respectively engaged in cross border raids, committed acts of violence against civilians and soldiers, stole goods and burned down farms.

[71] On December 7, 1863, pro-Confederate British subjects from the Maritime Provinces hijacked the American steamer Chesapeake off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, killing a crew member and wounding three others in the ensuing gunfight.

[77] A KKK founder boasted that it was a nationwide organization of 550,000 men and that it could muster 40,000 Klansmen within five days' notice, but as a secret or "invisible" group with no membership rosters, it was difficult to judge the Klan's actual size.

[82] The group published newsletters, smuggled arms, and hijacked buildings as it sought to bring in European intervention that would force the Ottoman Empire to surrender control of its Armenian territories.

The United States Department of Justice destroyed left-wing and radical political movements, including Marxism, anarchism, and the Industrial Workers of the World, through the Palmer Raids led by J. Edgar Hoover.

[102] On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, one of a group of six assassins, shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarajevo, the capital of the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The campaign, led by key WSPU figures such as Emmeline Pankhurst, targeted infrastructure, government, churches and the general public, and saw the use of improvised explosive devices, arson, letter bombs, assassination attempts and other forms of direct action and violence.

[114] The rebellion failed militarily but was a success for physical force Irish republicanism, leaders of the uprising becoming heroes in Ireland after their eventual sentence of capital punishment by the British government.

[121][122] On the eve of D-Day, the SOE organised with the French Resistance the complete destruction of the rail[142] and communication infrastructure of western France[143] the largest coordinated attack of its kind in history[144] Allied supreme commander Dwight D. Eisenhower later wrote that "the disruption of enemy rail communications, the harassing of German road moves and the continual and increasing strain placed on German security services throughout occupied Europe by the organised forces of Resistance, played a very considerable part in our complete and final victory".

[95] Also during the 1950s, the National Liberation Front (FLN) in French-controlled Algeria and the Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston (EOKA) in British-controlled Cyprus waged guerrilla and open war against the authorities.

[160][161] Founded in 1928 as a nationalist social-welfare and political movement in the Kingdom of Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood began to attack British Armed Forces soldiers and police stations in the late 1940s.

[195] In 1995 an ETA car-bomb nearly killed José María Aznar, then the leader of the conservative People's Party, and in the same year investigators disrupted a plot to assassinate King Juan Carlos I.

Inspired by Che Guevara, Maoist socialism, and the Vietcong, the group sought to raise awareness of the Vietnamese and Palestinian independence movements through kidnappings, taking embassies hostage, bank robberies, assassinations, bombings, and attacks on U.S. Air Force bases.

[206][207] The hijacking of the Lufthansa jetliner "Landshut" in October 1977 by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Palestinian group allied with the Red Army Faction, also forms part of the German Autumn.

In 1983, President Fernando Belaúnde Terry of Peru described armed attacks on his nation's anti-narcotics police as "narcoterrorism", i.e., which refers to "violence waged by drug producers to extract political concessions from the government.

Weathermen leaders, inspired by China's Maoists, the Black Panthers, and the 1968 student revolts in France, sought to raise awareness of its revolutionary anti-capitalist and anti-Vietnam War platform by destroying symbols of government power.

Allied with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the group committed assassinations, hijacked a commercial Japanese aircraft, and sabotaged a Shell oil refinery in Singapore.

In Kenya, because of the seeming ongoing failure of the Kenyan African Union to obtain political reforms from the British government through peaceful means, radical activists within the KAU set up a splinter group and organised a more militant kind of nationalism.

659 people died in Lebanon between 1982 and 1986 in 36 suicide attacks directed against American, French and Israeli forces, by 41 individuals with predominantly leftist political beliefs who were adherents of both the Christian and Muslim religions.

On November 17, 1997, in what became known as the Luxor massacre, it attacked tourists at the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut (Deir el-Bahri); six men dressed as police officers machine-gunned 58 Japanese and European vacationers and four Egyptians.

On the morning of Thursday, 7 July 2005, four Islamist extremists separately detonated three bombs in quick succession aboard London Underground trains across the city and, later, a fourth on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square.

[303] On 7 January 2015, two Islamist gunmen[304] forced their way into and opened fire in the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo shooting, killing twelve: staff cartoonists Charb, Cabu, Philippe Honoré, Tignous and Georges Wolinski,[305] economist Bernard Maris, editors Elsa Cayat and Mustapha Ourrad, guest Michel Renaud, maintenance worker Frédéric Boisseau and police officers Brinsolaro and Merabet, and wounding eleven, four of them seriously.