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Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Mitigating Mumbai: The lessons US learned from the Nov. 26 Mumbai terror attack, Islam,Terrorism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam,Terrorism and Jihad
Mitigating Mumbai: The lessons US learned from the Nov. 26 Mumbai terror attack
The lessons US learned from the Nov. 26 Mumbai terror attack
By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart, Stratfor
January 14, 2009 | 1852 GMT

Armed Assaults

Armed assaults employing small arms and grenades have long been a staple of modern terrorism. Such assaults have been employed in many famous terrorist attacks conducted by a wide array of actors, such as the Black September operation against the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; the December 1975 seizure of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries headquarters in Vienna, Austria, led by Carlos the Jackal; the December 1985 simultaneous attacks against the airports in Rome and Vienna by the Abu Nidal Organization; and even the December 2001 attack against the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi led by Kashmiri militants.

In a particularly brutal armed assault, a large group of Chechen militants stormed a school in Beslan, North Ossetia in September 2004, taking more than 1,000 hostages and booby-trapping the school with scores of anti-personnel mines and improvised explosive devices. The attack, standoff and eventual storming of the school by Russian authorities after a three-day siege resulted in the deaths of more than 320 people, half of them children.

In some instances — such as the December 1996 seizure of the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima, Peru, by the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement — the objective of the armed assault was to take and intentionally hold hostages for a long period of time. In other instances, such as the May 1972 assault on Lod Airport by members of the Japanese Red Army, the armed assault was a suicide attack designed simply to kill as many victims as possible before the assailants themselves were killed or incapacitated. Even though Mumbai became a protracted operation, its planning and execution indicate it was intended as the second sort of attack — the attackers were ordered to inflict maximum damage and to not be taken alive.

http://newageislam.com/mitigating-mumbai--the-lessons-us-learned-from-the-nov.-26-mumbai-terror-attack-/islam,terrorism-and-jihad/d/1120


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