11 Islamic Groups Added to Terror List

The State Department added 11 militant Islamic groups to its official list of terrorist organizations Wednesday but said that international efforts had reduced worldwide terrorist attacks and doubled the number of Al Qaeda members in custody to more than 3,000.

In releasing the report, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that around the world, “terrorist cells have been broken up, networks disrupted and plots foiled.” Yet he warned that despite the progress, terrorists are planning “appalling crimes and trying to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction.”

“We cannot and will not relax our resolve,” he added.

Separately, U.S. officials said a new terrorism intelligence center is scheduled to begin operations today.

The Terrorist Threat Integration Center is supposed to solve information-sharing problems that plagued the CIA, the FBI and other agencies in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The center was announced by President Bush in his State of the Union address last year. It initially will be based at CIA headquarters, with about 50 analysts and other experts, largely drawn from the CIA and FBI.

John Brennan, a longtime CIA official in charge of the new center, said it will have access to a variety of intelligence data and will produce a daily “threat matrix” distributed to top government officials. The matrix was previously drafted each day by the CIA and the FBI.

Brennan also said the center will provide the “analytic basis” for the government’s color-coded threat alert system.

In the annual terrorist activity survey, the State Department left unchanged its list of state sponsors of terrorism: Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, Libya and Cuba. Nations on the list are ineligible for U.S. economic aid and arms sales and barred from buying so-called dual-use products that could be used for both civilian and military purposes.

Now that Saddam Hussein has been overthrown, Powell has recommended that Bush drop U.S. sanctions against Iraq, officials said.

Syria was included on the list even as Powell prepared to visit Damascus to seek greater cooperation from Syrian President Bashar Assad. Officials acknowledged that Syria has helped the United States in its hunt for Al Qaeda operatives but criticized the country for continuing to host and support such groups as Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Syria also has come in for criticism from the administration in recent weeks for allegedly allowing Iraqi officials to flee through its territory and militants to cross it en route to attacking U.S. forces in Iraq.

Officials cited progress by Libya and Sudan, yet said that the countries still need to do more. Libya “has again failed to comply with United Nations requirements related to the bombing in 1988 of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland,” it said. The U.S. maintains that the Libyan government has not acknowledged criminal responsibility for the bombing -- in which 279 people were killed -- as the U.N. requires. The report faulted Sudan for permitting Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to have a presence in the country.

The report said Al Qaeda suspects have now been arrested in 100 countries. About 1,600 Al Qaeda members were in custody at the time of last year’s report.

The 11 newly listed Islamic groups included Ansar al-Islam, a group that was based in Kurdistan and took a heavy beating by U.S. and Kurdish forces in the war on Iraq. The U.S. has said it believes Ansar al-Islam was linked to Al Qaeda.

Also among them was Hizb-i Islami, founded by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar; the Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade, a group affiliated with the Chechen rebels who attacked a Moscow theater last fall; and the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement, a Uighur separatist group based in China’s Xinjiang province. China has been urging the Bush administration to begin an effort against the group.

Just as it did last year, the report praised the international effort against terrorism. It said the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were an important part of the effort.

Officials sought to emphasize the decline in terrorist attacks, saying it brought the level of terrorism to the lowest point in 30 years. Cofer Black, the State Department’s coordinator for terrorism, said the decline was “a remarkable achievement.”

Yet the drop reflected, in large part, not efforts in the unsettled Middle East but a falloff in attacks by Colombian rebels against that country’s oil pipelines. There were 41 such attacks in 2002, down from 178 the year before. The attacks are aimed at depriving the Colombian government of oil revenue.

Governments made some progress in freezing the assets of terrorist groups. In 2001, they had confiscated $116 million; with this report, the total has reached $134 million.

Deaths from terrorist attacks fell to 725, from 3,295 in 2001, a year that included the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Thirty Americans were among those killed in terrorist attacks in 2002.

Officials said 2002 included horrific attacks, including a bombing in Bali in October that killed about 200. The terrorist attack by Chechen militants on a Moscow theater involved 800 hostages, a record, officials said.

Times staff writer Greg Miller contributed to this report.