SIZE OF SUCCESSFUL RESISTANCE GROUPS The size of the active service component of urban guerrilla and terrorists groups generally ranges from a couple of hundred at the low end to a couple of thousand members at the high end. The following estimates of the number of hardcore operational activists for some of the major urban paramilitary groups illustrate this point: • Basque Fatherland and Liberty-- 200 • Irgun in Palestine -- 200 • FLN in Algiers only – 200 • PIRA – 250-300 • EOKA in Cyprus – 350 maximum, often less • M-19 in Colombia – 1,000 • Armed Islamic Group in Algeria – several hundred to several thousand Demographics of Membership Surprisingly the type person who becomes an urban guerrilla or terrorist remains essentially the same regardless of culture, geography, or era. As we shall demonstrate below, such a person is generally young, single, male, and has some education. Additionally, in the case of ideologically motivated groups, a member is likely to come from a middle or upper family. As a rule, the frontline cadre of paramilitary organizations are generally young people in their early to mid 20s. Exceptions to this rule sometimes occur like in the case of the Provisional IRA and various Islamic groups that use teenagers, sometimes as young as 12-14 years old. The leadership, on the other hand, is generally much older, usually being in their the mid-30s to early 40s. Again however, there are some notable exceptions like the cases of Carlos Marighella (the world’s leading theoretician of urban terrorism) in Brazil who was 58 at the time of his death and the policy leaders of Palestinian groups who are often in their late 40s or early 50s. The operational cadre is predominantly male -- as much as 80% of the time between 1966 and 1976 according to one study. This observation was echoed by another paper devoted exclusively to the topic of women as terrorists that concluded: “women have played a relatively minor role in terrorist violence in the last thirty years.” Case studies into the behavior of individual groups reinforce these general findings. For example, only one quarter of the Tupmaros in Uruguay were women. Limiting the role of women is apparently a long-standing practice among urban guerrilla and terrorist groups. This is suggested by a study that found that women made up only 25% of all Russian terrorists prior to the 1917 revolution. The Greek EOKA operating in Cyprus during the 1950s
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 16:30:21 +0000
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