Al-Qaeda killing mostly Muslims: 85% of casualties non-Westerners, report says

Most victims of al-Qaeda terrorist attacks are Muslims living in Muslim countries, says a new report from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The study, by the academy's Combatting Terrorism Center and based on Arabic media sources to avoid accusations of pro-Western bias, concludes 85% of the casualties from all al-Qaeda attacks in 2004-08 were Muslims, compared with 15% Westerners.

The trend appears to have intensified toward the end of the period studied. In 2006-08, 96% of the victims were inhabitants of countries with Muslim majorities and only 2% were westerners.

"During this period, a person of non-Western origin was 54 times more likely to die in an al-Qaeda attack than an individual from the west," the study says.

Yet al-Qaeda's leaders insist westerners are their main targets and Muslim deaths are unintentional errors.

"We haven't killed innocents; not in Baghdad, nor in Morocco, nor in Algeria, nor anywhere else," Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group's No. 2, declared in a 2007 on-line forum when he was accused of killing innocent Muslim bystanders.

"If there is any innocent who was killed in the mujahedeen's operations, then it was either an unintentional error or out of necessity," he said.

The West Point report concludes al-Qaeda is growing more violent and indiscriminate.

"Al-Qaeda represents itself as the vanguard of the Muslim community, committed to upholding Islamic values and defending Muslim people against Western forces, but its behavior represents a callous attitude toward the lives of those the group claims to protect," it says.

Outside the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, 99% of al-Qaeda's victims were non-Western in 2007 and 96% were non-Western in 2008, the study adds.

Since it relied on Arabic sources, the West Point work is expected to be a powerful propaganda tool in U.S. attempts to discredit al-Qaeda internationally (...)