WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush said Thursday that the United States was making big gains in its global war on terror even though more people are being killed across the world by terrorist attacks.
"We are relentless -- we the Americans and coalition partners. We understand the stakes and they are very high," Bush told a news conference a day after figures showed terrorist activity increased sharply last year with the number of attacks and dead more than tripling.
"Our strategy is to stay on the offensive and to keep the pressure on the people -- cut off their (terrorists) money (network), share intelligence and find where they hide," he said. "We are making good progress."
Bush added that the United States would not shirk from its decision, taken after the September 11, 2001 attacks, to defeat the terrorists abroad "so that we don't have to face them here at home.
He said that while the short term objective was to go after the terrorists and destroy their organizations, the push for freedom and democracy must be intensified as a long term objective.
The US National Counterterrorism Center, an arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, said in a report Wednesday that there were 651 terrorist attacks across the globe last year with 1,907 people killed.
This compares with 208 attacks involving 625 fatalities in 2003, according to State Department figures released last year.
A total of 6,704 people were wounded in terrorist strikes last year, according to the center, compared to the 3,646 reported for 2003. Another 710 people were taken hostage in 2004, the new report said.
The center released the figures for the first time and separately from an annual State Department country report on terrorism which said the global threat remained "significant" and Iraq was still the central battleground.
Earlier this month, the department said it had decided not to publish statistics after widely publicized errors were found in figures for 2003 that had to be revised.
Congressional Democrats charged that last year's erroneous report was used to bolster administration claims to be making progress in the war on terror, and urged the State Department to include data on terrorist attacks in its annual report.
"We also ask that you determine whether political consideration affected the department's decision this year to withhold data regarding terrorist attacks from its annual terrorism report," they said in a letter to the department.
Most of those killed by terrorist attacks in 2004 were in the Middle East, largely in Iraq, where 726 people died in 270 attacks. But the bloodiest strikes were in Europe and Eurasia, where 636 people were killed overall in 24 incidents, including a train bombing in Spain and school seizure in Russia.
More than half the attacks were in South Asia, which recorded 327 incidents that produced 502 deaths. The bulk of the incidents in the region was reported in the divided Kashmir state claimed by both India and Pakistan.
04/29/2005 01:10 GMT