Discuss the similarities and the differences between al-qaeda and the IRA

Some of the more remarkable IRA attacks include a 1973 car bombing in London bombing in Birmingham and Guildford in 1974 in which twenty-four people died and hundreds were injured , two bombings in London in 1982 in which eleven soldiers were killed a December 1983 bombing of Harrod 's department store , an attack on the Tory conference in Brington in 1984 that killed five and could have killed most of the British cabinet , a 1985 attack on the Newry Barraks of the RUC that killed nine and injured thirty-two , a rocket attack

on 10 Downing Street at the height of the Gulf War , and a 1993 bombing of the city of London that caused extensive financial damage

As the perpetrators of these acts and many more like them , the IRA deserves to be labeled as a group that uses terrorist methods (Walker 1986 . Recall that terrorism is the use of violence to create a climate of fear that will lead to political change . All of these attacks whether on civilians or soldiers , were designed to use terror to convince the British government to change its politics in Northern Ireland . Even the attacks on the security forces were not planned by the IRA according to a military logic because they were not trying to defeat the British forces , instead

Besides violence , the Ira also used hunger strikes as a tactic . Six different times during the current conflict , IRA prisoners have gone on hunger strikes while in prison , demanding to be treated as political rather than criminal prisoners

Meanwhile , Al-Qaeda 's goals and strategies appear much more diffuse than those of groups such as the IRA , affecting a much larger number of states . While Northern Ireland saw some appalling violence by nonstate entities , the overall percentage of civilian casualties tended to be...