The last three decades has seen the South and West Asian regions turning into a hot bed of terror activities. Spreading from these regions, and alongside by many other isolated areas across the globe, terrorism today has become the biggest threat to world peace and security.

The contemporary brand of terrorism sprouts from the base human instincts of political, ethnic and religious ideals gone corrupt. It is characterised by mindless violence and barbarity carried out by suave, clever but diabolically indoctrinated fanatic groups who believe that it is their transcendent ‘duty’ to upturn, through unprovoked bloodletting, the human society according to their horribly dehumanised notions. Terrorism has thus emerged as the most fearsome disease to attack the common peoples’ aspirations for peace and progress. To make matters worse, certain state entities have joined in using terror as another tool of their despicable political demands and have helped in spreading the disease.

Civilized world today is at its wits end to stamp out the disease of terrorism. To achieve that goal, it is necessary to study this poisonous phenomenon from its inception and consider the features of indoctrination that converts a human into a Satan. Following up, it is also necessary to monitor the various methods to adopted to terrorise the hapless targets of their violence. With the terror groups ever morphing into new collaborations, structures and appearances, the study assumes more salience for counter-terrorism measures to succeed.

This Compendium of Terror Groups is a continuation of the VIF’s regular efforts to record and evaluate the terror phenomena. The Compendium is aimed at providing an updated starting point for the observers of terrorism to proceed to deeper research. VIF is sanguine that this effort would be found useful in understanding terrorism and its eventual defeat.