WThe 1922 Turin massacre refers to the attack by Italian Fascists against members of a local labour movement in Turin, Italy, during a three-day terror campaign from 18–20 December 1922, to break the resistance of the labour movement and working class to Fascism.
WAgent Orange is a herbicide and defoliant chemical, one of the "tactical use" Rainbow Herbicides. It is widely known for its use by the U.S. military as part of its chemical warfare program, Operation Ranch Hand, during the Vietnam War from 1961 to 1971. It is a mixture of equal parts of two herbicides, 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. In addition to its damaging environmental effects, traces of dioxin found in the mixture have caused major health problems for many individuals who were exposed.
WThe Alianza Americana Anticomunista was believed to be a paramilitary far-right group mainly operating in Colombia between 1978 and 1979.
WAlpha 66 is an anti-Castro paramilitary organization that operates in the Southern United States. The group was originally formed by Cuban exiles in the early 1960s and was most active in the late 1970s and 1980s. Although its base of support has greatly eroded due to the end of the Cold War and the thawing of relations between the United States and Cuba, Alpha 66 is still active today and is recognized as a terrorist organization by state governments and research groups alike.
WThe Caravan of Death was a Chilean Army death squad that, following the Chilean coup of 1973, flew by helicopters from south to north of Chile between September 30 and October 22, 1973. During this foray, members of the squad ordered or personally carried out the execution of at least 75 individual communists held in Army custody in certain garrisons. According to the NGO Memoria y Justicia, the squad killed 97 people: 26 in the South and 71 in the North. Augusto Pinochet was indicted in December 2002 in this case, but he died four years later without having been judged. His trial, however, is ongoing since his and other military personnel and a former military chaplain have also been indicted in this case.
WThe Colombian conflict began on May 27, 1964 and is a low-intensity asymmetric war between the government of Colombia, far-right paramilitary groups, crime syndicates and far-left guerrilla groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), fighting each other to increase their influence in Colombian territory. Some of the most important international contributors to the Colombian conflict include multinational corporations, the United States, Cuba and the drug trafficking industry.
WThe Contras were the various U.S.-backed and funded right-wing rebel groups that were active from 1979 to the early 1990s in opposition to the Marxist Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction Government in Nicaragua. Among the separate contra groups, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) emerged as the largest by far. In 1987, virtually all contra organizations were united, at least nominally, into the Nicaraguan Resistance.
WCubana de Aviación Flight 455 was a Cuban flight from Barbados to Jamaica that was brought down on October 6, 1976 by a terrorist bomb attack. All 73 people on board the Douglas DC-8 aircraft were killed. Two time bombs were used, whose explosives have been variously described as dynamite or C-4. The crash killed every member of the Cuban National Fencing team.
WThe Dirty War is the name used by the military junta or civic-military dictatorship of Argentina for the period of United States-backed state terrorism in Argentina from 1976 to 1983 as a part of Operation Condor, during which military and security forces and right-wing death squads in the form of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance hunted down any political dissidents and anyone believed to be associated with socialism, left-wing Peronism or the Montoneros movement.
WThe Mexican Dirty War refers to the Mexican theater of the Cold War, an internal conflict in the 1960s and 1970s between the Mexican PRI-ruled government under the presidencies of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverría and José López Portillo, which were backed by the US government, and left-wing student and guerrilla groups. During the war, government forces carried out disappearances, estimated at 1,200, systematic torture, and "probable extrajudicial executions".
WThe East Turkestan Liberation Organization (ETLO) was a secessionist Uyghur organization that advocated for an independent Uyghur state named East Turkestan in the Western Chinese province known as Xinjiang. The organization was established in Turkey in 1990 or 1996 to fight against the Chinese government in Xinjiang, a territory in which no ethnicity forms a majority, but is inhabited in order of most populous to least by Uyghur, Han Chinese, Kazakh and other Turkic communities. ETLO is a designated terrorist organization by the governments of China, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.
WThe Grey Wolves, officially known as Idealist Hearths, is a Turkish far-right organization and movement affiliated with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Commonly described as ultranationalistic, Islamistic and neo-fascistic, it is a youth organization that has been characterized as MHP's paramilitary or militant wing. Its members deny its political nature and claim it to be a cultural and educational foundation, as per its full official name: Ülkü Ocakları Eğitim ve Kültür Vakfı.
WThe Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 were large-scale killings and civil unrest that occurred in Indonesia over several months, targeting Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) party members, Communist sympathisers, Gerwani women, ethnic Javanese Abangan, ethnic Chinese and alleged leftists, often at the instigation of the armed forces and government. It began as an anti-communist purge following a controversial attempted coup d'état by the 30 September Movement. The most widely published estimates were that 500,000 to more than one million people were killed, with some more recent estimates going as high as two to three million. The purge was a pivotal event in the transition to the "New Order" and the elimination of PKI as a political force, with impacts on the global Cold War. The upheavals led to the fall of President Sukarno and the commencement of Suharto's three-decade authoritarian presidency.
WThe Islamic Unity of Afghanistan Mujahideen, also known as the Seven Party Mujahideen Alliance or Peshawar Seven, was an alliance formed in 1988 by the seven Afghan mujahideen parties fighting against the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan forces in the Soviet–Afghan War. The alliance sought to function as a united diplomatic front towards the world opinion, and sought representation in the United Nations and Organisation of the Islamic Conference.
WThe Kashmir Princess was a chartered Lockheed L-749A Constellation aircraft owned by Air India. On 11 April 1955, it was damaged in midair by a bomb explosion and crashed into the South China Sea while en route from Bombay, India, and Hong Kong to Jakarta, Indonesia. Sixteen of those on board were killed, while three survived. The target of the assassination was the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai, who missed the flight due to a medical emergency and was not on board.
WAlfonso López Trujillo was a Colombian Cardinal Bishop of the Roman Catholic Church and president of the Pontifical Council for the Family.
WMustafa Band was a group of four Albanian exiles who wanted to kill Enver Hoxha in 1982. The plan failed and two of its members were killed and one arrested.
WThe Mỹ Lai massacre was the Vietnam War mass murder of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops in Sơn Tịnh District, South Vietnam, on March 16, 1968. Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were killed by U.S. Army soldiers from Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment and Company B, 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd (Americal) Infantry Division. Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated, as were children as young as 12. Twenty-six soldiers were charged with criminal offenses, but only Lieutenant William Calley Jr., a platoon leader in C Company, was convicted. Found guilty of killing 22 villagers, he was originally given a life sentence, but served only three-and-a-half years under house arrest.
WOperation Condor was a United States-backed campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of opponents, officially and formally implemented in November 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America.
WThe Phoenix Program was a program designed and coordinated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Vietnam War, involving the American and Australian and South Vietnamese militaries.
WLuis Clemente Posada Carriles was a Cuban exile militant and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent. He was considered a terrorist by the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Government of Cuba, among others.
WAl-Qaeda is a transnational extremist Salafist militant organization founded in 1988 by Osama bin Laden, Abdullah Azzam, and several other Arab volunteers during the Soviet–Afghan War.
WJosé Efraín Ríos Montt was a Guatemalan general, politician, and war criminal who served as President of Guatemala. Born in Huehuetenango, he was a dictator who took power as a result of a coup d'état on March 23, 1982. He was overthrown by his defense minister, Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores, in another coup d'état on August 8, 1983. In the 2003 presidential elections, Ríos Montt unsuccessfully ran as the candidate of the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG). In 2007 he returned to public office as a member of Congress, thereby gaining prosecutorial immunity. He was protected from a pair of long-running lawsuits alleging war crimes against him and a number of his former ministers and counselors during their term in the presidential palace in 1982–83. His immunity ended on January 14, 2012, with the end of his term in legislative office. On January 26, 2012, he appeared in court in Guatemala and was formally indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity.
WSalwa Judum was a militia that was mobilised and deployed as part of anti-insurgency operations in Chhattisgarh, India, aimed at countering Naxalite violence in the region. The militia, consisting of local tribal youth, received support and training from the Chhattisgarh state government. It has been outlawed and banned by a Supreme Court court order, but continues to exist in the form of Armed Auxiliary Forces, District Reserve Group and other vigilante groups.
WThe Shanghai massacre of April 12, 1927, known commonly in China as the April 12 Purge or April 12 Incident, was the violent suppression of Communist Party of China (CPC) organizations in Shanghai by the military forces of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and conservative factions in the Kuomintang. Following the incident, conservative KMT elements carried out a full-scale purge of Communists in all areas under their control, and even more violent suppression occurred in Guangzhou and Changsha. The purge led to an open split between left and right wing factions in the KMT, with Chiang Kai-shek establishing himself as the leader of the right wing faction based in Nanjing, in opposition to the original left-wing KMT government based in Wuhan led by Wang Jingwei.
WThe Taliban or Taleban, who refer to themselves as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), are a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist political movement and military organisation in Afghanistan currently waging war within that country. Since 2016, the Taliban's leader is Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada.
WThe White Terror in Russia refers to the organized violence and mass killings carried out by the White Army during the Russian Civil War (1917–23). It began after the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, and continued until the defeat of the White Army at the hands of the Red Army. The White Army fought the Red Army for power, which engaged in its own Red Terror. According to some Russian historians, the White Terror was a series of premeditated actions directed by their leaders, although this view is contested. Estimates for those killed in the White Terror vary, from between 20,000 and 100,000 people as well as much higher estimates of 300,000 deaths.
WIn the history of Spain, the White Terror describes the political repression, including executions and rapes, which were carried out by the Nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), as well as during the first nine years of the regime of General Francisco Franco. In the 1936–45 period, Francoist Spain had many official enemies: Loyalists to the Second Spanish Republic (1931–39), Liberals, socialists of different stripes, Protestants, atheists, intellectuals, homosexuals, Freemasons, and Basque, Catalan, and Galician nationalists.