WASHINGTON -- Iran continued its "terrorist-related" activity last year and also continued to provide broad military support to President Bashar Assad of Syria, the State Department said Friday in its annual report on terrorism.
The State Department's assessment, a survey of attacks and trends mandated by Congress, suggests neither the election of President Hassan Rouhani nor the prospect of a nuclear accord with the United States and its negotiating partners has had a moderating effect on Iran's foreign policy in the Middle East.
"In 2014, Iran continued to provide arms, financing, training and the facilitation of primary Iraq Shia and Afghan fighters to support the Assad regime's brutal crackdown," the report said.
"Iran remained unwilling to bring to justice senior al-Qaida members it continued to detain and refused to publicly identify those senior members in its custody," it added.
The 388-page report paints a picture of an aggressive Iranian foreign policy that has often been contrary to the interests of the United States. Even when the United States and Iran share a common foe, such as the Islamic State extremist group, the Iranian role in Iraq risks inflaming sectarian tensions. Some of the Shiite militias Iran has backed in Iraq, including Kataib Hezbollah, have committed human-rights abuses against Sunni civilians, the report said.
Although the report covers 2014, U.S. officials said the Iranian policies described in the report have continued this year.
Specifically, the report says Iran used the elite arm of its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Quds Force, "to implement foreign policy goals, provide cover for intelligence operations, and create instability in the Middle East." The unit is Iran's "primary mechanism for cultivating and supporting terrorists abroad."
The State Department cited media reports that Quds Force soldiers have taken part in combat operations supporting Assad in Syria's civil war.
"We continue to be very, very concerned about IRGC activity as well as proxies that act on behalf of Iran," said Tina Kaidanow, the State Department's senior counterterrorism official, using the initials for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. "We watch that extremely carefully."
Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has suggested that Iran sees its regional and nuclear policies as proceeding on separate tracks, an approach that may be intended to placate hard-liners at home but that may also reflect his own foreign-policy strategy.
The White House has held out hope that a deal to limit Iran's nuclear program might be the first step toward an eventual easing of tensions and perhaps even cooperation on regional matters. But even if the two sides remain at odds over the Middle East, officials in President Barack Obama's administration insist a nuclear accord is worth pursuit in its own right.
The report concludes that Iran has complied with its commitments under an interim agreement to curb its nuclear activities that took effect in January 2014. Iran says its atomic program is for civilian energy and medical research.
The report comes a week before Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to travel to Vienna to try to seal a nuclear accord.
World powers and Iran are trying to conclude an accord by June 30, setting 15 years of restrictions on Iran's nuclear program in exchange for significant relief from the international sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy. The negotiations don't involve Iran's support for militant groups beyond its border.
The U.S. has designated Iran a state sponsor of terrorism every year since 1984, citing a litany of efforts to destabilize the Middle East and aid foreign terrorist groups.
Islamic State's Threat
The report also notes that as the threat from al-Qaida leadership in Pakistan has diminished, the threat from the Islamic State, which has established a self-styled caliphate in much of Iraq and Syria, has grown.
The report said that as of December, the Islamic State, also known as ISIL, could muster between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters. The group derives most of its funding not from external donations, like al-Qaida does, but from smuggling oil, kidnapping for ransom, robbing banks and selling stolen antiquities.
The number of foreign fighters who have traveled to Syria -- more than 16,000 as of late December and thousands more since -- is greater than the number of foreign militants who have gone to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia at any point in the past 20 years, the report said.
The report also noted the Islamic State has deftly used the news media and social media to influence a wide spectrum of potential audiences: local Sunni Arab populations, potential recruits, and governments of coalition members and other populations around the world, including English-speaking audiences.
"ISIL has been adroit at using the most popular social and new media platforms (YouTube, Facebook and Twitter) to disseminate its messages broadly," the report concluded.
U.S. counterterrorism officials have voiced increasing concern that the Islamic State as well as al-Qaida and its affiliates are inspiring, but not necessarily directing, a greater number of so-called lone-wolf attacks -- like the terrorist attacks in Ottawa, Ontario, and Sydney last year.
"These attacks may presage a new era in which centralized leadership of a terrorist organization matters less, group identity is more fluid, and violent extremist narratives focus on a wider range of alleged grievances and enemies," Kaidanow said.
An annex to the report, a country-by-country statistical survey of terrorist trends, showed a year in which extremists in the Middle East, Africa and Asia committed 35 percent more terrorist acts, killed nearly twice as many people and almost tripled the number of kidnappings worldwide. Statistics also pointed to a tenfold surge in the most lethal kinds of attacks.
In total last year, nearly 33,000 people were killed in almost 13,500 terrorist attacks around the world, according to the figures that were compiled for the State Department by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. That's up from just more than 18,000 deaths in nearly 10,000 attacks in 2013.
Twenty-four Americans were killed by extremists in 2014, the report said. And terrorist abductions rose to 9,428 in the calendar year from 3,137 in 2013.
The report attributes the rise in attacks to increased terror activity in Iraq, Afghanistan and Nigeria and the sharp spike in deaths to a growth in exceptionally lethal attacks in those countries and elsewhere.
There were 20 attacks that killed more than 100 people each in 2014, compared with just two such attacks a year earlier, the report said. Among those were December's attack by the Pakistani Taliban on a school in Peshawar that killed at least 150 people and the June attack by Islamic State militants on a prison in Mosul, Iraq, in which 670 Shiite prisoners died.
Attacks occurred in 95 countries last year but were concentrated in the Middle East, South Asia and West Africa. Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nigeria accounted for more than 60 percent of the attacks. Adding Syria, they made up roughly 80 percent of the fatalities, the report found.
The rise in kidnappings is mainly attributable to the mass abductions by terrorist groups in Syria, notably the Islamic State and the al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra Front.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram was responsible for most, if not all, of the nearly 1,300 abductions, including several hundred girls from a school in Chibok. By contrast, the report cited fewer than 100 terrorist-related kidnappings reported in Nigeria in 2013.
Despite the increasing number of attacks, State Department officials insisted that the United States was making headway in the struggle against terrorism, including by working with its partners in the region. John Kirby, the State Department spokesman, said that defeating the Islamic State would take time.
"It's going to take three to five years," he said.
Information for this article was contributed by Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times, by Matthew Lee and Bradley Klapper of The Associated Press, and by Indira A.R. Lakshmanan of The Washington Post.
A Section on 06/20/2015