Comparison of Terrorist Groups

Terrorist Organization Comparison

Japanese Aum Shinrikyo and the Islamic State

The Japanese Aum Shinrikyo is a cult that is relatively low key when compared to the actions that have been take in recent years by groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). In March 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth), was responsible for killing 13 and injuring over five thousand by using sarin gas on a subway in Tokyo, Japan which was order by the group's leader Shoko Asahara (Nadeau & Adelstein, 2016). While the group has been quiet since this time, until recently in which they have become the center of some attention in the media. Despite the group's long stretch of inactivity, it is also important to note that this has still been the only terrorist group to actually use a sophisticated chemical compound, such as sarin gas, to carry out a terrorist plot.

Of all seemingly unlikely places, the group has made recent headlines Russia when many of the group's members were subjected to arrest. Police in Russia have raided 25 homes and shrines in Moscow and St. Petersburg and arrested people linked to the notorious Aum Shinrikyo cult and the group is said to have set up operations in the former Soviet states after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in the early 1990s. Asahara's successor, Fumihiro Joyu, was the head of the group's Moscow operation and his aim was to shift the group's violent history to a more spiritual base and he changed the name Aleph (Cole, 2014).

During the 1980s, Aum Shinrikyo became, like Islamic State today, a religious death-cult eventually focused on killing innocent people with their international network of members. The focal point of the group is its focus on Shoko Asahara, the group's first cult leader, who claimed that he is the first enlightened one since Buddha; however, their beliefs are a mix of different concepts that seem to be borrowed from primarily from Hinduism and Buddhism, but also with a few apocalyptic Christian prophecies and other eccentric claims from other ideologies (Cole, 2014). The Islamic State, and related groups, are also a religious group that has central tenets that are as equally hard to follow as the Amum Shinrikyo, but follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment as one of the central focuses in which it bases its strategy of jihad that is believed to be able to somehow usher in the apocalypse, in which time the true followers of this belief expect that they will receive some cosmic benefits that last until the end of time (The Atlantic, 2015). Both of these groups use their religious membership to collect money or contribute labor to their business operations.