US labels dozens of groups — like Hamas — as terrorists. How is this decision made?

Hamas has been called many things by its adversaries, including “brutal,” barbaric and “evil.” But as far as the U.S. government is concerned, one label matters the most: terrorist organization.

The U.S. State Department currently classifies Hamas — the Islamic militant group that governs Gaza and is at war with Israel — as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO).

It’s far from alone in being categorized this way. Hamas shares the FTO designation with 67 other groups around the world, including Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and the New Irish Republican Army.

Landing on this list of enemies, which can result in serious legal and economic repercussions, is no simple task. The designation comes after a lengthy bureaucratic process and is frequently revised, according to experts interviewed by McClatchy News.

“It’s not like everyone that’s an enemy of the U.S., or any group that the U.S. opposes makes it on the list,” Bruce Hoffman, a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations, told McClatchy News. “There are strict criteria.”

The process of creating the list “is highly politicized … and ambiguous,” Martha Crenshaw, an emeritus professor of political science at Stanford University, told McClatchy News.

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What is the Foreign Terrorist Organization list?

The State Department’s FTO list was created following two major terrorist events in the 1990s: a chemical attack in a Tokyo subway and the Oklahoma City bombing, according to a West Point counterterrorism report.

In response to the attacks, Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 that authorized the State Department — upon consultation with the Treasury Department and Attorney General’s office — to classify groups as foreign terrorist organizations.

How are groups added to the list?

Three criteria have to be met in order for the State Department to brand a group as an FTO, Brian Phillips, a University of Essex professor who studies terrorism, told McClatchy News. They have to be foreign, threaten American national security and use terrorism — a hotly contested term.

“Defining terrorism is immensely complicated,” Hoffman said. Paraphrasing historian David Fromkin, he said “terrorism is defined by whether you identify with the perpetrator or the victim. If you identify with the perpetrator, they’re usually freedom fighters or resistance fighters or something more anodyne, but if you identify with the victim, then they’re terrorists.”

“The U.S. government alone has had over 20 legal definitions of terrorism,” Colin Beck, a Pomona College professor who published a 2013 study on the FTO designation process, told McClatchy News. “So there’s lots of fuzziness there that allow(s) for perception, politics, and other things to affect designation.”

The State Department’s definition of terrorism is itself broad and includes unlawful activities such as hijacking, assassination, and the use of firearms to harm people.

With such an expansive definition, countless violent groups — “perhaps every rebel group in a civil war” — would qualify as using terrorism, Phillips said. But, many of these organizations do not meet the criteria of threatening American national security.

“A small group far away that hasn’t targeted Americans or attempted to attack the United States is unlikely to be designated,” Phillips said.

Certain groups though, particularly those that are already designated as terrorists by a U.S. ally, like the U.K., are more prone to receive the designation, Phillips said.

Additionally, “Islamist groups, regardless of how much violence they use, are much more likely than non-Islamist groups to be designated as FTOs,” Phillips said.

Of the 67 groups currently on the list, at least 22 are Islamic militant groups, including nine ISIS factions.

Experts say this bias toward Islamist groups exists because the government’s data collection has historically been oriented toward Salfist Jihadi groups — such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS — which “have carried out the most catastrophic attacks,” Jason Blazakis, who served as the director of the State Department’s Counterterrorism Finance and Designations Office from 2008 to 2018, told McClatchy News.

What happens to groups on the list?

The U.S. government has a number of tools at its disposal to pursue groups labeled as FTOs and their supporters, according to Blazakis.

“The designation actually has a lot of substance,” Blazakis, now a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, said.

An FTO designation allows the government to arrest and charge individuals with providing material support for terrorism, Blazakis said.

Since 2001, 538 people have been charged with material support for terrorism, making it the most commonly used terrorism charge, according to an analysis by The Intercept.

For example, in 2020, the Department of Justice charged two men in Minnesota — both self-described “Boogaloo Bois” — with attempting to provide material support to Hamas.

The FTO designation also greenlights the government to go after terrorist groups’ financial assets, Blazakis said.

“Here we’re talking millions of dollars of Al-Qaeda assets have been frozen because of the FTO designation,” Blazakis said. Further, “if somebody is part of an FTO, they’re inadmissible to U.S.”

Research suggests that groups added to the FTO list eventually carry out fewer terrorist attacks, but only if they are located in countries allied with the United States, Phillips said.

“Crackdowns on illicit financial flows — closing bank accounts and arresting people for materially supporting FTOs — can affect the targeted groups,” Phillips said.

How do groups get off the list?

The FTO list is reviewed every five years, and there are three ways in which groups can be removed from it, Blazakis said.

The first and most commonly used criterion is a change in circumstances, including a lack of activity. “Usually you see it when the group has reformed to become a political entity or became defunct,” Blazakis said.

The Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia’s largest rebel group, for example, was delisted after they formally eschewed violence in 2021, according to Phillips.

The Houthis, a militant group waging a civil war in Yemen, were also deslisted in 2021 after humanitarian groups said its FTO designation could have a “devastating impact” on the country’s ability to obtain food and fuel, according to the Department of State. Three of the group’s leaders remained sanctioned after the delisting, however. The war in Yemen created what was called “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”

Additionally, groups can be delisted if they no longer threaten U.S. national security — though this pathway has never been used — or at the discretion of the secretary of state, Blazakis said.

The secretary “could wake up and remove all the groups tomorrow just because,” Blazakis said.

Since its creation, 20 groups have been taken off the FTO list.

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