President Biden is set to visit Belfast on Tuesday to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.
Young
members of the "Dissident Republicans" Irish nationalist group threw
petrol bombs at an armored police vehicle in the Northern Irish area of
Creggan on Monday but no injuries were reported in the attack.
- The
Good Friday Agreement largely ended decades of violence in Northern
Ireland and elsewhere in the British Isles ― a conflict known as The Troubles.
- Irish
nationalist groups, most prominently the Irish Republican Army (IRA),
perpetrated a campaign of armed resistance against British troops in
British-occupied Northern Ireland.
- A group called the
Provisional IRA began using terrorist tactics as part of its
campaign around 1970, killing 1,800 people, including ~600 civilians,
between 1969 and 1994.
- Under the Good Friday
Agreement signed in April 1997, the IRA agreed to disarm and give up on
using violence to incorporate Northern Ireland into the Irish Republic.
- Northern Irish police on Sunday said they had thwarted a bomb plot led by the New IRA, a small Irish nationalist operation that has been linked to violence against police in recent years.
- British
intelligence agency MI5 upgraded its domestic terrorism threat level in
Northern Ireland to severe last month after a police officer was shot
and seriously injured by New IRA gunmen.
