RAF

The Red Army Faction

The causes that lead to the formation of the RAF were the Vietnam War, Imperialism, fear of another regime similar to the Nazis,  and more directly the murder of a student protester during a demonstration at the arrival of the Shah of Iran. An attempted assassination on activist Rudi Deutschke further fueled the fire of the RAF movement. In spring of 1968 Baader and Ensslin set fire to a department store. This was one of their first acts to start the movement. Their believes were often based in the writings of Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Che, and Karl Marx.
Baader and Meinhof were the leaders of the first generation of the RAF, and gave it that name. After their arrests the second generation of the RAF, and possibly the most brutal. The fall of the USSR was major blow to remaining activists as that was a first hand example of the problems with communism, but the RAF continued.
The end of the RAF was official when Rueters magazine received a fax of an 8-page typed letter stating that the group had dissolved.
The RAF can be related to recent terror attacks around the world but is slightly different in most cases. We have seen a fall in attacks by extreme leftist groups and a rise by religious groups. Recent large scale attacks such as 9-11 or the train bombings in Spain or Great Britain were at a larger scale and aimed not at just the government but at people themselves. The RAF did not want to harm the workers of their country but the institutions that they disagreed with. Recent terrorist attacks by the Al Queda and groups of the like were aimed at civilians. That is a stark difference but the RAF used many similar techniques.