Terror threat

Global Trends in Terrorism Through 2016 and the Relative Role of ISIS and the Taliban

The United States no longer has an official database on any aspect of the global trends in terrorism because the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) has ceased to report on such trends. It does, however, have a START database maintained by the University of Maryland which it uses in its annual State Department Country reports on terrorism. A new report by Erin Miller and Michael Distler, Mass Casualty Explosives Attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, provides the first public START update of its terrorism statistics that includes the 2016 year, and it highlights the attacks led by ISIS, ISIS “affiliates”, the Taliban, and other terrorist groups in Afghanistan.

The key patterns in these attacks are shown in Figure One below, and they raise a number of important issues. The article states that,

The total number of deaths caused by terrorist attacks in these two countries comprised nearly half (46%) of all fatalities worldwide between 2004 and 2016.1 During this period, 13 percent of the fatalities from terrorist attacks in Iraq and 15 percent of the fatalities from terrorist attacks in Afghanistan resulted from attacks against combatant targets...