Deaths from 2014 Terrorist Attacks Increased 80%
More than 32,000 people across 93 countries were killed in terrorist attacks in 2014, and 78 percent of those victims were killed by terrorism in just five countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Nigeria and Iraq, according to The Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorism Index 2015, released in mid-November.
The terrorist groups Boko Haram and ISIL/ISIS were responsible for 51 percent of claimed deaths in 2014. The report notes that Boko Haram – the Nigerian jihadist group – was responsible for 6,644 deaths in 2014, overtaking ISIL. Most of the group’s victims (77 percent) were private citizens.
The economic costs of terrorism reach the highest level in 2015, costing $52.9 billion USD – 10 times the amount terrorism cost in 2000. Only 2.6 percent of terrorist attacks were committed on Western countries. Terrorist motivations for attacks in the West are mostly political (68 percent) and Islamic fundamentalism (20 percent), followed by racial or religious supremacists (11 percent) and individual issues (1 percent). Seventy percent of deaths from terrorist attacks in the West were committed by lone wolf terrorists, the Index notes.
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