The Terror Report Is Terrifying

Catherine Traywick looks over the State Department’s annual terrorism report, which came out on Wednesday:

All told, the State Department found that worldwide terrorist attacks rose by 40 percent over the past year, from 6,771 in 2012 to 9,707 in 2013. Two-thirds of the strikes occurred in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India, resulting in the deaths of more than 11,000 people. A total of 17,891 people died in terrorist attacks in 2013, up from 11,098 in 2012.

The report attributed much of the violence to sectarian strife in Syria, Lebanon, and Pakistan, which have been riven by brutal fighting between the countries’ religious and ethnic populations. Iraq has been hit particularly hard, with Sunni militants slaughtering thousands of Shiite civilians, but Syria’s brutal civil war has begun to morph from a rebellion against Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad to ongoing communal violence between the country’s Alawite and Sunni populations. Islamist militants in Syria, the report says, are increasingly “motivated by a sectarian view of the conflict and a desire to protect the Sunni Muslim community from the Alawite-dominant [Assad] regime.”

Providing the above chart, Zack Beauchamp digs deeper into what the report has to say about Iraq and Syria:

“The [country] that accounts for nearly half of the increase in the two years is Iraq,” Gary LaFree, the University of Maryland researcher whose institute compiled the raw data for the State Department, told me. Moreover, since attacks in Iraq were more frequent and deadlier than in the other 9 nations with the most terrorist attacks, it’s responsible for much larger percentages of the increases in deaths and injuries.

LaFree told me his numbers undercounted attacks in Syria, as it’s hard to verify responsibility for any one attack in the midst of a civil war. But the State Department sees a classic al-Qaeda pattern. “Thousands of foreign fighters traveled to Syria to join the fight against the Assad regime,” the 2013 report warns. According to State’s counterterorrism coordinator, Tina Kaidenow, “we’re concerned over the long term that [Syria] will attract individuals who will be radicalized.”