Number of terrorist acts in 2014 increased 35%, fatalities increased 81%, compared to 2013

Number of terrorist acts in 2014 increased 35%, fatalities increased 81%, compared to 2013

Published 22 June 2015

 

On Friday the State Department is issued the Country Reports on Terrorism 2014, an annual report mandated by Congress. The report’s statistical annex, which was prepared by the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism (START), shows that the number of terrorist attacks in 2014 increased 35 percent, and total fatalities increased 81 percent compared to 2013, largely due to activity in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Nigeria. Iran continued to sponsor terrorist groups around the world, principally through its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force.

On Friday the State Department is issued the Country Reports on Terrorism 2014, an annual report mandated by Congress.
The report’s statistical annex, which was prepared by the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism (START), shows that the number of terrorist attacks in 2014 increased 35 percent, and total fatalities increased 81 percent compared to 2013, largely due to activity in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Nigeria.
More than 60 percent of all attacks took place in five countries: Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Nigeria — and 78 percent of all fatalities due to terrorist attacks also took place in five countries: Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria.
The increase in total fatalities was in part a result of certain attacks which were exceptionally lethal. In 2014 there were twenty attacks that killed more than a hundred people, compared to only two such attacks in 2013.
Tina Kaidanow, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, noted that these statistics do not provide the full context. Aggregate totals or numbers of attacks are not a particularly useful metric for measuring the aims of the extremist groups or of U.S. progress in preventing or countering these activities. She said that more can be learned about terrorism by examining the trends which became apparent in 2014.
Among these trends:
Despite significant blows to al-Qaeda’s leadership, weak or failed governance continued to provide an enabling environment for the emergence of extremist radicalism and violence, notably in Yemen, in Syria, Libya, Nigeria, and Iraq. The United States is concerned about the continued evolution of the Islamic State; the emergence of self-proclaimed ISIS affiliates in Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, and elsewhere; and tens of thousands of foreign terrorist fighters who are exacerbating the violence in the Middle East, imposing a continued threat to their own home countries.
The ongoing civil war in Syria has been a spur to many of the worldwide terrorism events. Since the report covers only calendar year 2014, it notes that the overall flow of foreign terrorist fighter travel to Syria was estimated at more than 16,000 foreign terrorist fighters from over ninety countries as of late December 2014, which is a number that exceeds any similar flow of foreign terrorist fighters traveling to other countries in the last twenty years.
Many of the foreign terrorist fighters joined ISIS, which has seized contiguous territory in western Iraq and eastern Syria. Iraqi forces and the Counter-ISIS Coalition have dealt significant blows to ISIS, but it continues to control substantial territory.
As with many other terrorist groups worldwide, ISIS has brutally repressed the communities under its control and used ruthless methods of violence such as beheadings and crucifixions. Uniquely, however, it demonstrates a particular skill in employing new media tools to display its brutality both as a means to shock and to terrorize, but equally to propagandize and to attract new recruits.
Boko Haram shares with ISIS a penchant for the use of these brutal tactics, which include stonings, indiscriminate mass casualty attacks, and systematic oppression of women and girls, including enslavement, torture, and rape.
Though al Qaeda central leadership has been weakened, the organization continues to serve as a focal point of inspiration for a worldwide network of affiliated groups, including al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, a longstanding threat to Yemen, the region, and the United States; al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, AQIM; al-Nusrah Front; and al-Shabaab in East Africa.
There has also been a rise in lone offender attacks, including in Ottawa and Quebec in October and in Sydney in December of 2014. In many cases, it was difficult to assess whether these attacks were directed or inspired by ISIS or al Qaeda and its affiliates. These attacks may presage a new area in which centralized leadership of a terrorist organization matters less, group identity is more fluid, and violent extremist narratives focus on a wider range of alleged grievances and enemies.
Enhanced border security measures among Western states since 9/11 have increased the difficulty for known or suspected terrorists to travel internationally. Therefore, groups like al Qaeda and ISIS encourage lone actors residing in the West to carry out attacks on their behalf.
ISIS and al Qaeda affiliates, including al-Nusrah Front, continue to use kidnapping for ransom operations, profits from the sales of looted antiquities, and other criminal activities to raise funds for operational purposes. Much of ISIS’s funding, unlike the resources utilized by al Qaeda and al Qaeda-type organizations, do not come from external donations, but was internally gathered in Iraq and Syria. ISIS earned up to several million dollars per month through its various extortion networks, in criminal activity in the territory where it operated, including through oil smuggling. Some progress was made in 2014 in constraining ISIS’s ability to earn money from the sale of smuggled oil as a result of the anti-ISIS coalition airstrikes that were conducted on ISIS-operated oil refineries. But the oil trade was not fully eradicated.
ISIS and al Qaeda were not the only serious threats that confronted the United States and its allies. Iran continued to sponsor terrorist groups around the world, principally through its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, the IRGC-QF-Quds. These groups included Lebanese Hezbollah, several Iraqi Shia militant groups, Hamas, and the Palestine-Islamic Jihad. Addressing this evolving set of terrorist threats and the need to undertake efforts that span the range from security to rule of law to efficacy of governance and pushing back on terrorist messaging in order to effectively combat the growth of these emerging violent extremist groups requires an expanded approach to our counterterrorism engagement.
— Read more in Country Reports on Terrorism 2014 (U.S. Department of State, June 2015)