Boko Haram and extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan unleashed a savage rise in violence between 2013 and 2014, according to new statistics released by the State Department on Friday.
Attacks largely at the hands of the Islamic State and Boko Haram raised the number of terror acts by more than a third, nearly doubled the number of deaths and nearly tripled the number of kidnappings.
The figures contained in the department’s annual global terrorism report said that nearly 33,000 people were killed in almost 13,500 terrorist attacks around the world last year.
That’s up from just over 18,000 deaths in nearly 10,000 attacks in 2013, it said.
24 Americans were killed by extremists in 2014, the report said, while abductions soared from 3,137 in 2013 to 9,428 in 2014.
The report attributed the rise in attacks to increased terror activity in Iraq, Afghanistan and Nigeria and the sharp spike in deaths to a growth in exceptionally lethal attacks in those countries and elsewhere.
Terror attacks took place in 95 countries in 2014, but were concentrated in the Mideast, South Asia and West Africa. Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nigeria accounted for more than 60 percent of the attacks and, if Syria is included, roughly 80 percent of the fatalities, the report found.
There were 20 attacks that killed more than 100 people each in 2014, compared to just two in 2013, according to the figures that were compiled for the State Department by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.
Among the 20 mass casualty attacks in 2014 were the December attack by the Pakistani Taliban on a school in Peshawar, Pakistan that killed at least 150 people and the June attack by Islamic State militants on a prison in Mosul, Iraq, in which 670 Shiite prisoners died.
At the end of 2014, the prison attack was the deadliest terrorist operation in the world since September 11, 2001, according to the report. Click to signup for FREE news updates, latest information and hottest gists everyday
Advertise on NigerianEye.com to reach thousands of our daily users
No comments
Post a Comment
Kindly drop a comment below.
(Comments are moderated. Clean comments will be approved immediately)
Advert Enquires - Reach out to us at NigerianEye@gmail.com