Terrorism trends in 2019

The number of deaths from terrorist attacks, according to the 2020 Global Terrorism Index published by the Institute of Economics and Peace, is down for the fifth consecutive year since the peak in 2014. This is, without a doubt, a remarkably positive trend. With respect to 2018, the total number of people killed by terrorism has fallen by 15.5 percent to 13,826. The GTI is an index published annually by the IEP, a think tank located in Sydney, Australia, which draws on data collected by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) of the University of Maryland to produce these indices.

Although the progressive reduction in the number of victims of terrorism is a positive sign, it remains alarming that almost half of the deaths occur in just one country: Afghanistan. Although it holds this leading position, Afghanistan has also managed to reduce its total number of victims by over 22 per cent, although it remains, together with Nigeria, the only countries in which the number of deaths caused by terrorism exceeds one thousand. It is also noteworthy that of the ten deadliest attacks in 2019, six have taken place between these two countries, four in Afghanistan and two in Nigeria. Sri Lanka was the country that suffered the most deadly attack, with 266 victims.

If we look at the Sahel region, particularly the countries that converge in the violent area of the three borders, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, we see that the trend is very worrying. In fact, it is in Burkina Faso that the number of deaths has risen the most, 507 more deaths than in 2018, with Mali and Niger being among the countries whose number of deaths has increased the most compared to the previous year. Other countries where terrorism is on the rise are Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yemen or Cameroon.

Another of the interesting aspects of the GTI is the measurement of the economic impact of terrorism, which has been significantly reduced since its peak in 2014, in parallel with the drop in the total number of deaths. In particular, by 2019, the economic impact, measured by the number of deaths, loss of GDP or damage to property, has been reduced by 25 percent with respect to 2018, returning to figures even lower than in 2006. Afghanistan is once again at the top of the table of countries whose economy has been most affected by terrorism, in this case Syria being the second and Nigeria the third largest economy to have contracted as a result of terrorism. These three countries are followed by Mali and Burkina Faso, with an impact of terrorism amounting to 1.9 percent of GDP, which also shows how the violent drift in which both countries are immersed is affecting them.

It is important to assess the situation in which the countries most affected by terrorism find themselves. According to the GTI for 2020, 96% of the deaths caused by terrorism occur in countries in conflict, whether open warfare or minor, which proves that terrorism feeds on pre-existing instability and insecurity to consolidate its presence. It should also be stressed that unlike in the three-year period 2014-2016, when the number of civilian victims was much higher than that of police or military forces, this figure has gradually become equal, and even during 2019 it was slightly higher than that of non-civilian victims.

Finally, leaving aside the Jihadist terrorism that tends to account for the large numbers, the GTI also deals with terrorist attacks of other kinds, such as those of an extreme right-wing or extreme left-wing political nature. Although the number of incidents is much lower than Jihadist terrorism and is a long way from the figures reached by extreme left-wing terrorism during the 1970s, in what is considered by many to be the third wave of terrorism, a certain upsurge in terrorism of this kind has been witnessed since 2014. This is particularly true of extreme right-wing terrorism, which has been active since 2015, with some fifty incidents per year, its highest figure in the past half century.

As we can see at this point, the general impact of terrorism, whether in lives or in economic terms, is clearly positive, and both figures are far from the situation around 2014. However, it is necessary to underline the worrying trends in some Sahel countries and Mozambique.