Global Terrorism Index 2023: Bangladesh ranks 43rd with low impact

Impact of terrorism on Bangladesh has been reported to be low by the 10th edition of the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) 2023 report.

GTI provides an extensive summary of the key global trends and patterns in terrorism over the last decade.

Bangladesh dropped two places to 43rd among 163 countries in the latest report, with Afghanistan on top of the list as the country with the highest impact of terrorism.

Bangladesh ranked in the low range of the terrorism scale, which rates the impact of terrorism in each nation on a scale of zero to 10, where zero represents no impact of terrorism and 10 represents the highest measurable impact.

The country received a score of 3,827 on the GTI index, The calculation of score takes into account the deaths, incidents, hostages, and injuries caused by terrorism, weighted over a five-year period. A higher rank with a lower score indicates a lower impact of terrorism. Afghanistan received a score of 8,822.

The GTI report is produced by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) using data from TerrorismTracker and other sources. TerrorismTracker provides event records on terrorist attacks since 1 January 2007. The dataset contains almost 66,000 terrorist incidents for the period 2007 to 2022.

In 2022, deaths from terrorism fell by nine percent to 6,701 deaths and is now 38 percent lower than at its peak in 2015. The fall in deaths was mirrored by a reduction in the number of incidents, with attacks declining by almost 28 percent from 5,463 in 2021 to 3,955 in 2022. However, if Afghanistan was removed from the index, terrorism deaths would have increased by four percent.

Afghanistan remained the country most impacted by terrorism for the fourth consecutive year, despite attacks and deaths falling by 75 percent and 58 percent respectively. Pakistan ranked 6th on the index, India ranked 13th, and Sri Lanka ranked 29th.

The deadliest terrorist groups in the world in 2022 were Islamic State (IS) and its affiliates, followed by al-Shabaab, Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and Jamaat Nusrat Al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM).

Sri Lanka recorded the largest improvement in score in South Asia, with the country recording no attacks or deaths for the second consecutive year. Bangladesh was the second most improved country in regards to the impact of terrorism, followed closely by Nepal, with both countries recording two attacks and no deaths in 2022.

The South Asia region is home to two of the ten countries with the worst GTI scores, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Of the seven countries in the region, only Bhutan has a GTI score of zero, meaning that is has not recorded a terrorist attack in the past five years.