Deaths from attacks fall globally in 2019

The number of people killed in terror attacks worldwide fell for the fifth consecutive year in 2019, with conflict still the main driver of terror but an increase of "far-right terrorism" seen in the West, a leading think tank said yesterday.

Deaths from terrorism fell in 2019 to 13,826, a 15 percent fall from the year before and a further annual decline from a peak in 2014, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) said in its 2020 Global Terrorism Index.

It warned that in North America, Western Europe and Oceania, deaths attributed to far-right terror have increased by 250 percent since 2014, with 89 killings in 2019.

"They are higher now than at any time in the last 50 years," it said.

It emphasised that conflict remains the primary driver of terrorism, with over 96 percent of deaths from terrorism in 2019 occurring in countries already in conflict.

It said the largest decreases in deaths occurred in Afghanistan and Nigeria but they remained "the only two countries to have experienced more than 1,000 deaths from terrorism."

For the second year in a row, South Asia was the region most impacted by terrorism, it said.