The number of deaths worldwide caused by terrorism declined for the fifth straight year after hitting a peak in 2014, according to a report by the Global Terrorism Index released on Wednesday.
The number of deaths went down by 15.5% last year to 13,826, with an overall 59% decrease since the peak in 2014.
Although the greatest decrease in deaths this past year was registered in Afghanistan, it remained the nation most impacted by terrorism, after overtaking Iraq in 2018.
Despite the overall decrease in terrorist deaths, there has been a worrying surge in far-right terrorism, with such attacks up 250% since 2014 in North America, Western Europe, and Oceania and deaths increasing by 709% over the same period.
The report found that deaths from political terrorism surpassed those from religious terrorism in the West for the first time in 2018 and that such deaths are expected to go up due to political instability and violence caused by economic distress from the coronavirus pandemic.
The United States and Great Britian had the highest number of terror-related deaths in the West, with 29 and 30, respectively.
Thomas Morgan, senior research fellow at the Institute for Economics and Peace, which compiled the report, told ABC News that there was often a "misconception" that terrorism predominantly occurred in Western nations.
"There is a misconception based in the coverage levels in the media … but also because 96% of terrorism occurred in the context of an ongoing conflict," he said.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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