The Taliban overtook ISIS as the world’s deadliest terrorist group in 2018, according to a report released by an international think tank on Nov. 20.
The report, produced by nonpartisan think tank the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), found that although the total number of deaths from terrorism has fallen around the world, at least one death from terrorism was experienced by 71 countries—the second highest number of countries since 2002 and four more than in 2017.
The highest number of deaths was recorded in Afghanistan, with more than 7,000 deaths, pointing to a rise in terrorist activity in the region.
The Taliban “now account for 38 per cent of all terrorist deaths globally,” according to the IEP’s executive chairman Steve Killelea.
In 2018, the terrorist group was responsible for 6,103 deaths globally, up 71 percent from the previous year, according to the report. Compared to 2017, the number of attacks attributed to the Taliban rose by 39 percent, to 972.
The Taliban’s key targets last year were “military and police personnel,” the report stated, accounting for 53 percent of attacks and 59 percent of all deaths. More than 3,600 military and police personnel were killed in attacks attributed to the Taliban in 2018.
The release of the report comes as the Trump administration continues with its attempts to negotiate with the terrorist group to broker a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. President Donald Trump halted talks between the United States and the Taliban in September, after a particularly deadly spate of Taliban attacks, including a Kabul suicide bombing that killed a U.S. soldier.
In contrast, global deaths attributed to ISIS saw a dramatic decline, a drop of just under 70 percent, from 4,350 in 2017, to 1,328 in 2018, according to the report. The report noted this was largely driven by “the success of local forces and a U.S.-led international coalition, which have militarily defeated the group in Syria and Iraq.”
The 2019 Global Terrorism Index, however, found that there has been a sharp rise—of 320 percent—in far-right terrorism in America and Europe, which it defined as “a political ideology that is centered on one or more of the following elements: strident nationalism (usually racial or exclusivist in some fashion), fascism, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-immigration, chauvinism, nativism, and xenophobia.”
It also mentioned terrorist attacks carried out by groups classified as “far-left.”
The report noted that to the end of September in 2019 alone, 77 deaths have been attributed to far-right terrorists, with the three largest politically motivated terrorist attacks in the West in the last 50 years perpetuated by far-right extremists.
Of these incidents, the United States has been most impacted by attacks attributed to far-right terrorists, the report found.
“In the U.S. in 2018, there were no recorded attacks by a known terrorist group. Out of 57 events, 28 were committed by far-right extremists, 27 by unknown perpetrators, and two by jihadi-inspired extremists,” the report said.
