Are major terrorist attacks becoming more common?

This article is published in collaboration with The Washington Post.

The attacks in Paris Friday night were among the deadliest terrorist assaults in recent years, a period in which terrorism has become much more common.

At least 127 are dead in Paris. While that figure is horrifying, terrorist incidents are no longer unusual. Although data for the current calendar year is not yet available, last year was particularly violent. There were at least 28 terrorist attacks with more than 100 fatalities.

This is a sharp change from just a few years ago, as shown in the chart below, which relies on data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

Overall, the number of terrorist attacks worldwide has increased from roughly 1,000 annually around the turn of the millennium to nearly 10,000 today, according to data shown below from the Institute for Economics and Peace, an international research group. As previously reported on Wonkblog, the group noted that the increase was concentrated in a few Middle Eastern countries and Nigeria and coincided with the invasion of Iraq.

Terrorism is not confined to just a few countries.

Following the attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, for example, violent Islamist extremists detonated bombs in a bar district in Kuta, Indonesia, killing 202 people, many of them foreign tourists.

In 2004, Chechen and Ingush rebels seized a school in the Russian province of North Ossetia, taking hundreds of people hostage. After a siege, 344 were dead.

A series of bombings on trains in Mumbai killed at least 187 people on July 12, 2006. The militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba is believed to be responsible for that massacre, as well as another in the same city two years later, when gunmen killed at least 166.

Last year, Russian separatists in Ukraine brought down a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet on a flight from Amsterdam, killing all 298 people aboard.

Most of last year’s major attacks, though, were perpetrated by the Islamic State and by Boko Haram in Nigeria, according to the University of Maryland’s database.

Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Max Ehrenfreund is a Reporter for the Washington Post. 

Image: A man, wrapped with a French flag, observes a minute of silence in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, to pay tribute to victims of Friday’s Paris attacks, France, November 16, 2015. REUTERS/Charles Platiau.