Global terror deaths up by a third: report

The US report again named Iran as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, accusing it of aiding extremists in the region

Deaths and injuries from terrorist attacks increased sharply last year, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, with government officials, police and security guards coming under greater attack than ever before, the State Department’s annual survey of global terrorism concluded on Monday.

The scorecard on terrorist trends and attacks found that more than 20,000 people died and more than 38,000 were injured in about 14,000 incidents last year, an increase of 6,000 deaths, or 30 per cent, over 2005, according to the department’s “Country Reports on Terrorism 2006”.

The report once again designated Iran as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, accusing the Islamic Republic of aiding extremists throughout the Middle East, particularly in Iraq. As in 2005, the vast majority of incidents and deaths occurred primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan, where US troops and local forces are battling Islamist militants. The two regions also accounted for 90 per cent of the 290 attacks considered high-casualty incidents because they killed 10 or more people, the report said.

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The report said 45 per cent of all incidents considered terrorist attacks, about 6,600, occurred in Iraq, killing at least 13,340 people. The Iraq fatalities comprised about 65 per cent of the worldwide total of victims for the year. A UN report earlier this year estimated there were nearly 35,000 civilian casualties in Iraq last year but did not blame terrorism for all of them.

As fighting has intensified in Afghanistan, 749 attacks were reported there in 2006, an increase of more than 50 per cent over the 491 attacks reported for 2005, the US report said. At least 1,040 people were killed in Afghanistan, up from 684 reported dead from terrorist incidents the prior year.

Russell Travers, deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, which compiled the statistics, said analysts used the State Department’s definition of terrorist attacks. That definition includes many attacks in Iraq that some contend are not terrorist incidents but acts of guerrilla warfare. The figures do not include attacks on US troops.

The report said more than 11,200 government officials and police were attacked in 2006, up from 9,500 in 2005. Also, more than 1,800 children were victims of attacks in 2006, an increase of 80 per cent, although officials said there was no orchestrated effort to target children.

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The annual report is mandated by Congress as a way of informing policymakers, the public and allies about trends in global terrorism. It has been controversial in recent years, as critics of the Bush administration accused it of manipulating the statistics for political gain.