ISIS's
Fall Means Fewer Terror Deaths As Jihadis Adjust, IPT Analysis Shows
by Ariel Behar
IPT News
November 28, 2017
|
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the
first of your friends to like this.
 The fall of ISIS's
physical caliphate is likely to create a shift in radical Islamic
terrorism, an Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) analysis of
data from the University of Maryland's National Consortium for the Study of
Terrorism and the Responses to Terrorism (START)'s Global Terrorism
Database (GTD) finds.
Fewer people may be killed in radical Islamic terror attacks, but the
terrorists will seek new safe havens and adapt their online strategies to
maintain a virtual caliphate.
From the data, five phases were identified. The first phase from
2001-2006 saw on average 2,500 fatalities globally. Phase two from
2007-2011 saw an average of 3,200 global fatalities. In phase three,
2012-2013, there was an annual average of 9,500 global fatalities, and in
phase four, 2014-2016, an exponential spike in fatalities showed an average
annual of around 27,500 global fatalities. Now that the caliphate is
finally collapsing, the fifth phase, according to the IPT, will start to
see a decline in annual fatalities globally.
The ideology that drove the caliphate's creation has not been
eliminated, which suggests that jihadists will find new methods to
terrorize the global community. Radical Islamists will use cyberspace to
create a virtual caliphate in order to spread their parasitic ideology.
Last weekend's devastating ISIS attack on a Sufi mosque in Egypt's
Sinai Peninsula shows that the terrorist group maintains the ability to
carry out large-casualty attacks despite the loss of a home base.
Despite that, we still expect to see a drastic decrease in global
fatalities especially in the territory of the almost-defeated caliphate in
Iraq, Syria, and parts of Libya now that the ISIS-foothold in those
countries has been destroyed. The Afghanistan/Pakistan region, however,
will continue to see extremely high fatalities because of its weak terrain
and its ineffective central governments. Other countries with weak central
governments and significant Muslim populations in the Sahel and Maghreb in
Africa as well as in Southeast Asia will also start to see a spike in
radical Islamist terrorism. Lastly, countries in the West will continue to
see terrorism spread, especially since attacks in the West are of great
propaganda value to these jihadists.
Radical Islamic terrorism is advancing. These extremists are developing
new tools in order to terrorize the global community to spread their
Islamist ideology. Until 2016, fatalities as a result of Islamist terrorism
were increasing rapidly. That appears to be over with subtle increases in
areas with weak central governments, high Muslim populations, and countries
where attacks prove significant propaganda value. The world should
celebrate the collapse of the ISIS-established caliphate. But this next
phase is not to be underestimated.
Read the full report here.
|
Print
Send
RSS
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment