Global terrorism in decline
Updated
A new Canadian study suggests deaths from terrorism have in fact fallen by 40 per cent since 2001 and the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Presenter: Tom Fayle
Speaker: Andrew Mack, of the Human Research Report project at Simor Fraser University in Canada
MACK: Well it's ok to do that, it's ok to do that primarily because there's no agreed definition of terrorism and therefore if you want to include civilian deaths in civil war situations you can.
Just two points; firstly that this is rather unusual. Normally speaking when we talk about civilians being killed in civil wars we use the terms war crimes or crimes against humanity or even genocide. We don't normally call them terrorism. However, if you want to you can, but if you are going to do that then you have to do it consistently.
And the problem with two of the data sets that go back to 1998 is that they don't do this consistently. They're counting very large numbers of civilians killed in Iraq terrorism, but when we look at sub-Sahara Africa's many civil wars, which kill lots and lots of civilians, they're counting very, very few of these. And the consequence is that you have a distorted data.
And so what we've actually did was ask questions, ok, what happens if you take Iraq out of the equation? And when you take Iraq out of the equation you find that the decline in terrorist fatalities since about 2001, which was the 9/11 disaster year.
And secondly, if you say ok we want to include Iraq fatalities nevertheless there's still a decline of about 40 per cent, but it now takes place in 2007 not 2001. So whichever way you look at the data there's been a decline in terrorist fatalities.
FAYLE: Alright then, what do you attribute the decline in the incidence of terrorism to?
MACK: Well if we include Iraq which has been driving the global terrorism fatalities in all three of these data sets, it's pretty clear that the big change comes in 2007. It comes in 2007 because last year is the first year in which overall civilian casualties start to drop and they start to drop very quickly indeed.
And there are a number of reasons for this; one is the ceasefire by Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia leader, that's one of the factors, another factor is that we've had ethnic cleansing in Baghdad, and that's separated the two communities. There's fewer bits of territory to fight about, fewer people have been killed as a consequence of that. There's the much vaunted surge by the Americans, another 30-thousand troops brought in, that and a change in US strategy which focuses on protecting the civilian population, that's made a difference.
But the critical thing and it's critical because it applies outside Iraq is that destruction or near destruction of al Qaeda in Iraq. The terror group was operating, still is operating but not nearly to the same degree in Iraq. And what happened with this group is they've been attacking Shia, the Shias have been counter-attacking against the Sunni, and the Sunni, who are the allies of the al Qaeda in Iraq got so fed up with this that they eventually made an alliance with the Americans and turned their guns against their former ally, al Qaeda in Iraq, and effectively destroyed them.
All those four factors together and that explains the decline in terrorist fatalities in Iraq.
FAYLE: If we do accept that the number of terrorist related deaths are falling does that though necessarily mean that the terrorist threat globally is on the wane?
MACK: Not necessarily because it's always of course possible. If we talk about a threat we're talking about something that's happening in the future, and we don't know what happens in the future. It's theoretically possible that a couple of years from now al Qaeda may be able to launch an attack which is even greater than the 9/11 attack. We don't think that's very likely because al Qaeda as a global institution is in real trouble and it's in real trouble primarily because it's just lost support in every Muslim country in the world to a devastating degree. If you actually look at the public opinion poll figures you'll see that the level of support that al Qaeda and groups like it have in Muslim countries is incredibly low now, about one per cent, two per cent in many countries.
