Terrorism deaths spiked in 2014: U.S. State Department

Extremists in Iraq, Afghanistan and Nigeria were behind a savage rise in violence between 2013 and 2014, according to new statistics released by the U.S State Department.

Attacks largely at the hands of the Islamic State (ISIS) and Boko Haram raised the number of terror acts by more than a third, nearly doubled the number of deaths and nearly tripled the number of kidnappings.

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The figures contained in the department's annual global terrorism report show that nearly 33,000 people were killed in just under 13,500 terrorist attacks around the world in 2014. That's up from just over 18,000 deaths in nearly 10,000 attacks in 2013, it said. Twenty-four Americans were killed by extremists in 2014, the report said. Abductions soared from 3,137 in 2013 to 9,428 in 2014, the report said.

The report attributes the rise in attacks to increased terror activity in Iraq, Afghanistan and Nigeria, and the sharp spike in deaths to a growth in exceptionally lethal attacks in those countries and elsewhere. There were 20 attacks that killed more than 100 people each in 2014, compared to just two in 2013, according to the figures.

The 20 mass casualty attacks in 2014 included:

• The December attack by the Pakistani Taliban on a school in Peshawar, Pakistan that killed at least 150 people.
• The June attack by Islamic State militants on a prison in Mosul, Iraq, in which 670 Shia prisoners were killed. The 2014 prison attack was the deadliest terrorist operation in the world since Sept. 11, 2001, according to the report.

Terror attacks took place in 95 countries in 2014, but were concentrated in the Mideast, South Asia and west Africa. Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nigeria accounted for more than 60 per cent of the attacks and, if Syria is included, roughly 80 per cent of the fatalities, the report found.

The rise in kidnappings is mainly attributable to sharp increases in mass abductions by terrorist groups in Syria, notably ISIS and the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front. In Nigeria, Boko Haram was responsible for most, if not all, of the nearly 1,300 abductions in 2014, including several hundred girls from a school in Chibok. By contrast, fewer than 100 terror-related kidnappings were reported in Nigeria in 2013, according to the report.

Nevertheless, the report said, regional and international efforts to counter ISIS and other groups were starting to make inroads.