By Corine Hegland, NationalJournal.com
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, April 27, 2006

Terrorists killed 14,602 people and carried out approximately 11,000 attacks last year, according to a report [PDF] scheduled for release Friday morning by the State Department and the National Counterterrorism Center. That's more than double the incidents and fatalities in 2004, when 3,192 attacks killed 6,060 people, NCTC reported last July.

The report cautions that numbers from the two years are not "meaningfully" comparable because of the "substantial" increase in effort devoted to counting all incidents this year. In previous years, the report had counted only international terrorist incidents; in both 2004 and 2005, the report counted all terrorist incidents, whether domestic or international.

Fatalities in Iraq, where the report concludes that terrorist attacks on noncombatants "significantly" increased last year, drove much of the jump, accounting for 8,299 deaths. India had the second most fatalities, with 1,357 dead, followed by Colombia, with 810, and then Afghanistan, with 682.

The report has been a source of controversy in recent years. Two years ago, in the 2003 count, it failed to include attacks that took place after November 11, 2003, and it incorrectly totaled incidents that took place during the first 10 months of the year. Last year, the State Department overhauled the report, formally known as Patterns of Global Terrorism, replacing it with Country Reports on Terrorism and breaking the statistics out into a stand-alone report issued by the National Counterterrorism Center.

Both documents are scheduled for release at 10:30 tomorrow, but the statistics are already available on the NCTC Web site [PDF].

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