More than 5,000 people, mostly civilians and overwhelmingly Muslims, were killed in terrorist attacks in November, according to a new study documenting the toll of extremist violence worldwide.
About 60% of these deaths were caused by the militant groups Islamic State and Boko Haram, suggesting a transformation in the nature of terrorist groups from terrorists to “more conventional forces that are fighting to gain or hold territory against state armies”, the report by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and the BBC, said.
The study found that extremist groups adhering to the austere Salafist ideology carried out 664 attacks that killed 5,042 people in November.
Iraq suffered 1,770 deaths, but the deadliest attacks were carried out in Nigeria, where just 27 incidents took 786 lives. The “battle zone” between Syria and Iraq where Islamic State has dug in saw the largest number of fatalities, and the death toll in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan also stretched into the hundreds.
Excluding the terrorists themselves and victims of unknown origin, the authors found just over half of those killed in November’s attacks were civilians. “Given context and location, the vast majority of the victims are Muslim,” the report said.
Most deaths were caused by bombings but the figure is dwarfed by the combined number of fatalities from shootings, ambushes and executions.
Al-Qaida, which was thought to be in “terminal decline” following the killing of Osama Bin Laden, killed 410 people.
The figures showed extremism was a “movement in the middle of a transformation”, the authors said, with the deadliest groups now embracing strategies to hold and govern territory against the armies of weak or failing states.
