The perils of Terrorism
On 7th October, Israel was subjected to a deadly attack by the Palestinian militant group, Hamas wherein thousands missiles were launched, Hamas militants infiltrated the country and opened fire on its citizens. Israel retaliated by bombarding the Gaza Strip which has a population of about 2.3 million people. As a result, 5,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war broke out, out of which 2,055 are children.
Let’s try and analyze the terrorist attacks carried out between the years 1970 and 2017 .
Figure 1 is a line chart plotted to depict the terrorist attacks that took place each year starting from 1970 up to 2017. We can see that the attacks have kept increasing with no definite pattern with the maximum at 16,903 attacks that took place in 2014.
Figure 2 shows the top 10 deadliest attacks that took place till date which has been measured by the number of people who died in that attack. Out of the 10, 3 were carried out in Iraq which took 1540, 953 and 670 lives. Another horrifying attack which shook the world was the 9/11 attack on the World trade Centre, USA carried out by Al-Qaeda which resulted in 1384 innocent civilians being killed. The other attacks wherein there was maximum loss of life took place in Rwanda, Somalia, Nepal and Syria.
Figure 3 shows the distribution of terrorist attacks carried out in different cities with the maximum attacks in Baghdad, Iraq. Most of the attacks carried out in Iraq are linked to the Islamic State. Karachi ranks second in the terrorism incidents and has witnessed 2652 attacks till date.
Figure 4 provides a region-wise distribution of terrorism incidents. We can clearly infer from the pie chart that 27.8% of terrorist attacks took place in Middle East which includes countries like Iraq, Palestine, Syria and Egypt, Sudan in North Africa followed by 24.8% attacks which were carried out in South Asia in countries like Philippines, Brunei and Cambodia.
Figure 5 is a scatter plot between the number of people who were injured vs the number of people who lost their lives classified according to the type of attack. For example, in bombing or explosion attacks, the total number of people who were injured were close to 3,72,686 and the number of people who were killed were 1,57,321. Armed assault on the other hand, witnessed 1,60,297 casualties and resulted in 77,366 people getting injured.
Figure 6 is a bar chart to understand the distribution of attacks carried out by various terrorist outfits. The top terrorist group which has staged the most number of attacks are the Taliban, followed by ISIL and Shining Path.
Overall, we can conclude that terrorism is a global problem and is detrimental to humanity as it causes great loss of life and property. Gaza is facing a humanitarian crisis with over 700 people being killed in a 24 hour time period. Millions of people are stranded in the south part of the city with no food, water and fuel. There is an urgent need to call a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel otherwise, the loss incurred will be beyond reparation.