Analysis of Global Terrorism Dataset

Terrorism is a cause of global concern for civilians and government bodies alike. With rising number of terrorist attacks happening all over the world, it has become possible to collect the data about global terrorism and observe patterns from it.

Global Terrorism dataset, which has over 191k records of the incidents related to terrorism from 1970 to 2018 is managed by The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, College Park. It was established in 2005 as a U.S Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence. Apart from the city and the country, the dataset also specifies the latitude and longitude of the attacks thereby giving accurate locations that can help in data visualization. With the help of abundant features available in this dataset, we can find out the intensity of attacks by region for a particular year, whether there are any temporal or geographical trends in the attacks and the relationships between the characteristics of attacks and their success and failure rates.

Intensity of Terror Attacks

By Number of Terror Attacks

Figure below is a heatmap of intensity of terror attacks based on count. The brighter regions are areas where a greater number of terror attacks occur. From this heatmap, we can see that areas near the coastline are more susceptible to terror attacks. Majority of terror attacks occur near middle east and south-east Asia. I further used Tableau to gain more understanding of the scenario.

From Figure below, we can see that around 71% of around 190k terror attacks occurred in the continents of Asia and Africa. 4 of the top 5 countries with the most terrorist attacks (Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India) belong to the continent of Asia (Colombia is in South America). Top 10 countries (Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Colombia, Philippines, Peru, United Kingdom, El Savador and Somalia) contributed to around 55% of the all the terror attacks that happened globally from 1970 to 2018.

By number of fatalities

Terrorism is a brutal issue in various parts of the world as can be seen from the heatmap, majorly in the continents of Asia and Africa which are responsible for around 82% of the deaths world-wide. Considering average lifespan of humans to be around 71, we can say that terrorism has stolen 30.8 million years of people’s lives.

For this field, I created a weighted field. I assigned a weight of (*1) for deaths and (*0.5) for wounded to create the following heatmap.

By Property value damage

After analyzing damage to properties because of terror attacks, we see a different picture. Though the number or terror attacks in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States are lower, the property damage is very high. This tells us that the motive in the countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and countries in this section are very different. Though terror attacks in the UK resulted in 0.78% of total deaths, they were responsible for over 50% of total property damage.

Analysis of Weapons Used

In the dataset, the weapons were segregated between 10 categories — Explosives, Firearms, Incendiary, Melee, Vehicle, Chemical, Sabotage Equipment, Biological, Fake Weapons, Radiological and Other. Of these, Explosives, Firearms, Incendiary and Melle accounted for 99.51% of the data. So, for the analysis in QGIS, I only considered these.

From the pie chart and table above, we see that explosives were used in around 96k or 55% of the attacks, followed by Firearms which[RD1] accounted for 35.39% of the attacks. Incendiary and Melee were used in around 11.8k and 3.9k attacks respectively.

In the figure below, we can clearly see that Explosives is the most common weapon type. In parts of the continents of Europe and North America, Incendiary is used as weapons a lot. In the continent of Africa and parts of Central America, firearms can be seen to be used a lot. This data can be used by government and law enforcement agencies to regulate weapons in their territory.

Analysis of Terror Groups

By Count of Terror Attacks

Below is the bar graph of the 10 most active terrorist organizations. As we can see, Taliban has been responsible for around 8.8k terror attacks, followed by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also known as ISIS, which is responsible for around 6k attacks.

From the figure below, we can see that most of the terror groups are responsible for attacks in a specific geographical location. This tells us that most of such attacks are because of political reasons mostly to capture or take control of a part of land. We can see that ISIL is the most active around Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram near Nigeria, Taliban in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, among others.

By number of fatalities

In the figure below, the size of the marker is proportional to the number of fatalities a terror group is responsible for. So, a larger marker indicates that the terror group has claimed a lot of lives. In this figure, I have plotted 5 terror groups that claimed the greatest number of lives. The formula for the marker size looks something like:

0.0001 * sum(nkill,gname, gname = ‘Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)’)

Here is a bar graph to make sense of the markers.

By property damage

In the figure below, I have plotted 3 terror groups that have caused the most property damage. These 3 groups are collectively responsible for around 75% of the property damage, with Irish Republican Army responsible for 60% (over 4 billion USD). IRA has been active mostly in the UK and some parts of Western Europe, the USA and Africa.

Following is the bar graph of 10 terror groups that have caused the most property damage.

Analyzing Trends in Data (Understanding spikes)

The first spike can be seen in the number of people killed in the year 1984. After analyzing it further we see that a number of deadly terror attacks occurred in Nicaragua, Peru and El Salvador.

In 1995, we see a sharp spike in the number of people wounded. When analyzed, we see most of it relate to a terror incident in Japan.

Upon digging deeper, I found that it is related to the The Tokyo subway sarin attack (Chikatetsu Sarin Jiken, “Subway Sarin Incident”), which was an act of domestic terrorism perpetrated on 20 March 1995, in Tokyo, Japan, by members of the cult movement Aum Shinrikyo. In five coordinated attacks, the perpetrators released sarin on three lines of the Tokyo Metro (then part of the Tokyo subway) during rush hour. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack)

The rise in number of fatalities in 1997 could be related to terror attacks in Algeria.

Several news articles talk about brutal massacre in Algeria.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/08/30/hundreds-die-in-massacre-near-algiers/b6e77248-2e68-4244-86b8-4096ce3de497/
https://fas.org/irp/threat/terror_97/mideast.html

Sharp spike in number of injuries and wounds in 2001 can be explained by the 9/11 (September 11 attacks), a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks by Al-Qaeda against the US.

In 2004 and 2007, there were several terror attacks in Iraq.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_2004
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_2007

In 2014, we see a very sharp spike in the number of terror attacks and fatalities and injuries as well. After analyzing the data from 2013 to 2015, we see that deadliest of the terror attacks happened around mid-2014 in which around 6500 people were killed. According to US State Dept, the number of terror attacks rose by 80% in 2014. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33206784).
It says the sharp increase was largely due to groups like Islamic State in Iraq and Boko Haram in Nigeria, as can be seen from the second figure.