THE TENSION: Study Finds 'War on Terrorism' Successful, Attacks Decline Sharply

News in Balance:

Worldwide Terrorism Deaths Down 40 Percent

WASHINGTON, May 22, 2008 -- In a story widely ignored by the so-called mainstream media, The Canadian Press reported that a group of researchers from Simon Fraser University says global terrorism is on the decline, despite previous data and public perceptions that suggest otherwise.

The university's Human Security Report Project says fatalities from terrorist attacks around the world have, in fact, decreased by 40 percent since the start of the Global War on Terrorism in 2001.

The report notes that data showing increases in terrorism have included civilian deaths in Iraq. Such deaths in civil wars have traditionally been treated as war crimes, not terrorism, and it makes sense to remove those numbers from the data entirely.

Andrew Mack, director of the project, said those data counted civilian deaths from the ongoing conflict in Iraq when, he argues, typically civilian casualties in civil war are considered war crimes, not terrorism.

"How many people are getting killed by terrorists depends on how you define terrorism," Mack said from New York, where he released the report, Human Security Brief 2007.

"What is happening in Iraq is totally driving the global terrorism toll.... This way of looking at terrorism is slightly unusual and is inconsistent."

For example, the U.S. data didn't include civilian deaths from conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, such as in Darfur, which Mack said are similar to what's happening in Iraq.

At the same time, fatalities in Iraq made up the vast majority of terrorism-related deaths in the U.S. data - in one case accounting for nearly 80 per cent of the worldwide tally in a single year.

Because of those inconsistencies, the new report argues that civilian deaths in Iraq shouldn't be counted in global terrorism figures.

However, Mack said even if the Iraq numbers are included, there was a 60 per cent decline in fatalities in that country during the second half of 2007.