Islamist terrorist attacks in the world 1979-2024

• 1979-2000: 2,194 attacks and 6,817 deaths.
• 2001-2012: 8,265 attacks and 38,187 deaths.
• 2013-April 2024: 56,413 attacks and 204,937 deaths.

• 1979-2000: an attack killed an average of 3.1 people.
• 2001-2012: an attack killed an average of 4.6 people.
• 2013-April 2024: an attack killed an average of 3.6 people.

• 1979-2000: firearms (911), explosives (856), melee weapons (124), incendiary weapons (68).
• 2001-2012: firearms (2,572), explosives (4,516), melee weapons (198), incendiary weapons (234).
• 2013-April 2024: firearms (23,442), explosives (20,460), melee weapons (2,157), incendiary weapons (860).

• South Asia: 31.2% of attacks, 33.7% of deaths.
• Middle East and North Africa: 30.4% of attacks, 33% of deaths.
• Sub-Saharan Africa : 35.2% of attacks, 30.1% of deaths.
• Southeast Asia: 2.6% of attacks, 1.1% of deaths.
• Europe and Russia: 0.4% of attacks, 0.7% of deaths.
• North America: 0.1% of attacks, 1.3% of deaths.
• Oceania: 0.01% of attacks, 0.005% of deaths.
• South America: 0.004% of attacks, 0.05% of deaths.

• 1979-2000: 24 attacks, 32 deaths.
• 2001-2012: 8 attacks, 8 deaths.
• 2013-April 2024: 53 attacks, 294 deaths.

The countries most affected by Islamist terrorism are Afghanistan (17,075 attacks), Somalia (10,768 attacks), Iraq (8,209 attacks), Nigeria (3,950 attacks), Syria (3,421), Pakistan (2,635), Mali (2,289 attacks), Israel (1,748 attacks), Yemen (1,657 attacks), Algeria (1,387 attacks), Egypt (1,367 attacks), Mozambique (1,302 attacks) and Cameroon (1,230 attacks).

In these thirteen countries, 218,734 deaths were caused by Islamist terrorist attacks, representing 87.5% of the total number of deaths worldwide.

The United States and Russia have also been hit by jihadist terrorism. During the period 1979-April 2024, there were 60 attacks in the United States and 3,121 deaths, and 86 attacks in Russia, resulting in 988 deaths.

• 1979-2000: military (343 attacks, 15.6%), civilians (530 attacks, 24.1%), police forces (408 attacks, 18.6%).
• 2001-2012: military (1,410 attacks, 17.1%), civilians (2,506 attacks, 30.3%), police forces (1,424, 17.2%).
• 2013-April 2024 : military (20,556 attacks, 37.2%), civilians (15,111 attacks, 27.4%), police forces (8,217 attacks, 14.9%).

• Number of Islamist terrorist attacks in Muslim countries: 57,726 attacks (86.3% of Islamist terrorist attacks worldwide).
• Number of deaths caused by Islamist terrorist attacks in Muslim countries: 222,236 deaths (88.9% of deaths caused by Islamist terrorist attacks worldwide).

It should be noted that these figures underestimate the reality since they do not take into account the Islamist terrorist attacks perpetrated in countries with a non-Muslim majority where Muslim populations are concentrated in certain provinces. This is the case, for example, in southern Thailand, where Muslims are in the majority in the provinces of Satun, Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat, but also in the Philippines, in the region of Mindanao; in India, in the province of Jammu and Kashmir; and in China, in the Uyghur autonomous region of Xinjiang.

The deadliest terrorist organisations, taking into account their various offshoots, were the Taliban (71,965 deaths), the Islamic State group (69,641 deaths), Boko Haram (26,081 deaths), Al Shabaab (21,784 deaths), and al Qaeda (14,856 deaths). These five terrorist groups were responsible for more than three-quarters (81.8%) of the victims of Islamist terrorist attacks between 1979 and April 2024.

Dominique Reynié, Executive Director of the Fondation pour l’innovation politique

Fondapol has undertaken a significant effort to quantify and analyze Islamist terrorism worldwide, which resulted in a first report published in 2019, followed by another in 2021. This is the third edition. The striking surge in Islamist violence in recent years made this updated edition necessary. U.S. President Joe Biden emphasized this in August 2021, following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul: ‘The terrorist threat has metastasized around the globe, far beyond Afghanistan. We face threats from Al Shabaab in Somalia, al-Qaeda networks in Syria and the Arabian Peninsula, and ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq, and establishing networks in Africa and Asia.¹. Three years later, our data confirms the relevance of these remarks. The expansion of Islamist terrorism since 2012-2013 is undeniable, particularly in West Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East, which was tragically illustrated by the Hamas attacks on Israeli territory on October 7, 2023.

The series of attacks on September 11, 2001 remains the deadliest in the history of terrorism, with 3,001 dead and 16,493 injured². However, the attacks of October 7, 2023 represent the second most deadly Islamist terrorist event, causing the death of at least 1,195 people, injuring more than 3,400, and organizing the kidnapping of 251³. These attacks were the largest against Israel on its own soil since its creation in 1948. The October 7 pogrom was characterized by unprecedented violence: assassinations, torture, rape and hostage-taking of women, children and the elderly. To date (31 August 2024), 98 hostages are still being held by Hamas.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the deadliest attack to date was the takeover of the town of Palma in Mozambique by the Islamic State between 24 March 2021 and 5 April 2021: 1,193 people were killed during the 13-day occupation of the town, and 209 were abducted. They are currently presumed dead.

In Europe (excluding Russia), since 1979, there have been 209 attacks and 802 deaths. In France, the worst-hit European country over the same period, there have been 85 Islamist terrorist attacks, resulting in 334 deaths. In addition to France, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom were also impacted, sometimes more than once. Russia is also a target of Islamist terrorism, with 86 attacks and 988 deaths between 1998 and April 2024. In 2024, Russia was hard hit by two particularly deadly Islamist attacks: the first, on March 22 in Moscow, killed at least 144 people and injured almost 550; the second, on June 23 in the province of Dagestan, killed around 20 and injured around 40. Nevertheless, it is outside the Western world that countries have suffered more often and even more severely from Islamist violence.

We asked ourselves whether it was possible to truly know the extent of Islamist violence in the world, to make a database of it and to share the results with interested audiences in the form of a database accompanied by this study. To carry out such work, it was necessary first to determine the starting point of the database, to identify the most reliable sources, examine and validate them, then process the data collected, present the main lessons learned and, lastly, make the information collected available to the public.

We decided to start collecting data from 1979 onwards. This year was chosen by most specialists because it reflects the historical failure of Arab nationalism competing with the movements of Islamisation and the affirmation of jihadism⁴. That same year, a number of events precipitated this development: the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution, the signing of the Camp David agreements and the hostage-taking of the Great Mosque of Mecca by a group of Islamist fundamentalists in November-December 1979⁵. For Gilles Kepel, what was happening that year was the result of “the fierce struggle between the Saudi monarchy and Khomeini’s Iran”⁶ but at the same time it was the time of a new indirect confrontation between the USSR and the United States: “The jihad financed in this country [Afghanistan] by the oil-monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula and the CIA is explicitly aimed at inflicting on the Soviet Union […] a ‘Vietnam’ that precipitates its fall. At the Islamic level, its function is also to divert radical militants around the world from the struggle against the American Great Satan – to which Khomeini incites them – and to channel them against the USSR. Afghan jihad has a cardinal importance in the evolution of the Islamist movement around the world. It became the ultimate cause, with which all militants, moderate or radical, identify themselves. It supersedes, in the Arab imagination, the Palestinian cause and symbolises the transition from nationalism to Islamism⁷”.

Like many concepts, terrorism is subject to controversial definitions. In this study, we define “terrorism” as political acts that meet the principle and criteria of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). In this context, a terrorist act is presented as “the threat of the effective use or use of unlawful force and violence by a non-state actor in order to achieve political, economic, religious or social objectives, through fear, coercion or intimidation”⁸. This definition is extended to the enumeration of a set of characteristics specifying the nature of the terrorist act:

– it must be intentional and result from a conscious calculation by the perpetrator;
– it must include some level of violence or threat of imminent violence, whether physical or material;
– the perpetrators of the incident must be non-state actors⁹.

To be included in the database, an event must also meet at least two of the following criteria:

– the violent act must have a political, economic, religious or social objective;

– the act must result from an intention of coercion, intimidation, or be motivated by the desire to spread an economic, political, religious or social message to a wider audience than that represented by the immediate victims; what matters is the intention of those who planned the attack or those who made the decision to carry it out;

– the action must be distinct from activities considered legitimate in time of war. The act must violate the framework defined by international humanitarian rules, in particular those concerning the prohibition of intentionally targeting civilians or non-combatants.

Our contribution focuses specifically on terrorist acts carried out by organisations or individuals claiming to be Islamists. The criterion defining a terrorist action and according to which “the violent act must pursue a political, economic, religious or social objective” must therefore be specified. This criterion is considered essential to our database and focuses on attacks that have been the subject of an Islamist claim or about which the available information indicates that it has been planned, decided and carried out in the name of Islamism.

For historians, “Islamism” is a term “used at the end of the nineteenth century to designate Islam as a religion and civilisation, but which has recently taken a new meaning of militant fundamentalist, traditionalist and proselyte Islam”¹⁰. Islamism now refers to “a trend demanding the strict application of the prescriptions of religious or shari’a law, some of which have been abandoned, as well as the principles of faith, by various modern governments in Muslim countries, particularly under the influence of European countries, Western ideologies and reformist movements”¹¹. As a result of this evolution, the defenders of such a conception of Islam, the “Islamists”, advocate for a jihad that is “on the one hand, in their own country against ‘bad’ Muslims and corrupt rulers in order to establish, if necessary, a purely Islamic state, and on the other hand, more generally, against the secular values that dominate the non-Muslim world”¹². The same authors consider that Islamism has many analogies with the Muslim Brotherhood movement¹³.

There are many other definitions of Islamism, often very detailed. To complete without unduly complicating matters, one can refer in particular to the definition proposed by Edward Walker, because of its relative clarity and conciseness: “By ‘Islamism’, I mean the normative political ideology that has as its core program the establishment of Islam as a state religion and the implementation of Islamic law (shari’a). Militant Islamism, then, is any form of Islamism that advocates the use of violence to achieve Islamist objectives. This same distinction is made by Islamists themselves, who refer to ‘Parties of the Islamic Call’, or al-da’wa al Islamiyya (i.e., Islamist groups that do not advocate violence) on the one hand, and ‘Parties of the Muslim Revolution’, or al-thawra al-Islamiyya (i.e., Islamist groups that do advocate violence) on the other hand¹⁴. Acknowledging that there are no universally accepted definitions of Islamism and terrorism, some researchers characterise it as an ideology whose key tenets include:

– Belief that Islam is not only a religion, but also a holistic sociopolitical system;
– Advocacy of shari’a (Islamic) law as divine state law;
– Belief that a transnational Muslim community, known as the Ummah, should unite as a political bloc;
– Advocacy of an ‘Islamic’ state, or Caliphate, within which sovereignty belongs to God¹⁵.

It is within the framework of these definitions that we have conceived this work and that we propose here the result in the form of a database listing the Islamist terrorist attacks perpetrated in the world since 27 December 1979. The data included in our database does not extend beyond 12 April 2024, given the time required to validate and process the information collected. Indeed, while the attacks in Western countries have considerable visibility, due to the greater impact that violence can have in more peaceful societies, their ability to produce reliable data quickly and a particularly dense media presence, the same cannot be said for attacks that take place, much more often, in other parts of the world where all identification and intelligence processes become longer but cannot be as effective.
Therefore, the validation and classification of relevant events requires work that goes beyond the time we had to define in order to make this publication possible.

To conduct our research, we relied on three types of sources: gatherng information on attacks using search engines, cross-referencing existing databases, and consulting academic research. We used a range of databases that track both general attacks and specifically Islamist attacks¹⁶. All the databases we used were helpful in confirming and expanding our research¹⁷. However, most of these databases were incomplete or unevenly detailed. For some countries, regions, or time periods, there was a lot of information, but for others, the data was sparse or missing. For example, Wikipedia offers data organized by year or theme, but it is often fragmented and incomplete, making it unsuitable for statistical analysis. For our first edition, “Islamist Attacks in the World 1979-2019,” we primarily used the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) from the University of Maryland, USA¹⁸. This database covers terrorist attacks from 1970 to 2017. The value of this data set lies in its ability to record attacks, whatever their motivation.

This richness was also our main challenge, since we had to extract Islamist-type attacks from the 172,944 attacks recorded worldwide from 1979 to 2017. We therefore first had to select, verify and classify the data contained in the GTD. We then had to supplement it with our own information, in particular for the years 1993, 2018 and 2019¹⁹.

Since the first edition of our study, in November 2019, the University of Maryland database has been updated to June 2020. Firstly, we were able to consolidate our data for the years 2018 and 2019.

For the period from July 2020 to April 2024, we used the Armed Conflict and Event Data Project (ACLED) database. This American non-profit organization specializes in data collection and mapping of all types of violent events worldwide, from 1997 to the present day. We have developed a filtering system, with three parameters, to retain only Islamist attacks:

1. The period: we have exported data for the period from 1 July, 2020 to 12 April, 2024;
2. Type of event: we then selected all terrorist attacks worldwide;
3. Islamist terrorist groups: finally, we have kept track of attacks perpetrated by an Islamist terrorist or by an Islamist terrorist group, with 656 Islamist terrorist groups recorded from 1979 to the present day.

We have excluded several types of events from our database:

– Operations initiated by state forces aimed at preemptively weakening a terrorist group (e.g., “On 12 March 2021, 3 Taliban were killed and 1 wounded in an Afghan military operation in Dih Yak district, Ghazni province. Additionally, 4 Taliban-planted IEDs were detected and defused in the district. Fatalities coded as 3”)²⁰.
– Operations where the instigator is not clearly identifiable (e.g., “On 18 September 2021, clashes erupted between AQAP militants and unidentified tribesmen in Al Tariyah village, Hatib district (Shabwah), killing 1 and injuring others. The reason behind the clashes was not reported”)²¹.

For the Islamist attacks included in our database, we have provided the following information:
– the date ;
– the location of the attack: country, city, exact location when identifiable;
– the number of confirmed deaths and the number of wounded, including among the attackers; it is important to point out here that the number of wounded is obviously greatly underestimated by the information available;
– the perpetrator(s) of the attack ;
– target type(s) ;
– the type(s) of attack(s) involved;
– type(s) of weapon(s) used.
– description of the attack.

For the period June 2021-April 2024, we analyzed a total of 18,188 events, representing an average of 527 terrorist acts per month. We have worked with information provided by the Armed Conflict and Event Data Project (ACLED) to analyze it and create our own database²².

It is obviously not possible to claim to offer an exhaustive database of Islamist attacks committed worldwide between 1979 and April 2024, for a number of reasons detailed below.

A certain number of attacks have not been listed. Despite our best efforts, it has not been possible to identify a certain number of Islamist attacks over the entire period in question.

a/ In some cases, the number of victims caused by Islamist attacks is insufficiently detailed. It is sometimes roughly estimated by the authorities of the country who, for political reasons, do not wish to collect and publish information on the subject. This is particularly the case with the Algerian state (see our box below).

b/ A number of attacks do not appear in our “retained estimate” when religious motivation is not clearly predominant in a combination involving another determination. Islamist terrorism takes place in singular and complex contexts that sometimes make it difficult to collect reliable data. This is particularly the case in situations of war, civil or international, independentist or separatist struggles and territorial conflicts that persist over long periods of time, where causalities are shifting or inextricable, as in the case of the Palestinian conflict, while in a completely different context, in Thailand for example, a separatist movement has led a Muslim minority to get involved with weapons in the name of objectives that can achieve, beyond political demands, a religious dimension.

c/ Islamist motivation is not always identified. Available data do not always allow news agencies to attribute the attack to the Islamist cause, especially if the country affected by the attack is characterised by weak administrative structures. The absence of claim of responsability can increase the likelihood that an attack will not even be recorded by agencies or that this information will not reach the press.

d/ The number of deferred deaths is practically unknown. However, it is certainly significant. Since victims who succumb to their injuries after an attack are almost never mentioned in the available information, it is impossible to know their exact number.

The death of Tahar Mejri, who died of grief on June 14, 2019, three years after losing his wife and son in the Nice attack on July 14, 2016, is another tragic illustration of what we refer to as ‘delayed deaths’. It is therefore also impossible to integrate these deaths into our database in a reliable way. Thus, according to our database, we record at least 249,941 deaths and 192,598 people wounded, which is less than the number of deaths. However, if we consider four cases of attacks, each carried out with different means, in three countries where the quality of information is excellent, we observe a completely opposite ratio between the number of deaths and the number of people wounded: in the United States, there were five times as many people wounded (16,493) than killed (3,001) in the 9/11 attacks; in France, there were three times as many people wounded (413) than killed (137) in the 13 November 2015 attacks; in Nice, in the 14 July 2016 attack, there were five times as many people wounded (458) than killed (87). In Israel, the attacks of October 7th, 2023, resulted in 3,400 injured and at least 1,195 dead, hence in three times more deaths than injuries. It should be noted here that both the Bataclan attack and the Nice attack led to survivors committing suicide several months or even years after the events. Our study goes back on this particular point. This information leads us to believe that the number of people wounded is much higher than that in our database. Certainly, developing countries, which are the countries where most attacks take place, do not have the same capacity to identify and care for people injured in an attack. Some of the injured are probably not even counted, while others die from their injuries after a certain period of time due to the inadequacy or fragility of relief systems and health institutions. If we applied the ratios of the four sample attacks to the number of casualties in our database (249,941), we would have to adjust this figure by multiplying it by three (hence 749,823 wounded) or five (hence 1,249,705). However, among all these injured people, it appears certain that several of them die from their injuries, and that the poorer and more lacking in rescue and medical resources the affected country is, the more numerous these deaths are.

For these four reasons, we propose two types of quantification of Islamist violence, in the form of a “retained estimate” and a “possible estimate”. The “retained estimate” results from our database of attacks during the period 1979-April 2024, that were clearly motivated by an Islamist agenda. The “possible estimate” results from the identification of attacks that could be qualified as Islamist, including certain terrorist acts that are also based on separatist, political or social logic, which make it more difficult to attribute them to an exclusively or mainly Islamist motivation. In all cases, the number of victims, dead or injured, is significantly lower than a reality that cannot be more precisely known.

“The possible estimate” should be between 300,000 and 400,000 deaths considering the victims of Islamist terrorism in Algeria, according to the hypotheses based on the best-known sources and the most reliable studies.

Our research began in spring 2018. It gave rise to a first publication, in 2019²³, and a second in 2021²⁴. The study we publish here is based on the database we developed, within the limits previously indicated. The analyses that follow first present the evolution of Islamist terrorism from 1979 to the present day, before proposing a presentation and reading of the data according to the regions of the world and the countries affected by Islamist violence.

This work does not aim to shed light on the foundations of Islamism or to discuss the origins and justifications, in the context of Islam, of the use of violence and violence of a terrorist nature in particular. In a different way, we consider that our contribution lies in the information that can be obtained from the exploitation of a consolidated database and the analyses to which it can give rise. However, in order to understand the value of the data shared here, it is necessary to briefly recall the developments in Islamist terrorism since 1979.

Until the mid-1970s, Islamism had little influence in the Middle East and North Africa. In the wake of decolonisation and the rejection of Western imperialism, the new States of the region affirm a nationalist and pan-Arab vision promoted by leaders such as Nasser or Boumediene and by movements such as Ba’ath, in Syria and Iraq, or the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Palestine. Islamist organisations are firmly contained or severely repressed, as Nasser did in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in 1928 by Hassan el-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood was established with the aim of restoring the political Islam that had disappeared with the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate proclaimed by Atatürk in 1924.

At the end of the 1970s, the Islamist claim was strengthened¹. The increase in social inequalities and corruption of the elites were denounced. Islamist movements were trying to embody a political alternative to existing dictatorships or were engaging in violent actions, as in Syria, where the Muslim Brotherhood launched an armed struggle against the Baathist regime of Hafez el-Assad. These movements of Islamisation in Middle Eastern societies flourished all the more as Arab nationalism began to falter then collapsed. At the end of the decade, in 1979, a window of opportunity opened up for Islamists in the Middle East and North Africa.

The year 1979 was a pivotal year, the scene of several important events, including the Iranian revolution and the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR. The Russian military operation precipitated the emergence of a new Islamism. At the same time, in Iran, the opposition led by the Shiite clergy, due to the context of intense social protest, forced the Shah to flee the country (16 January 1979). On 1 February 1979, Ruhollah Khomeyni came to power. He initiated the transformation of Iran’s imperial regime, accused of “Westernisation”, into an Islamic republic. In the wake of the Iranian revolution, Shia groups advocating armed struggle were formed. Among them is the Lebanese Hezbollah, created in 1982. Shia ideology is affirmed in the context of the process of Islamisation of the Middle East where it competes with Sunni legitimacy.

In Afghanistan, the Soviet invasion initiates the conflict which will be considered the matrix of contemporary Islamist terrorism². Jihad is supported by Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Egypt. Jihadists who reach Afghanistan become “mujahideen”; they are seen as the liberators of a “land of Islam” (dar al-islam).

With 357 attacks, which cost the lives of 1,442 people, the 1980s are the least deadly years compared to the decades that followed. The emergence of Islamist terrorism is visible from the years 1980-1983 which correspond to the Muslim Brotherhood’s activism in Syria, in the midst of an uprising against the government of Hafez el-Assad.
From 1980 to 1982, there were 69 attacks on Syrian territory, representing nearly two-thirds (63.3%) of all Islamist terrorist attacks listed in the world during these three years. Attacks ceased after the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, including during the Hama massacres by the Syrian army in 1982.

From 1980 to 1989, the country most affected by Islamist terrorism is Lebanon, with 133 attacks, which caused at least 515 deaths. In the grips of a civil war since 1975, the country has been experiencing the rise of small terrorist groups. This unstable national context and Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982 promote, the same year, the emergence of Hezbollah. A year later, the Shia organisation triggered a series of attacks on foreign institutions. An Italian patrol was hit on 15 March 1983, although no lives were lost, but on 18 April a new attack hit the United States Embassy in Beirut, resulting in the deaths of 63 people. At the end of the same year, on 23 October, an American base and a French patrol were terribly hit by an attack in which 299 people lost their lives. Hezbollah’s terrorist activism is particularly intense in Lebanon, where it committed 276 attacks from 1983 to 2000, but it is not limited to this. In all, by integrating the other affected countries, Hezbollah is responsible for 339 attacks from 1983 to 2000, killing 1,105 people. Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Cyprus, Denmark, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Kuwait and Tunisia are among the affected countries.

In September 1986, Paris suffered a series of six attacks, including the one on 17 September, rue de Rennes, in front of a store, which killed 7 people and injured 55.
These attacks were claimed by the Solidarity Committee with Arab political prisoners and the Near East, on behalf of the Lebanese Hezbollah.

The Lebanese organisation is also considered res- ponsible for the two attacks on the Israeli Embassy on 17 March 1992 in Buenos Aires (30 deaths, 220 wounded), as well as the attack of 18 July 1994 on a Jewish association, also in Buenos Aires (85 deaths, 236 injured). Over the whole 1979-April 2024 period, Argentina remains the only country in South America affected by Islamist terrorism, with three attacks.

The withdrawal of the Red Army from Kabul on 5 February 1989 galvanised Islamist mobilisation, already stimulated in 1987 by the creation of Al-Qaeda, by Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden. The globalisation of the jihadist struggle began then. The discourse is mainly based on the idea of a unified Muslim community (ummah) claiming autonomy from the ethnic, national and cultural specificities of each nationality. The objective is to establish the Caliphate and the exemplary prophetic city, which must also be extended to non-Muslim countries. The empowerment of the jihadist discourse in relation to classical, nationalist and political referents is not the hallmark of Al-Qaeda. It is taken up by all Muslims who came to Afghanistan to take part in the violent action. Following the Soviet withdrawal, these mujahideen returned to their countries of origin and spread the ideas of Jihadist Salafism there. Thus, in the 1990s, an increasing number of countries, particularly in the Middle East, were directly affected by Islamist violence.

In Algeria, a number of jihadists gathered in militant groups since the beginning of the 1991-2002³ civil war. The victory of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in the 1990 municipal elections and the 1991 parliamentary elections, followed by the cancellation of these elections by the Algerian army and the resignation of President Chadli Bendjedid, triggered a “black decade”. Military and Islamist groups engaged in a terrifying struggle for power. The confrontation devastated the country. From 1990 to 1999, Algeria was the country that was hit the hardest by Islamist terrorism. There were 542 attacks, or more than a third (34.6%) of the attacks recorded worldwide during this decade by our database; there were at least 2,390 deaths, representing more than half (51.4%) of the victims of Islamist terrorism in the world between 1990 and 1999. The violence reached its peak in 1997: 967 people were killed following the parliamentary elections won by the Rassemblement national démocratique (RDN), supported by the army.

During this “black decade”, religious figures and institutions were particularly affected, particularly Christians of foreign nationalities: twelve Croatian tourists were murdered on 14 December 1993, two Spanish nuns were killed on 23 October 1994 and seven French monks from Tibhirine were kidnapped and murdered in the spring of 1996.

In Egypt, on the eve of the 2000s, the Islamist landscape was structured by two movements: al-Jihad and al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. The objective of these two organisations was the establishment of an Islamic State, and the means to achieve this was terrorism⁴. In the 1990s, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya launched 257 insurgent attacks against the government, killing 489 people.

In the Middle East, the 1990s were marked by the Islamisation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A transfer of power of sorts took place to the benefit of Hamas, a Palestinian Islamist movement born in 1987 at the beginning of the first Intifada, and to the detriment of the PLO, which came from the Arab nationalist movement. This evolution led to a change in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 1992, 417 leaders and activists of Hamas were arrested and taken to southern Lebanon, in the village of Marj al-Zuhur, after the assassination of an Israeli officer. A resolution of the Council of UN security necessitated their repatriation. This event is analysed by Gilles Kepel as “the transition which gave Hamas parity with the PLO, if not primacy, for the incarnation of the Palestinian cause, and consequently the Islamisation of its Arab and universal image⁵“. Beyond the political vicissitudes on Palestinian territory, “the increase in suicide attacks – in the face of the hardening of successive governments of Mr. Netanyahu and the intensification of colonisation – can be considered as the model for the mirror of which the international jihadism of Al-Qaeda would develop its preferred mode of action⁶“.

In our database, we clearly observe an increase in the number of attacks affecting the Israeli and Palestinian territories from the beginning of the 1990s. Terrorist attacks are largely incriminating to Hamas but also to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Group (PIJ). Between 1979 and 2000, of the 62 attacks recorded on Israeli ground, 29 were claimed by Hamas and 13 by the PIJ. Out of 87 attacks in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, 65 were claimed by Hamas and 12 by the PIJ.

Islamist violence has been on the rise in the Middle East and in North Africa from the 1980s onwards, and other regions of the world are also becoming hosts to this jihad, particularly Southeast Asia (Philippines), South Asia (India) and Europe.

Rapid empowerment and the increasing power of Islamism eventually raise fears of countries that have nevertheless worked for this movement or who used it for domestic political reasons or international relations. Thus, in the face of the Islamist threat, Saudi Arabia and Algeria have engaged in relentless repression. This is also the case for Egypt and Syria. In a decade, Salafists have changed categories: firstly admired as “freedom fighters”, they were then denounced as “fugitives”⁷.

This regional context forced many jihadists into exile: some, having returned from Afghanistan, became political refugees, often with the aim of exporting their Islamist struggle to new territories, including those that are not predominantly Muslim. They sought asylum in Europe. In the 1990s, these territories of settlement and conquest were first England and France. London thus became a hub for Salafo Jihadist activism in Europe⁸. Between July and October 1995, France was hit by a wave of Islamist terrorist attacks related to the Algerian context: on 25 July 1995 an attack in the Parisian metro resulted in the deaths of 7 people and 86 people wounded.

Asia was also hit hard between 1979 and 2000, particularly in the south and southeast. According to our database, we record the first Islamist terrorist attacks in India in 1986. The phenomenon remained sporadic until 1990. In that year, 12 attacks were carried out under the leadership of the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) group and its supporters. The action of this Islamist group was rooted in the conflict between India and Pakistan over the border region of Jammu and Kashmir, but if the group wanted the region to be integrated into Pakistan, it was also campaigning for the establishment of a caliphate in the world.

The landscape of Islamist terrorism in India is fragmented: a number of groups revolve around the issue of independence, including Allah’s Tigers (“Tigers of Allah”), the Muslim Brotherhood, Harkat ul-Ansar and Jamaat-e-Islami. Between 1979 and 2000, most attacks (78.8%) were concentrated in Jammu and Kashmir. Since 2000 and the creation of the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), attacks have been both more numerous and more deadly (25 attacks and 126 deaths in 2000, 42 attacks and 200 deaths in 2001). These years also saw the Pakistani Taliban (Lashkar-e-Taiba) conducting terrorist campaigns in India.

In the Philippines, Islamist terrorism is deployed as part of the separatist struggle of the Moro people, a Muslim minority in the south of the country. One of the main terrorist groups in the region, the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), founded in 1991 by Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, drew its inspiration from Islamist movements in the Middle East. The first demonstration of this terrorist movement occurred on 7 September 1986, when the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) attacked a Catholic church and a marriage ceremony in Salvador, on the island of Mindanao, killing 20 people and injuring 186. The group launched an attack on 15 January 1987 in the Manila metro, the capital, killing 8 people. In 1994, after an eclipse of sorts, the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) carried out 7 attacks in the south of the country. It later became one of the main actors of Islamist terrorism in the Philippines in the following decades.

The attacks of 9/11 2001 perpetrated by Al-Qaeda on U.S. soil were the deadliest terrorist attacks in history, with a total of 3,001 deaths and 16,493 wounded. On that day, two hijacked airliners were launched against the towers of the World Trade Center in New York. A third aircraft had been directed at the Pentagon in Washington. On board the fourth hijacked aircraft, it was a passenger revolt that defeated the terrorists’ plan, as the aircraft crashed in the countryside in Pennsylvania.

The live and global broadcasting of this dramatic and spectacular event¹ also marked the beginning of a new era in the media coverage of terrorism. In addition to the deferred information intended for specific audiences, immediate and comprehensive information is now available. This new public space profoundly affects the work of traditional media (television, press and radio). The advent of social media and smartphones is opening its doors of mass communication to countless new players, starting with terrorist organisations.

The attacks of 9/11 have had a significant impact that changed the geopolitics of the Middle East². Qualified by George W. Bush’s administration as the “war on terror”, the American response was brisk. On 7 October 2001, the United States launched a major offensive against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, accused of having supported Al-Qaeda. A year and a half later, on 20 March 2003, the American army invaded Iraq, in order to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime in the prospect of “democratising the Middle East”. Despite overwhelming military victories, the United States is failing to restore peace, or to eradicate Islamism. Confronted with the machine of American war in the long term, Islamists organised themselves, by acquiring an international dimension that keeps being reaffirmed. Between 2001 and 2012, the number of attacks and victims have increased in a spectular way, notably due to the attacks perpetrated by Taliban fundamentalists.

Their movement has been spreading in Afghanistan and in Pakistan since 1994. Two years later, they overthrew the government in place when Kabul was taken over. They established the regime of the Islamic Emirate from Afghanistan, headed by Mohammad Omar. In the years that followed, the Taliban persecuted minorities, established a well-founded regime on the strict application of shari’a law and welcomed numerous wanted jihadists, including the leader of Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden.
In a few years, Afghanistan became a home for Islamic extremists from all over the world.

After the attacks of 9/11, the Taliban were driven out of power by an international coalition led by the Americans. From this moment on, there was an exponential increase in the number of attacks and the number of victims, in particular among international forces or members of the Afghan government. We went from 4 attacks and 153 deaths in the country in 2001 to 829 attacks and 2,604 deaths in 2012. In total, between 2001 and 2012, 2,536 attacks took place on Afghan soil, killing at least 8,054 people. This represents 30.7% of the total number of Islamist terrorist attacks worldwide between 2001 and 2012. The Taliban were responsible for most (95.2%) of these attacks.

In Pakistan, we also witnessed the rise of groups multiplying terrorist acts between 2001 and 2012, with 1,010 attacks and 4,997 deaths. Very present in this country, the Taliban organised themselves from 2007 under the name Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP); they were responsible for nearly three-quarters (71.1%) of the terrorist violence over this period (2001-2012). Other Islamist groups are also active, such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (56 attacks, 386 deaths) or Lashkar-e-Islam (64 attacks, 115 deaths). In 2007, two terrorist attacks led by Al-Qaeda and its allies left their mark on the landscape of the country’s politics: on 18 October, an attack against a crowd gathered to welcome the former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, returning from exile, caused the death of 141 people and wounded 250. On 27 December, she was murdered in turn, victim of a suicide attack that killed 20 people and wounded more than a hundred.

Between 2001 and 2012, Iraq was the third largest country most affected by Islamist terrorism, with 914 attacks. Particularly violent, these attacks caused the deaths of 8,534 people, with on average 9.3 people killed per terrorist action. By comparison, in the world during the same period, an attack killed an average of 4.6 people. The fight against foreign interference is a key reason for violence by Islamists. On 19 August 2003, the car bomb attack against the Canal Hotel, UN headquarters in Baghdad, killed 22 people. The year 2004 saw a series of terrorist attacks targeting coalition member countries in Iraq, with 5 attacks against personnel at military bases, checkpoints and patrols of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I). At the same time, the development of hostage takings/kidnappings became more common to terrorist actions: while we do not record any hostage takings or kidnappings in 2001, 2002 and 2003, there were 27 in 2004, largely aimed at civilians from countries militarily deployed in Iraq (5 Americans, 4 Japanese, 3 South Koreans, 1 Bulgarian, 1 Canadian, and 1 Italian). Among the countries involved in the war, the United States was greatly affected: between 2001 and 2012, in Iraq, 34 attacks targeted Americans, including 15 during the year 2004.

Between 2001 and 2012, an increase in Islamist terrorist attacks is observable in several geographical areas in the world. Compared to the previous period (1979-2000), there was a sharp increase in the number of terrorist attacks, with 8,265 attacks (compared to a total of 2,194 between 1979 and 2000) and 38,187 deaths (compared to a total of 6,817 between 1979 and 2000). This dramatic increase is partly due to the globalisation of jihad, facilitated by the acceleration of the circulation of people and ideas.

Since 2004, Europe has been confronted with a wave of attacks of a new magnitude. On 11 March, in Madrid, four trains exploded almost simultaneously. Claimed by Al-Qaeda, these attacks killed 191 people. On 7 July 2005, four explosions hit public transportation in London, killing 56 people and wounding 784. Though Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for these attacks, the terrorists, unlike those of 9/11, were natives of the United Kingdom. Gilles Kepel sees this as a change in the implementation of Islamist terrorist attacks, which now rely on “a human resource specific to the Western country targeted”³.

In addition, many Islamist movements are intensifying their inter-regional collaborations, such as in Asia. The 9/11 attacks on the ground claimed by Al-Qaeda and then the intervention in Afghanistan by American troops helped further the link between Osama bin Laden and various South Asian groups⁴, examples of which are Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) in Indonesia. The difficulty is to examine, in each context, the way in which people and violent groups combine local elements, regional and global within the referents, the objectives and the operating methods they mobilise and implement. Trends then appear to be oscillating between unrelated ethno-nationalism with global jihad and a transnational religious referent5. The situation in Thailand during this period takes part in this dynamic. From 2004 onwards, in the context of a separatist insurgency, the south of the country where a Muslim minority lives is crossed by violent activism. The two main groups Runda Kumpulan Kecil (RKK) and the Patani United Liberation Organisation (PULO), are then organised around a jihadist discourse. For a number of attacks occurring at this time, the Islamist character is sometimes found intertwined with ethno-nationalist claims.

According to our estimate between 2001 and 2012, we identify 111 attacks and 91 deaths in Thailand. According to the possible estimate, we count 146 attacks and 121 deaths over the same period. In the latter we also take into account the actions of terrorists accused of being Muslim separatist extremists.

The rise of Islamist terrorism can also be explained by the development of Al-Qaeda’s ramifications, such as that of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQPA) or Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

These different branches develop a capacity to hit hard abroad, as shown by the three successive attacks of 9 November 2005 by Al-Qaeda in Jordan, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Amman, which caused the deaths of at least 61 people, and the one on 28 November 2002 at the Paradise Hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, killing 16 people.

Relatively spared until then, sub-Saharan Africa became a target of Islamist terrorism in the second half of the 2000s. The creation and expansion of the Al Shabaab group, formerly the armed wing of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), in Somalia in 2006 was central. Pursuing the objective of overthrowing the Somali government in order to establish a regime founded on shari’a law, Al Shabaab has been cultivating close links with Al-Qaeda, thus forming part of the global jihadist movement⁶. The group’s activity goes beyond the borders of Somalia, where the group has committed 459 attacks and killed 1,396 people, to reach Kenya, where it attacked 97 times (126 deaths), and Ethiopia, where it struck twice, including the devastating attack (100 deaths) on 2 November 2007 against Ethiopian soldiers in a hotel in Dolo.

Sub-Saharan Africa was also the first to suffer acts of violence by Boko Haram, which have been recorded in Nigeria since 2009. The considerable scale of its attacks between 2010 and 2012 (566 attacks, 1,655 deaths) foreshadowed its power of destruction over the next decade.

The Internet obviously plays a key role in the globalisation of Islamist terrorism. It turns out to be a powerful propaganda and recruitment tool⁷. The emergence of social media allows Islamist groups to interact effectively and often anonymously, to share documents and information, but also to establish a community of interconnected individuals. According to Evan Kohlmann, “90% of terrorist activity on the Internet takes place using social networking tools. These forums serve as a virtual firewall to help safeguard the identities of those who participate, and they offer subscribers a chance to make direct contact with terrorist representatives […]”⁸. Furthermore, cyber-terrorism is also a modality of attack for Islamist groups which thus multiplies their capacity for action.

On 17 December 2010, the immolation of the young street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, in the Sidi Bouzid region ofTunisia, led to the flare-up of the Arab Spring. After some time raising hopes of democratisation, these events led, in the first half of the 2010’s, to electoral victories for parties close to the Muslim Brotherhood. While theyoccasionally failed to retain power, they are “sup- ported by increasingly conservative societies, also as a result ofthe spread of Salafism imported from Saudi Arabia”¹.

In this new context, jihadism is developing regionally, based in particular on the proclamation by the Islamic State (IS) of the Caliphate in Mosul in 2014. It is during this period that Islamist terrorism is the most deadly. There has been an unprecedented increase of the number of attacks worldwide. The rise of IS and Boko Haram is facilitated by chaotic geopolitical contexts that offer terrorists many opportunities for expansion.

The group Islamic State emerged and then settled during the Iraqi civil war, between 2003 and 2011. The organisation was created in 2006 and, three times, its name change accompanied its expansion outside its Iraqi hub: first as an Islamic State in Iraq (ISI, 2006-2013), then as an Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, 2013-2014) and finally as an Islamic State (IS, from 2014).

Theorised in the 2000s, the strategy of the IS is to promote chaos, the “management of savagery”², and to globalise jihad. Its objective is to cultivate religion in the minds of the masses, to make Islam the only political and social order, and to train young people in order to establish a militarised society. The IS operates in several ways. The terrorist group may incite individuals to act alone. These are the “lone wolves”. Popularised in the 1990s, this expression has been used by the IS through different publications.

A lone wolf becomes radicalised, plans and executes an attack on their own, without being affiliated with a particular terrorist group, even if they can claim the attack on behalf of the IS³. It should be noted that failed attacks are generally not claimed by the Islamic State⁴. The Iraqi-Syrian “parent company” directly claims responsibility for the most deadly attacks⁵. Examples include the attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunisia on March 18, 2015, and the November 13, 2015 attacks in France, for which the IS claimed responsibility the very next day.

As it grows in power, the IS is expanding its battlefield. According to our census, it was from 2013 onwards that the organization multiplied its terrorist acts. For that year, we count almost thirty-one times as many attacks committed by IS compared with the previous year (374 attacks in 2013, compared with 12 in 2012).

Note that Boko Haram is not included here, although this group pledged allegiance to the IS in March 2015. We have focused the following section on this terrorist group in order to highlight its singularity. Nevertheless, if we add the terrorist acts committed by Boko Haram since 2015 to the number of attacks perpetrated by the IS and its various branches since its creation in 2006, we obtain the figure of 19,640 attacks resulting in the deaths of 89,268 people.

Following the proclamation of the “caliphate” in June 2014, a multitude of Islamist groupuscules joined under the IS banner. This strategy of expansion enables the organization to establish itself across Africa and the Middle East, relying on the foothold of local jihadist groups. In 2016, the IS murdered 13,746 people. This was the deadliest year on record for the entire period 1979-April 2024. The number of IS victims increased ninefold in three years (1,458 deaths in 2013, 13,746 deaths in 2016). The chart on page 36 shows the evolution of the number of attacks committed by the various branches of the Islamic State organization from its inception to April 2024.

The territories most affected are those where IS has historically established itself, namely Iraq and Syria. The wars in these countries have facilitated the Islamtic State’s development, allowing it to conquer several cities and provinces and establish a totalitarian regime with the goal of re-establishing an “Abbasid caliphate.” IS terrorists have been most destructive in Iraq, where they have carried out 7,178 attacks, resulting in 36,029 deaths. This means that of the 43,422 people who have died in Iraq due to Islamist terrorism since 1979, 83% were victims of IS between 2006 and April 2024.

IS in Syria

In Syria, between 2013 and April 2024, Islamic State attacks were very deadly, with 1,962 attacks claiming the lives of 11,775 people; on average, in the country, the IS causes the death of 6 people with each of its attacks. Some neighboring countries have also been subject to IS intrusion through its offshoots, particularly since 2014. Here again, these intrusions are facilitated by destabilizing contexts, which in turn promote the terrorist organization’s hold on these territories, which IS has regarded as its “new provinces” since 2013: Mozambique (1,072 attacks, 4,081 deaths), Egypt (889 attacks, 2,493 deaths), Afghanistan (850 attacks, 4,198 deaths) Libya (578 attacks, 1,171 deaths), Pakistan (170 attacks, 807 deaths) as well as Yemen (116 attacks, 1,008 deaths).

On March 23, 2019, thanks to US-backed Arab-Kurdish forces, the EI is defeated. The end of the self-proclaimed caliphate is official with the capture of the last Syrian territory held by the jihadist organization. But deprived of its Iraqi-Syrian stronghold, the EI has not lost all its capacity to cause harm, and is decentralizing its activism towards its subsidiaries. Witness the murderous attacks in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday on April 21, 2019, and the attacks on three policemen in Saudi Arabia on the same day.

IS in Mozambique

The Islamic State is also responsible for numerous attacks in Mozambique, through the group “Al-Chabab in Mozambique”⁶, affiliated to the Islamtic State since 2019⁷. On March 24, 2021, this group succeeded in taking the strategic port city of Palma, in the Cabo Delgado region. Little data exists on this attack, as the Mozambican army regained control of the city a few days later, on April 5, 2021. The ACLED data did not allow us to gather enough elements to illustrate this event. We have therefore relied on the investigation carried out by independent journalist Alexander Perry⁸, winner of the George Polk Award. Between November 2022 and March 2023, a team of investigators visited the six districts of Palma and 15 surrounding villages. They were able to visit 13,686 inhabitants’ homes and assess the impact of this event on local populations. Thanks to this fieldwork, they were able to estimate that 1,193 people had been killed or presumed dead, and 209 people had been kidnapped, establishing a total of 1,402 victims of the takeover of Palma in just a few days. With this data, we can note that this is one of the top three deadliest Islamist attacks since September 11, 2001, along with October 7, 2023.

Mozambique has been plagued by Islamic terrorism for many years, particularly since the rise to power of Al-Chabab, whose official name is Alhu Sunna Wal Jamma (ASWJ), also known as Ansar al-Sunna, and represented by international terrorist Bonomado Machude Omar⁹. On October 5, 2017, he and Ansar al-Sunna led the first insurrection against a police station, killing 18 people¹⁰. This event marked the start of a war between police forces and the Mozambican army against Islamist militants, which is still ongoing. This war has resulted in over a million people being displaced from the region and at least 4,671 deaths¹¹.

In May 2022, the Islamic State proclaimed the “Mozambique Province” (ISIS-M or ISM), without specifying its exact borders. However, ongoing clashes with Mozambican, Rwandan, and SADC¹² armed forces significantly reduced the jihadist presence in Cabo Delgado between 2021 and 2023.

With the insurgent presence having diminished, the SADC armed forces have started withdrawing from the region, a process set to be completed on July 15, 2024. Rwanda, however, plans to maintain its military presence by sending an additional 2,000 soldiers at the same time. Despite being weakened, the Islamic State’s presence in Mozambique remains a reality, and the region is still particularly fragile and dangerous. In March 2024, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported over 110,000 displaced persons¹³ since December 2023 due to attacks by jihadist groups in the region.

IS in France

With the exception of Latin America, many countries across other continents have been targeted by the Islamic State, with attacks on their nationals both at home and abroad. Several European Union countries have been severely impacted, with France being the hardest hit, suffering 14 attacks and 149 deaths caused by the IS¹⁴.

It was on November 13, 2015 that France was struck by a series of terrorist attacks by the IS. In total, 133 people died¹⁵ and 413 were injured. Faced with the scale of the massacre, French President François Hollande, declared on the very evening of the attacks that France had “gone to war” against “the barbarians of Daesh¹⁶”.

These terrorist attacks were claimed by the Islamic State (Daesh). They were carried out simultaneously, in different locations in Paris, by different groups of terrorists in possession of weapons of war (explosives, Kalashnikovs). The first attack took place at the Stade de France (largest stadium in France, located in Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris) during the friendly match between France and Germany. It was carried out by three men, two brothers of Iraqi nationality and one man of French nationality. Stopped by security guards, unable to enter the stadium, they detonated their explosive belts on the outskirts of the stadium, killing one and injuring dozens; these were the first suicide attacks in France.

The second attack took place almost simultaneously in the 10th and 11th arrondissement of Paris. The group of assailants consisted of three men, known to have committed terrorist acts in Syria. Armed with Kalashnikovs, the terrorists fired point-blank at customers on the terraces of bars and restaurants. The surprise attack left 39 people dead and 32 injured.

Finally, the third and deadliest of the attacks on the night of November 13, 2015, took place at the Bataclan theatre, during a concert. Assailants armed with explosives and Kalashnikovs entered the concert hall before firing into the crowd, killing 90 people and seriously injuring dozens more. The police arrived ten minutes after the first shots were fired, and were quickly joined by military forces from Operation Sentinelle, who eventually neutralized the Islamist terrorists with the help of elite units specialized in the fight against terrorism.

A few months later, on July 14, 2016, France was again targeted by Islamist terrorism on its national holiday. Around 10:30 p.m., a 19-ton truck drove into crowds on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, killing 86¹⁸ people and injuring 458. Besides France, 19 other countries were affected by this attack, which left thousands traumatized. It was the second deadliest terrorist attack in France. Two days after the incident, ISIS claimed responsibility for the massacre.

IS in Russia

Islamist terrorism in Russia is closely tied to the long-standing conflict between the central government and separatist rebels from Muslim territories in the North Caucasus, particularly Chechnya and Dagestan. After centuries of conflict with the central authorities, Chechen separatists declared independence following the collapse of the USSR in 1991. This led to the first Chechen war in 1994, which ended in a defeat for the Russian army, forcing it to withdraw from the region. On October 3, 1998, the Wolves of Islam group assassinated a Russian government official in Ingushetia, accusing him of collaborating with the Federal Security Service (FSB). On February 2, 1999, the Sword of Islam group attacked the Ministry of Energy in Grozny. In response to these and other insurgent actions, Moscow launched the second Chechen war in August 1999. This conflict, which lasted until April 2000, ultimately resulted in the establishment of a government loyal to Moscow, but at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.

The events of 9/11 led Russian authorities to intensify their efforts against Chechen insurgents. This period saw a rise in Islamist radicalization within the separatist struggle, which increasingly sought to establish an Islamic state in Ciscaucasus. On average, from 2001 to 2012, Islamist terrorism claimed around 60 lives per year. During this time, 26 major attacks occurred in the country, with two particularly notable incidents. On October 23, 2002, members of the Chechen jihadist group Special Purpose Islamic Regiment (SPIR) seized 912 hostages at Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater. On September 1, 2004, terrorists attacked a school, killing 344 people, many of them children, and injuring at least 727. This attack was claimed by the Riyadus-Salikhin Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs, which used suicide bombings. Between 2013 and April 2024, the number of terrorist attacks in Russia increased, reaching 58 attacks and 262 deaths, with 20 of these incidents occurring in Dagestan. During this period, the Islamic State also expanded its influence in Russia, notably through the emergence of the Caucasus Province of the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for 40 attacks. According to Wassim Nasr, a jihadism specialist, there is a “blood debt” between ISIS and Russia that traces back to the conflicts in Syria and Chechnya¹⁸. In fact, in Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan, some separatists have gradually become Islamized to the point of pledging allegiance to IS following numerous confrontations with the Russian army.

According to the American magazine Foreign Policy¹⁹, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Islamic State launched a destabilization campaign to stir up hatred of Russia and develop its network of sympathizers.

The two most recent attacks perpetrated by the IS took place in 2024, one in Moscow and the other in Dagestan. On March 22, 2024, four men from Tajikistan entered the Crocus City Hall concert hall in the Moscow suburb of Krasnogorsk. They shot the audience at point-blank range with automatic weapons. This extremely violent attack killed at least 144 people and injured 550. A few months later, the Dagestan region was targeted on June 23, killing around 20 people and injuring around 40 (we did not include this attack in our study, as it took place after April 12, 2024, but we felt it was important to mention it here).

The Moscow attack was claimed by a branch of the IS: Islamic State – Khorasan Province (ISKP). Originally based in eastern Afghanistan and born in 2014, Islamic State – Khorasan Province seeks to establish a caliphate that would cover the entire region from Pakistan to Uzbekistan, via Iran. Initially belonging to Pakistani and Afghan Taliban groups, close to al-Qaeda networks²⁰ , the future leaders of the ISKP pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in October 2014, and founded the province of Khorassan early the following year. In eastern Afghanistan, the ISKP carries out extremely violent acts against civilians, particularly those close to the Taliban, and religious minorities.

In May 2022, the ISKP threatened to attack Iran, China, Central Asian countries and Russia, one of the Taliban’s main international supporters. In September 2022, they attacked the Russian embassy in Kabul. In January 2024, the ISKP claimed responsibility for the attack in Kerman, Iran, to commemorate the death of Qassem Soleimani, which killed 93 people: the scale of the attack is said to have enabled the terrorist group to raise new funds in the Gulf states²¹ . With the Moscow attack in March 2024, the ISKP achieved its goal: to be known and feared by everyone, especially the Western world.

In the Hausa language, boko haram can be translated as “Western education is a sin”. The Boko Haram movement was founded by Nigerian preacher Mohamed Yusuf in 2002 in Maiduguri, capital of Borno State, Nigeria. From an Islamist sect to an armed struggle movement in 2009, the organisation advocates a Jihadist Salafist Islam hostile to any Western influence. Its objective is to create a caliphate, governed by shari’a law, just like the IS, to which it pledged allegiance in March 2015 by being referred to as the Islamic State in West Africa.

The group amplified its terrorist activism from 2009 onwards, leading an insurgency for the creation of a caliphate in Nigeria. In 2013, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan declared a state of emergency and the Nigerian army launched an offensive throughout the country. Despite this, Boko Haram is taking control of new areas, including Borno State, where 68.9% of its attacks are concentrated (1,955 of the 2,836 Boko Haram attacks in Nigeria). As of 2014, the Islamist group’s theatre of operation extends to the countries bordering Lake Chad, in northern Cameroon, in Niger and in Chad.

Between 2009 and April 2024, Boko Haram was responsible for 3,546 attacks. The human toll (26,081 deaths) is particularly cruel. A significant number of refugees have fled their cities or even their countries. Women and children have even been kidnapped to serve the terrorist organisation, as was the case in April 2014 when 276 high school girls where kidnapped in Chibok, Nigeria.

Civilians represented 64.1% of Boko Haram targets between 2009 and April 2024, a significantly high proportion compared to other categories. Among other things, schools where teaching is considered too Westernised are regularly targeted. Military personnel fighting against Boko Haram are also targets, as the villagers who try to defend themselves by creating self-defense militias, and who are most often massacred. With regards to its modus operandi it should be noted that Boko Haram uses suicide bombing on a massive scale.

It was first during the Iran-Iraq conflict (1980-1988) that we began talking about “suicide attacks”. It was then a question of tactical warfare. On 30 October 1980, Mohammad Hossein Fahmideh, a 13 year-old fanatical Shiite, committed suicide by throwing himself, grenade in hand, under a tank. In total, there were several thousand Iranian children under the age of 16 years old who would rush onto minefields in order to trigger the explosions and allow troops to pass in order to fight on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Khomeyni²². It was then in the context of the Lebanon War that the first “suicide attacks” were perpetrated. In Beirut, on 23 October 1983, two suicide attacks orchestrated by Hezbollah target the American and French contingents of the Multinational Force of security. The first resulted in the death of 241 American soldiers, the second in the death of 58 people, including French paratroopers and the Lebanese family of a building guard. A total of 19 suicide attacks will be committed between 1979 and 2000. They represent 0.9% of the 2,194 acts of Islamist violence in the world.

Suicide attacks require few resources, produce considerable damage and are susceptible to have maximum media impact. Indeed, it profoundly modifies the narrative of the act. It is no longer an attack perpetrated by a terrorist who does not expose themselves or their life to any risk; they are a “martyr” who accept and lead their own “sacrifice” for a cause. Its impact is further increased by the use of the new media order that allows the “martyr” to display their death by filming himself using their smartphone connected to the Web.

Between 2001 and 2012, the use of suicide attacks increased significantly (679), to then represent 8.2% of all Islamic attacks (8,265). The story of the jihadist martyr is carefully crafted and maintained by radical Islamists; their efforts are focused on the religious valorisation of the terrorist gesture. The “terrorist” must consider himself as a shahid (martyr). Thus, for these men and women who, in most cases, are under 30 years-old, the act to kill by taking your own life is no longer perceived as a suicide – considered a sin – but it is supposed, on the contrary, to bear witness to great piety to the extent that it harms non-Muslims²³.

If, in Western public opinion, the author of a suicide attack is more often associated with the idea of a fanatical, of a miserable or psychologically unbalanced person, a number of studies seem to contrast this portrait by highlighting the relatively high socio-cultural level of a majority of terrorists killed in suicide attacks²⁴.

This is the case, for example, within Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement, whose terrorists that resort to suicide bombing are generally identified as university graduates and middle-class people²⁵.

Over the period 2013-April 2024²⁶, 2,071 attacks have been identified as suicides, representing 3.7% of the 56,413 Islamist terrorist attacks. Among the attacks carried out by the Islamic State and by Boko Haram, the suicide attack is frequently used. It reflects the culture of death maintained and developed among young jihadists. For Boko Haram, we have identified 460 suicide attacks from 2013 to April 2024, representing 10.9% of the total number of all attacks attributable to this group, while they represent 10.7% (1,649) of the total attacks by the IS. To carry out its suicide attacks, Boko Haram indoctrinates, manipulates, recruits or coerces women, teenagers and very young children in particular.

In June 2017, Donald Trump called for a military withdrawal from Afghanistan, but the US then sent almost 4,000 additional troops to contain the Taliban advance²⁷. By October 2017, Afghan forces still controlled 56% of the country. On February 20, 2020, an agreement was reached between the United States and the Taliban to allow the departure of American forces. On April 14, 2021, Joe Biden officially set the troop withdrawal date for September 11, 2021, to end a “war with no end²⁸“. By early July 2021, the Taliban claimed to hold 85% of the territory²⁹. Kabul fell on August 15, 2021, bringing the Taliban back to power twenty years after the United States declared war³⁰. As The Economist points out, the results are harsh: “America has been fighting in Afghanistan for twenty years. The United States has spent more than $2,000 billion on this war. It has lost thousands of soldiers and seen the deaths of tens of thousands of Afghans, both soldiers and civilians³¹“.
The updated edition of our database shows that, since 1979, Afghanistan has been the country most affected by Islamist terrorism, both in terms of the number of attacks (17,075) and victims (70,038). The number of deaths more than doubled between 2014 (4,209) and 2020 (10,734), testifying to the escalation of violence, foreshadowing the speed with which the Taliban reclaimed territory until reaching the capital on August 15, 2021. Attacks on civilian and military targets have multiplied. Between 2017 and April 2024, we counted 5,134 attacks against military targets, 2,551 against police targets, 1,440 against civilians and 536 against government targets. In the first edition of this study, in October 2019, it emerged from our work that the Islamic State was, the deadliest group (52,619 deaths) worldwide, between 1979 and 2019, ahead of the Taliban (39,733) and Boko Haram (22,287). After consolidating the 2018-2019 data and integrating the years 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 as well as the first four months of 2024, it appears that the Taliban is the deadliest group with 71,965 deaths worldwide, followed by the Islamic State (69,641) and Boko Haram (26,081).

The Taliban is a fundamentalist Islamist group of Sunni origin. It opposes the coalition government, which includes resistance factions. Mostly involving young Afghans from the poorest areas of the Pashtun peasantry, the Taliban emerged following the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, but also in reaction to a chaotic internal political situation caused by pro-Soviet governments. They developed a fundamentalism that rejected all Western and Communist influence. In both cases, the Taliban took Kabul in 1996 and 2021, to the detriment of a government that had been disowned by the population. The institutional and political vacuum in Afghanistan was filled by the Taliban through the re-establishment of shari’a law, which won approval from a population desperate for political stability after decades of conflict. The Taliban capitalized on the situation and increased their chances of success by leveraging their strong presence in rural areas to develop poppy cultivation, generating significant income for the country’s depleted economy (though this crop has been banned by the Taliban since their return in 2021). Additionally, they received support from various regional state allies, such as Pakistan, which provided arms and logistical assistance, as well as non-state allies like al-Qaeda. The religious indoctrination of Taliban fighters, combined with the presence of limited and demotivated opposition factions, enabled them to control 90% of the territory by 1998 and to regain power in 2021 following the departure of American troops.

However, the Taliban’s return to power hasn’t eased the insecurity—quite the opposite. Armed groups still commit atrocities across Afghanistan, including the Islamic State in Khorasan, which remains a threat to the Taliban³² , despite the fact its offensive capabilities are currently limited (1,000 to 1,300 men). The Taliban are also facing accusations of human rights violations from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). More than two hundred former civil servants have been killed since August 2021, and human rights violations have been documented throughout the country (Kabul, Kandahar and Balkh provinces)³³. Women’s rights are non-existent.
For the purposes of our study, we made the methodological choice not to classify as terrorist the violent actions carried out by the Taliban since their return to power in August 2021. Their exactions have therefore not been taken into account as attacks in our study. This methodological choice explains the decrease in the number of terrorist acts and victims in Afghanistan over the period August 2021-April 2024 (352 attacks recorded, with 1,157 victims). We know that the Taliban’s actions are still characterized by violence; they continue to terrorize civilian populations.

Since 2021, West Africa has been the scene of several coups d’état. Mali has seen two military coups in the space of nine months: the first, in August 2020, overthrew President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, while the second, in May 2021, ousted the transitional president Bah N’Daw. Similarly, in Guinea, a military coup in September 2021 ousted President Alpha Condé, who had been in power since 2010. In January 2022, Burkina Faso was also hit by a military coup against President Roch Kaboré.

This context of political instability in West Africa has led to a resurgence of Islamist terrorism, particularly in the Sahel region (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Northern Nigeria). Jihadist groups affiliated to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have emerged, multiplying terrorist attacks, particularly against civilians. In Nigeria, Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West Africa (ISWAP) pose major security problems, particularly in north-east Nigeria. Mass kidnappings and attacks on civilians and security forces are frequent. Similarly in Mali, the army has suffered numerous setbacks in the Azawad region in the face of Tuareg independence groups and Islamist groups. Finally, the humanitarian crises caused by insecurity in several countries in the region are multiplying. It is estimated that millions of people have been displaced and are living in disastrous conditions. Armed conflict and instability have exacerbated poverty and famine in certain regions, notably in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

In this region, the sharp rise in the number of Islamist attacks is linked to the end of foreign military interventions, particularly those led by France through Operation Serval (2013-2014) and then Barkhane (2014-2022), designed to combat jihadist groups in the Sahel region. In Mali, the end of the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission (MINUSMA) in 2023 also explains the upsurge in terrorism in the country.

Our data shows that between 2019 and April 2024, sub-Saharan Africa remained a major hotbed of Islamist terrorism: 862 attacks and 3,893 deaths in 2019, 2,005 attacks and 5,099 deaths in 2020, 3,675 attacks and 8,750 deaths in 2021, 4,332 attacks and 10,045 deaths in 2022, 4,159 attacks and 9,815 deaths in 2023, and 1,466 attacks and 3,088 deaths between January 1 and April 12, 2024. Between 2021 and April 2024, Boko Haram remained an active and deadly Islamist group in the region, with 342 attacks carried out (4.9% of all Islamist attacks in sub-Saharan Africa), resulting in 1,079 deaths (3.4% of all Islamist terrorism deaths in sub-Saharan Africa). However, it is the Al-Shabaab terrorist group, with 6,294 attacks and 9,327 deaths over the period, that has been the region’s deadliest group since 2021. The countries most affected by Islamist terrorism between 2021 and April 2024 are mainly located around the Lake Chad region: Mali (4,983 deaths), Nigeria (4,324 deaths), Democratic Republic of Congo (3,926 deaths), Mozambique (3,782 deaths), Burkina Faso (2,782 deaths), Niger (1,306 deaths), Cameroon (835 deaths) and Chad (212 deaths). To the east, Somalia has suffered a large number of victims of Islamist terrorism (9,152 dead).

Al Shabaab in Somalia

The Al-Shabaab group, meaning “youth movement,” is a Sunni military and political organization based in Somalia since the 2000s, also active in Kenya and Ethiopia to a lesser extent. It should not be confused with the group of the same name active in Mozambique since 2017.

Identified as a terrorist organization by the United States in 2008, Al-Shabaab took advantage of the war against Ethiopia and the Somali civil war, which led to the dissolution of state institutions. This enabled it to establish a “proto-state” authority over the southern and central areas of the country, with administrative structures in place since 2010³⁴. The group’s actions in the region have been compared to those of the Taliban before they came to power, or to those of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Al-Shabaab has gradually gained the support of the population by integrating itself into police and judicial institutions³⁵, or by taking over traditional authority structures and clans, establishing a form of “rebellocracy”, with the primary aim of opposing the Somali government³⁶.

Between 2018 and 2020, Al-Shabaab was responsible for 1,574 attacks. This number increased to 6,164 attacks between 2021 and 2024. The intensification of terrorist violence is due, in part, to the rise in the number of Al-Shabaab fighters, who now exceed twelve thousand.³⁷ Many of these fighters are civilians, particularly children, who are often forcibly recruited. Additionally, the Somali federal government’s offensive launched in 2022³⁸, following an attack on a Mogadishu hotel in August of the same year, has provoked aftershocks and led the terrorist group to multiply its actions against official structures and the military. Despite support from the African Union and Western partners, the government has so far failed to restore its authority.

Al-Shabaab, backed by Al-Qaeda, is committed to a transnational form of Salafist jihadism, but some of its affiliates are above all driven by nationalist dynamics. A violent opposition has gradually crystallized between the Somali group and the Islamic State, with the former refusing to pledge allegiance to the latter, maintaining its independence and its own interpretation of shari’a law.

Al-Shabaab stands out for its extensive use of social networks, first via discussion forums, then through Facebook and X, which enable them to relay their attacks and messages. The group has recruited a large number of fighters from the Somali diaspora, as well as foreigners specialized in the production of explosives and from groups carrying out suicide attacks: this strong external base reinforces the transnational dimension of Al-Shabaab, which is no longer content with clan and nationalist claims.

The attack, named “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” after the mosque of the same name in Jerusalem, was carried out by the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, with support from groups affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. The assault on Israel was launched by land, air, and sea, using modern technological means.

On the morning of October 7, 2023, coinciding with the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, thousands of rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip. Initial Israeli army reports indicated that Tel Aviv and the farming community of Lakish were targeted, with later rocket attacks reaching Jerusalem. Al-Qassam Brigades Chief of Staff Mohammed Deif claimed that 5,000 rockets were launched from Gaza that day, while the Israeli army estimated the number at 3,000.

At around 6:30 a.m., terrorists equipped with drones attacked six Israeli military bases and civilian areas, including one town, five kibbutzim, and the “Tribu de Nova” music festival in Ré’im, just a few kilometers from the Gaza Strip. The targets of the attacks were both military and civilian. In the Kibbutz villages of Be’eri and Nirim, civilians were massacred, some taken hostage. At dawn, at the Re’im music festival, the 3,500 festival-goers were targeted by rockets. Some were intercepted by the Israeli missile defense system, the Iron Dome. Later, in a ground assault, 364 festival-goers were killed.

The aim of Hamas, and its companion groups such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, is to kidnap as many people as possible, to kill and inflict as much suffering as possible in a short space of time. Some civilians were burned alive in their homes, as seen in the kibbutzim.

The October 7 attack was marked by extreme violence, including numerous murders, acts of torture, rapes, and kidnappings of elderly individuals and infants. The wide range of attacks on various locations and targets, combined with the diverse methods of violence chosen by Hamas, underscored their intent to instill terror within Israeli society and on the global stage.

Agence France Presse has cross-referenced data from the Israeli Social Security, the army, the police, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, as well as figures from Internal Security to establish the number of people murdered during and in the aftermath of October 7³⁹. According to this data, the October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, and 3,400 injured⁴⁰. Hamas terrorists also took 251 people hostage. Of these, 112 were released in November 2023, following an agreement to exchange hostages for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. On June 8, four hostages were freed as part of an IDF-led military operation. On 31 August 2024, there were still 98 people being held by Hamas.

Rape: a weapon of Islamic terrorism

In the aftermath of October 7, there were reports of sexual violence committed by Hamas, notably during the “Tribe of Nova” festival⁴¹. On March 4, 2024, the United Nations published a report on the use of sexual violence by Hamas fighters during this pogrom, and in the months that followed⁴². This report highlights the difficulties in gathering evidence of this violence, due to the limited number of forensic examinations carried out because of the exceptional circumstances of the attack (multiple actors, diversification of crime scenes, charred bodies, etc.). However, the UN considers that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that sexual violence was committed by Hamas fighters. In the chaos of the music festival massacre, eyewitnesses witnessed scenes of rare violence. Victims were raped, sometimes collectively, sometimes when they were already dead. Women’s bodies were found naked, with bullet wounds, some tied to trees. Along Route 232, in the Negev desert, two women were reportedly raped, but this could not be verified by the UN mission team. In the vicinity of this road, several naked bodies, some even bearing traces of genital wounds, were found. In the Re’im and Be’eri kibbutzes, several factors suggest that sexual violence has been committed, including the discovery of naked female bodies. In the Gaza tunnels, according to the testimonies of freed hostages, sexual violence was inflicted on women and children by Hamas fighters.

Sexual violence is used to terrorize populations. Rape, a weapon of war and a war crime, is now used in acts of terrorism⁴³. Through sexual violence, rape, forced pregnancy and prostitution, terrorists subjugate, humiliate and destroy their victims⁴⁴. Inseminating rapes are also a way of colonizing a population’s genetics, and were often used as genocidal weapons in the 20th century⁴⁵. These forms of violence are increasingly used by Islamist groups.

Hamas

Hamas, short for “Islamic Resistance Movement,” is a Palestinian Islamist movement founded in 1987 during the first intifada. The group was established by members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, where its activities are primarily centered. The movement emerged in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Lebanese civil war. Classified as a “terrorist organization” by a majority of Western states, including the United States, Canada, Argentina, the United Kingdom, the countries of the European Union and Australia⁴⁶, Hamas enjoys the support of Syria, Algeria, Yemen, Malaysia and Afghanistan⁴⁷. China, Russia and Brazil do not consider it a terrorist organization⁴⁸.

Published in 1988, the Hamas Charter calls for Jihad against the Jews and the creation of an “Islamic state in Palestine”, as well as the total annihilation of the state of Israel⁴⁹. In 2017, the charter was amended, dropping all references to the Muslim Brotherhood and rejecting the Oslo Accords, the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1947 Palestine Partition Plan. While the 1988 version was openly anti-Semitic⁵⁰, the 2017 charter refuses to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, as article 16 indicates. The new charter does, however, retain the justification of “armed resistance, which is considered the strategic choice for the protection of the principles and rights of the Palestinian people” (article 25).

Hamas has two branches: the political branch is made up of two bodies, the Shura Council and the Political Bureau⁵¹. The military branch is made up of the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades. Since 1994, these brigades have carried out an increasing number of attacks in Israel, in particular to sabotage the 1993 Oslo Accords, part of a peace process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict⁵². In 2006, Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections for the first time, to the detriment of Fatah. Since then, it has administered the territory of Gaza⁵³.

Impact on the region

The attacks of October 7, 2023, prompted the Israeli government to launch a military campaign in the Gaza Strip, primarily aimed at recovering the hostages. In response, Hamas’s supporters quickly mobilized to attack Israel and its interests. First, rockets were launched daily by Hezbollah from the northern border between Lebanon and Israel, then, attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea by the Houthis, which disrupted international trade. In response, the European Union and the United States initiated operations to secure the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz⁵⁴.

The Houthis, or Ansarrullah movement, were founded on ideological pillars such as the fight against Israel and American imperialism. Financed by Iran, which includes them in its “Axis of Resistance”⁵⁵, the Houthis took part in the war in Gaza, considerably affecting maritime traffic in the Red Sea, through which over 12% of world trade passes.

The globalisation of Islamist terrorism can refer to the global visibility that digital technology provides to their attacks, but it can also designate a geographical reality: more or less, all the regions of the world have been hit. Of course, the damage caused vary considerably depending on the parts of the world. On the number of attacks since 1979, almost all of them (96.7%, or 64,691 attacks) took place in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

With regard to the 249,941 deaths, a considerable proportion (96.8% or 242,035 deaths) was also recorded in these three regions. Undeniably, the Western world is less affected. However, Europe and the United States have faced an increasing and changing threat, with particulary murderous attacks, such as in the United States in 2001, in Spain in 2004, in the United Kingdom in 2005, in France in 2015 and 2016. A multifold of tragedies that remain present in our collective memories.

Over the period studied, 85 countries were affected by at least one Islamist terrorist attack. Among these countries, 18 are European countries (19 including Russia), 14 of which are members of the European Union. Of the 85 countries, 33 are democracies¹. It is also observed that countries most affected by Islamist terrorist attacks in the last forty years are those who have experienced periods of war: Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq… Most of the 85 countries affected by Islamist violence are developing countries.

Finally, it should be noted that the vast majority (86.3%) of Islamist terrorist attacks have been committed in Muslim countries. As a result, most of the deaths caused by Islamist terrorist attacks (88.9%) are also recorded in Muslim countries. These figures underestimate the reality since they do not take into account the attacks Islamists perpetrated in countries with a majority of non-Muslim where Muslim populations are concentrated in certain provinces. Most of the lives lost are therefore Muslim lives².