• published: 04 Nov 2013
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Washington (CNN) -- As terrorism increasingly becomes a tactic of warfare, the number of attacks and fatalities soared to a record high in 2012, according to a new report obtained exclusively by CNN. More than 8,500 terrorist attacks killed nearly 15,500 people last year as violence tore through Africa, Asia and the Middle East, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. That's a 69% rise in attacks and an 89% jump in fatalities from 2011, said START, one of the world's leading terrorism-trackers. Six of the seven most deadly groups are affiliated with al Qaeda, according to START, and most of the violence was committed in Muslim-majority countries. The previous record for attacks was set in 2011 with more than 5,000 incidents; for fatalities the previous high was 2007 with more than 12,800 deaths. This year is expected to outpace even 2012's record high. There were 5,100 attacks in the first six months of 2013, said Gary LaFree, START's director, and the wave of violence shows few signs of ebbing. In recent weeks, Al-Shabaab, a militant group based in Somalia, attacked a mall in Nairobi, Kenya, leaving 67 dead; suicide bombers killed 81 at a church in Pakistan; and the Taliban took credit for killing two police officers with a car bomb in Afghanistan. To find and tally attacks like those, START's computers comb through 1.2 million articles from 50,000 media outlets each month with an algorithm to help identify and eliminate redundancies. Its 25-member staff then studies, categorizes and counts each attack. Gone are the days when terrorist groups like the Irish Republican Army or Italy's Red Brigade would try to keep casualties low by issuing warnings, LaFree said. "If you're a terrorist group now and you want to get your message out," he said, "the more people you kill, the more 'successful' you'll be." Sectarian attacks - such as the pitched battles between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq, Syria and Pakistan - tend to be disproportionately deadly, said Martha Crenshaw, an expert at Stanford University and a START board member. "Sadly, it seems to be increasingly acceptable in certain belief systems to kill as many members of the other religious community as possible," she said. "Moral restraints seem to be eroding." Bombings and explosions were used in 58% of terrorist attacks in 2012, but it wasn't always this way. In fact, START's data also show a dramatic global shift in terrorist tactics and hot spots. In the 1970s, most attacks were committed with guns and occurred in Western Europe. In the 1980s, Latin America saw the most terrorist acts. Beginning with the 1990s, South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East has seen steadily rising number of attacks, a trend that has accelerated in recent years. Although terrorism touched 85 countries last year, just three - Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan - suffered more than half of 2012's attacks (55%) and fatalities (62%). In January, Sunni suicide bombers attacked scores of Shiite pilgrims in Iraq, killing at least 73. In February, a car bomb outside a café in Mogadishu, Somalia, left 15 dead. In March, a bombing in Thailand killed 14 and injured 340 in a commercial district. Just eight private U.S. citizens died in attacks outside the United States in 2012, all in Afghanistan, according to the State Department. In the United States, seven people died in 11 terrorist attacks last year, six of them in a shooting at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Despite the death of Osama bin Laden and capture of other key al Qaeda leaders, the group has exported its brand of terrorism to other militant Muslims, according to START and other counterterrorism experts. "We've had success in stopping al Qaeda central," LaFree said. "But we have been unsuccessful in stopping the message." Afghanistan's Taliban was by far the deadliest group in 2012, when it launched 525 attacks that killed 1,842 people. The second deadliest group was Nigeria's Boko Haram, a jihadist group that orchestrated 364 attacks last year that killed 1,132 people. The next most deadly were al Qaeda in Iraq, the Communist Party of India-Maoist, Somalia's Al-Shabaab, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Pakistan's branch of the Taliban. Rhonda Shore, a spokesperson for the State Department's Bureau of Counterterrorism, said she hadn't seen START's latest numbers and couldn't comment on the report. But she offered a staunch defense of the Obama administration's approach to al Qaeda. "We have made great progress in our efforts to disrupt, dismantle and defeat the larger al Qaeda organization in recent years," she said. "However," she said, al Qaeda and its affiliates "continue to present a serious threat to the United States and its interests, and we must remain vigilant as we consider the range of tools and actions available to disrupt this threat." Jewish, jew, israeli, israel, christian, christianity, hindu, india, china, russia.