Are Muslims the majority of terrorist victims? The titan launcher By Ruth Alexander and Hannah Moore BBC News
20 January 2015
A Paris imam visited the scene of the Charlie Hebdo attack and condemned the murders. "These victims are martyrs and I will pray for them with all my heart," said Hassen Chalghoumi (above). He also said that 95% of terrorist victims are Muslims. Does this really hold?
The assertion is similar to one made in an article from 2011 by the US government's National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) in which it was stated that: "In cases where the religious affiliation of terrorists killed could be determined, Muslims suffered between 82 and 97% of terrorism-related deaths over the past five years."
The report did not specify the percentage of cases in which it was possible to determine victims religion or if the cases were representative of all instances. Since the report was withdrawn, it is difficult to get the answers.
The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is a US-based group that still compiles terrorism statistics. However it doesn't make any attempt to determine the religion of the victims or injured. To do so would be "very difficult" says the GTD's Erin Miller.
This is because most of the raw data is taken from news reports and do not often include the religion of victims. The GTD isn't able determine the perpetrators in half of the cases.
Miller states, however, that between 2004 and 2013, roughly half of all terrorist incidents and 60% of deaths were committed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq three countries with a majority Muslim population.
She believes that 95 percent of terrorists are Muslim.
"It's not out of the realm of possibility considering the high concentration of attacks in Muslim majority countries," Miller says.
The definition of terrorism
The GTD defines a terrorist attack as the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by an actor that is not a state to achieve a political, economic, religious, or social goal through intimidation, fear or intimidation.
Global Terrorism Database 2014 Codebook (p8)
People in the West might think of terrorist attacks in Charlie Hebdo or the 7/7 London Tube and Bus Bombs, or the Madrid Train Bombs. While some Muslims were killed in these attacks however, the majority of victims would not have been Muslim.
International standards show that there are a few terrorist attacks against France, Spain, and the US.
Between 2004 between 2004 and 2013 the UK was subject to 400 terrorist attacks. The majority of them were in Northern Ireland. The United States was hit by 131 terrorist attacks, less than 20 of which were fatal. France was the victim of 47 attacks. However, in Iraq, there were 12,000 attacks and 8000 of them were lethal.
Erin Miller says there is another reason she would not advise on the religion of victims, apart from the fact that reliable data is hard to find.
"It's tempting for many people to turn it into a scorecard, trying to figure out which religious groups are more violent than others, and then boil it down to this grossly simplified way of keeping score, like it's a football game," she says.
This is a mistake, she argues. Most terrorist attacks are rooted in geopolitics, she says. "Religion is certainly a component of them, but it is not the only factor."
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