[SPUTNIKNEWS] Deaths caused by terrorist attacks around the world fell dramatically in the last few years, but with the world’s largest terrorist group, ISIS, removed from the equation, Afghanistan’s Taliban
...mindless ferocity in a turban...
once again tops the list as the world’s deadliest non-state organization.
For four years, ISIS topped the Global Terrorism Index, compiled annually by the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP). However,
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some men learn by reading. A few learn by observation. The rest have to pee on the electric fence for themselves...
when the 2019 report was released on Wednesday, the Taliban once again topped the list. While the report analyzes attacks and deaths in 2018 and ISIS wasn’t destroyed totally until early 2019, the group was so far in the decline that it fell from the top spot.
The report analyzed 163 countries, finding that Afghanistan was the country most impacted by terrorism last year. It supplanted Iraq, which had held that position since 2004. ISIS was declared totally defeated in the Mesopotamian country in late 2017, pushed out by an unlikely alliance of Iraqi militias, elite Iranian troops and US Arclight airstrike
 ...KABOOM! ...
s.
Worldwide, 15,952 people died from terrorist attacks in 2018; that’s half what the total was four years ago, but the scope was wider than ever before as well, with at least one terrorism-related death occurring in 71 countries.
However,
some men learn by reading. A few learn by observation. The rest have to pee on the electric fence for themselves...
46% of those deaths happened in Afghanistan alone, which saw 7,379 fatalities from 1,443 attacks, according to the report. The Taliban was judged responsible for 83% of those attacks, including nine of the 10 deadliest attacks around the world that year.
Deaths from ISIS attacks, by comparison, were 85% lower than their height in 2016. Last year, they killed 1,328 people, although the IEP did not record their Afghanistan franchise, Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
Khorasan (IS-K), as the same organization. IS-K killed 1,060 people last year, nearly all of them in Afghanistan.
"The intensity of terrorism dropped markedly," Stephen Killelea, the founder of the IEP, told Business Insider, cautioning that now "we have an increase in the breadth of terrorism ... it's still very real, still a major issue globally."
The Taliban was catapulted to political prominence by the collapse of central authority in the final years of the People’s Republic of Afghanistan, which it helped to destroy following the Soviet Red Army’s withdrawal in 1988-9. The Taliban and other Mujaheddin bad boy groups fighting communist forces received wide support from the United States and Pakistain, accumulating power until the Taliban overthrew the Afghan government in Kabul and established the Islamic Emirate in 1996.
Taliban support for al-Qaeda, a terrorist organization staffed with former Mujaheddin fighters who plotted attacks against Western states and was allowed to operate training camps in Afghanistan, drew the ire of Washington following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, quickly overthrowing the Taliban government and beginning an bad boy war against the US-supported authorities that has raged until the present day.
A ceasefire seemed all but certain earlier this year, but US President Donald Trump
...dictatorial for repealing some (but not all) of the diktats of his predecessor, misogynistic because he likes pretty girls, homophobic because he doesn't think gender bending should be mandatory, truly a man for all seasons......
pulled out amid Taliban terrorist attacks that killed a US soldier just prior to the summit. Trump said earlier this week that the recent prisoner exchange between US and Taliban forces could lead to "more good things on the peace front, like a ceasefire."
A September report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction warned that if efforts aren’t made to reintegrate former Taliban fighters into Afghan society, they are at serious risk of joining IS-K.
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