According to the 2014 Global Terrorism Index, Boko Haram is the most deadly terrorist organization in the world killing 6,644 people comparison to ISIS’s 6,073, just as the cost of terror to the world peaked at of $52.9 billion surpassing $51.5 billion reached in the aftermath of 9/11.
Over the years, the report said, Nigeria witnessed a 300 per cent rise in fatalities from terror acts to 7,512 – which was described as the largest increase in terrorist-caused deaths ever recorded by any country.
Nigeria ranked fifth in the highest levels of deaths in 2013, but moved to second in 2014. This is largely believed to have been possible by Boko Haram’s expansion.
The group, which is also known as Islamic State’s West’s Africa province (ISWAP), was initially domiciled in Nigeria but branched out to neighboring countries like Chad and Cameroon overtime. It has so far, according to the report, launched about 46 attacks in Chad and Cameroon, resulting to 520 deaths.
The annual Global Terrorism Index is a product of the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), which has been collecting such data since 1997. To put a price on terrorism, IEP calculates the value of property damage, say from a suicide bombing in a building, and the cost of death and injury, including medical care costs and lost earnings.
It does not take into account the increased number of security guards, higher insurance premiums or city gridlock in the aftermath of an assault. While the findings do not include the impact of Friday’s carnage in the French capital — those will be quantified in next year’s study — the economic consequences of Europe’s worst terror attack in a decade so soon after January’s Charlie Hebdo shootings will reverberate across the European Union almost immediately.
“There will be impact from this quarter on gross domestic product in France as a result of this, because if you can just look at the shutdown of the city for, let’s say, 48 hours and then there are the ongoing flow-on effects from this as well,” said IEP’s executive chairman Steve Killelea. “If you beef up the security apparatus, particularly in Europe, as it affects the free flow of people, that will have an impact on the ongoing productivity,” he added.
Islamic State (IS), which this year has claimed responsibility for attacks on Paris and Beirut as well as the downing of the Russian plane in Egypt, has now overtaken the Taliban in Afghanistan as the deadliest terrorist group in the world, killing more than 20,000 people last year, the IEP study showed.
The self-proclaimed caliphate, which spun out of Al Qaeda in Iraq, relies on an increasing number of foreign fighters coming from the developed world. Among non-majority Muslim countries, Russia has the highest number of nationals who have travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight, followed by France.
Terrorism carries the biggest human and economic toll in emerging markets, where groups can exploit lawless spaces neglected by failing or weak governments. By region, the Middle East and North Africa were the most affected, accounting for 13,426 of total lives lost to terrorism in 2014, the IEP report showed
