Report: Incidence of terrorist violence around the world in decline

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Reports of an increase in terrorist violence around the world have been distorted by the high number of civilian casualties in Iraq, and omitting those deaths reveals a decline in terrorism, a research group argued in a new report Wednesday. The Human Security Brief 2007 said that without the figures from Iraq, fatalities from terrorism have declined by some 40 percent since 2001. Disputing claims that terrorist activity is on the rise, project director Andrew Mack said that "when we look a little bit more closely at this data, the incidence of terrorism is declining." The study by the Human Security Report Project, a Canada-based research group, analyzed and compared data from three major US government-funded terrorism research institutions.