That may come as a surprise, at a time when mass terror attacks like the one on Tuesday at the airport in Istanbul, which killed 41 people, continue to dominate the news. The data, in fact, shows that the number of attacks and fatalities rose in Western Europe and North America. But the attacks declined in the Middle East and North Africa, where most terrorist activity takes place, bringing down the global number. (The Istanbul attack, which will be categorized with the Middle East and North Africa region, won’t be added to the database until June 2017, along with the ones in Orlando and elsewhere this year.)
In the United States, there were 38 attacks with 44 fatalities last year, up from 26 attacks and 19 fatalities in 2014. Worldwide there were almost 15,000 terrorism incidents in 2015, down from nearly 17,000 in 2014. Fatalities declined to around 38,000 from over 43,000.
Erin Miller, the program manager for the database, noted that the decline was notable given an uptick in recent years. “The fact that this year the numbers go down says something, because there’s been no decrease in our ability to collect the data,” she said. Explaining why global terrorism declined is complex, Miller said, and it’s possible that “2014 was just a really bad year and 2015 was still violent but somewhat less so by comparison.”
Perhaps 2014 was the peak of instability and violence. let's hope.
