With 350 Indians killed and 540 injured in 748 terrorist incidents in 2018, India is at seventh place in a global think tank’s list of countries most affected by terrorism, according to the annual report by the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace, Business Standard reports on November 20. States that the country most affected by terrorism in 2018 was Afghanistan (7,379 killed), displacing Iraq (1,054 killed) as the deadliest country. Iraq, now at second place, is followed by Nigeria, Syria, Pakistan and Somalia, in that order.
The report states that 8,473 Indians have died since 2001 at the hands of terrorists. However, the 2018 death count was 10 per cent lower than in 2017, and 53 per cent lower than its peak in 2009. The number of terrorist attacks has increased by 14 per cent over the same period, peaking in 2016 at over 900", states the report. This trend indicates that terror attacks in India are becoming steadily less bloody. In 1998, about 4.3 people were killed in each attack. That dropped to 1.6 deaths per attack in 2008, and 0.5 in 2018. "In 2018 alone, 69 per cent of attacks had zero fatalities and 22 per cent had one fatality", says the report.