Report: Terrorism stats are skewed by Iraq attacks

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 U.S. government-funded terrorism research institutions.

It carried data showing that global terrorism fatalities between 1998 and 2006 peaked in 2001 with the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, declined until the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq, and then rose steadily over the next three years.

Using the same data to chart casualties while omitting Iraq, the study shows a sharp decline after the peak in 2001 and then holding relatively steady.

"Absent Iraq, there has been no major increase in fatalities from terrorism since 2001," the study says.

Mack argued that the Iraq fatalities should fall into the category of "war crimes" or "crimes against humanity," because they have occurred during wartime.

The U.S. institutions included in the study are all government-funded: the National Counterterrorism Center, the Oklahoma City-based Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, and the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

Mack, who served as director of strategic planning under former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, argued that the institutions are inconsistent in their definition of terrorism. According to the study, more deaths are counted in Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia, where U.S. interests are at risk, than in sub-Saharan Africa.

James Ellis III, research and program director of MIPT, said his organization uses a definition of terrorism that existed long before the U.S. drew up a list of terrorist organizations. Ellis acknowledged, however, that there may be some influence from U.S. experts and media reports that label certain acts or organizations as terrorism-related.

Ellis said each group, including Mack's researchers, uses different methodologies and definitions that are highly nuanced. MIPT includes incidents in Israel and the Palestinian territories, but did not include the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006, he said. It counts the violence in Darfur under the category of genocide, where events of the Holocaust would fall as well if they were included in the database, he said.

"We all use different methodologies," said Ellis. "We try to screen out general acts of violence, but it's not always clear ... and there's no question that the conflict in Iraq has evolved in some ways to a maybe unprecedented use of terrorism."

Gary LaFree, director of START, agreed that taking Iraq figures out of the data paints a different picture of global terrorism as a whole. But he maintained that the figures are relevant to the database and should not be omitted.

"I don't think anyone would dispute that there are important terrorist groups operating in Iraq," said LaFree.

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Associated Press Writer Carley Petesch contributed to this report.

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On the Net:

Human Security Brief 2007: http://www.humansecuritybrief.org/access.html

MIPT: http://www.mipt.org/

START: http://www.start.umd.edu/

NCTC: http://www.nctc.gov/