GLOBAL TERRORISM ANALYSIS
Analysed by SAMARPAN DAS
Introduction
1. The Global Terrorism Database
The Global Terrorism Database GTD is an open-source database including information on terrorist attacks around the world from 1970 through 2019. The GTD includes systematic data on domestic as well as international terrorist incidents that have occurred during this time period and now includes more than 200,000 attacks. The database is maintained by researchers at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism START, headquartered at the University of Maryland.
The GTD defines terrorist attacks as
The threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation
The dataset can be downloaded from here
Note : You need to login to get access to the database
2. Characteristics of the Database
- Contains information on over 200,000 terrorist attacks
- Currently the most comprehensive unclassified database on terrorist attacks in the world
- Efficiently covers attacks between 1970 to 17 September, 2019
- More than 4,000,000 news articles and 25,000 news sources were reviewed to collect incident data from 1998 to 2019 alone
- The attacks in the GTD are attributed to more than 2,000 named perpetrator organizations
3. Project Goals
- Study the source and do some quick research to understand more about the dataset and its topic
- Clean the data
- Prepare the data for processing and analysis
- Perform data pre-processing to manipulate the data for analysis and draft out targetted tabels for analysis
- Analyze the data more deeply and extract insights
- Visualize the data using Python and Tableau. Check out the Tableau Workbook on Global Terrorism Analysis By Samarpan Das
Glimpses of the Prime Findings
- 28.04 % of all events and a staggering 36.47 % of total casualties have been exclusive from the Middle East and North African region.
- Iraq has been the county with highest number of attacks and 21.87% of all casualties have been from Iraq.
- The huge rise in terror attacks in Iraq begun during 2004-2005.
- The analysis supports the result that count of attacks and count of casualties are directly proportional.
- It has been seen that explosives have always been the weapon of choice for terror organisations for 47.7 % of all attacks.
- Private Citizens and military have always been the biggest targets for terror organisations.
- It can be concluded that attacks by Taliban and Houthi Extremists(Ansar Allah) are on a arise and organisations like Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) are dying down
- Among Attack types, hijacking and hostage takings have caused the highest average of casualties per attacks.
- Al-Qaida has been the most lethal terror organisation, they have ended up causing 468.3 casualties per attacks.
- Baghdad has been the most attacked city in the world, 7 of the 26 cities are in Iraq and 4 of the 26 cities are from Pakistan.
- India is the country which have faced attacks from the highest number of terror organisations, followed by the US and Italy.