Terrorism Hotspot - South East Asia

Via The Times of India -

The US and UK may like to believe that they are leading the war on terror globally, but the country that has had to face the worst of terrorist attacks on its own soil, barring war-torn Iraq, is India.

In fact, India has since 2004 lost more lives to terrorist incidents than all of North America, South America, Central America, Europe and Eurasia put together. All of these vast swathes of the globe lost a total of 3,280 lives in terrorist incidents between January 2004 and March this year. India alone lost 3,674 lives over the same period of three years and three months.

In yesterday's edition of TOI, in our front page lead report on the Hyderabad blasts, we had said that terror groups have left India with perhaps the highest number of civilian victims of terror (apart from war-torn countries like Iraq).

Later, on Sunday, when we looked in detail at the worldwide numbers, we found India not only had the highest number of deaths after Iraq, but also the highest number of terror-related incidents and injured among all countries (again, barring Iraq) — more than all the war zones around the globe. India has been hit by terrorists at will and with chilling regularity — Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Malegaon, Varanasi, J&K — the list is endless. It's only on one count — hostages taken by terror groups — that India's at No 3, to Iraq's No 2. Guess which country was No 1? Nepal, that too by a huge margin, thanks to large-scale kidnappings by Maoists.

Indeed, if one had to pick a terrorist hotspot on the globe it would have to be South Asia. Outside of Iraq, 20,781 people were killed in terrorist violence between January 2004 and March 2007, according to data available from the Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS) of the US National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC). Almost half of them, 9,283 to be precise, were killed in South Asia.