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Tayo Olanipekun
Statistics from the United States Country Reports on Terrorism has revealed that 70 per cent of deaths due to terrorism worldwide took place in Nigeria and four other countries in 2017.
The four other countries are Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Syria, even as the report notes that the total number of terrorist attacks worldwide in 2017 decreased by 23 percent.
The U.S. Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Nathan Sales, who made this known in a teleconference on Wednesday, also said deaths resulting from terrorist attacks decreased by 27 per cent when figures are compared to those of 2016.
He noted that Iran uses terrorism as part of its statecraft and fuels attacks in many countries including Nigeria through a number of proxies.
Other instruments such as Lebanese Hizbollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s Quds Force are also deployed by Iran, making threats posed by its support for terrorism being of global proportion.
Since 2012 alone, Hizballah, he said, has conducted a successful attack in Bulgaria, undertaken two separate plots in Cyprus, as well as developed large caches of military equipment and explosives in Kuwait, Nigeria and Bolivia.
It is noteworthy that Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA) have killed many Nigerians since they began a campaign of terror some years back.
Militants have also reportedly killed hundreds of soldiers in attacks in northeastern part of the country in recent weeks, according to security and military sources, forcing a turnaround in the course of an insurgency the country has announced it has crushed.
An aid worker held captive for months was also shot pointblank recently by the militant, with warning sent out to the authority asking for ransom to secure the release of an abducted school girl, Leah Sharibu.
Sales said Iran remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, responsible for “intensifying multiple conflicts and undermining U.S. interests in Syria, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Bahrain, in Afghanistan, and in Lebanon.”
The report includes a statistical annex prepared by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, University of Maryland, USA, according to Sales.
A total of 100 countries witnessed terrorist attacks in 2017 and they were concentrated geographically, 59 per cent of which took place in Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Pakistan and the Philippines.
