The annual Global Terrorism Index published by the Institute for Economics and Peace has reported that global terrorist attacks fell 22% last year, and deaths from said attacks fell 28%.
They both fall to numbers not seen since 2007.
2025 registered the single biggest annual reduction in attacks and incidents since 2020-2021. The trend reflects the stabilization of several key geographical areas, and reductions in attacks and deaths in 81 countries worldwide.
Terrorism, defined more narrowly as stateless, transnational perpetrators of violence for political or religious ends, is now concentrated in Africa’s Sahel, and Sub-Saharan region.
The report follows a year (2025) in which several areas that had previously been affected by terrorism saw significant strides towards peace and stability.
Turkey improved by 4 places, and many places in the last decade; a result of the end of a 40-year conflict between the government in Ankara and the Communist Kurdish guerilla movement, the PKK. The group’s founder and leader Abdullah Öcalan ordered the organization to dissolve, admitting it had come as far as possible by means of violence.
Afghanistan continues its improvement from last year’s report when it dropped out of the top 10 worst-affected countries for the first time since the American occupation began in 2002.
Iraq improved 3 positions, coinciding with an ongoing socio-economic improvement in the country after 4 decades of war which the UN’s chief coordinator in the country described as “unrecognizable and remarkable.”
Tunisia, which has suffered from an ongoing terrorist insurgency in the country’s southwestern mountains, majorly improved, with an incidence rating similar to the Netherlands, Austria, and Canada.
Libya, once a failed state, continues its efforts at stabilization, and improved another 4 positions, level with Italy—an outstanding achievement.
Algeria, Oman, Bangladesh, and Jordan all improved substantially. The Ivory Coast improved 11 positions, and is now safer from a terrorist point of view than almost any Western country.
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70% of all deaths resulting from terrorist attacks occurred in just 5 countries: Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger, DR Congo, and Pakistan. Even still, Burkina Faso and Niger experienced 900 fewer deaths from terrorism compared with last year.
Regarding Pakistan, terrorism there is half driven by conflict with the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), a militant group of ethnic Balochs in the country’s southwestern desert regions.
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The conflict is more reminiscent of the UK’s struggle against the Irish Republican Army than the US’s hunt for al-Qaeda. The BLA have a clear political objective of breaking their region away from Islamabad, and wage terrorist warfare in attempt to achieve it. The BLA have never attacked targets outside Pakistan.
2025 was also notable for only one attack that resulted in more than 100 deaths, a major reduction in what the report labeled “large-scale” terrorist attacks.
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