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String Of Islamic Terror Attacks Punctuate Troubling Numbers Under Obama Admin

REUTERS/Carlos Barria.

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JP Carroll National Security & Foreign Affairs Reporter
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The spate of terrorist attacks over the last year or so — Charlie Hebdo, Paris, Brussels, Orlando, Nice — really send home an inconvenient truth for President Barack Obama: terror has skyrocketed since he took office.

It isn’t just anecdotal, the numbers add up. Since the Syrian civil war began in 2011, the global carnage as a result of terrorism during the Obama administration adds up to at least 131,081 casualties.

The damning figures are publicly available in the U.S. Department of State’s Country Reports on Terrorism, which annually summarize terrorist activities worldwide. Much of Obama’s woes come from ISIS redrawing the map of the Middle East as it takes on the governments of Syria, Iraq, and Jordan.

The Country Reports on Terrorism 2015 starts off by admitting, “The global terrorist threat continued to evolve rapidly in 2015, becoming increasingly decentralized and diffuse.” The report goes on to state that ISIS, “remained the greatest threat globally,” and that the organization has at its disposal, “a large number of foreign terrorist fighters.”

In the non-partisan Vision of Humanity’s 2015 Global Terrorism Index (GTI), it states, “the number of people who have died from terrorist activity has increased nine-fold since the year 2000.”

The GTI 2015 report goes on to conclude that lone wolf terrorist attacks account for 70 percent of terrorist-related deaths in the Western world since 2006. Dealing with terrorist threats cost the world $52.9 billion in 2014, which is ten times more than the cost in 2000.

Vision of Humanity also notes in its 2016 Global Peace Index (GPI), that, “the last decade has seen a historic decline in world peace. This interrupts the long term improvements in peace since World War II.” The 2016 GPI depressingly states that, “the number of yearly incidents has almost tripled since 2011 and the number of deaths has increased to over 30,000.”

Five countries are primarily responsible for heightened terrorist activities and casualties: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria, according to the 2016 GPI. So far, 2014 was Obama’s worst year on record in preventing terrorist fatalities, considering 32,727 people died that year. The following year was only slightly better for the president’s statistics, as 28,328 people lost their lives to terrorism.

Most of the deaths in the wake of 9/11 during the Bush presidency happened outside of the U.S., and the majority of the victims were not Americans. The same is true of Obama’s presidency. There were only two Islamist-terror linked attacks that hit the U.S. mainland under Bush after 9/11, while there have been eight under Obama.

In October 2002, 10 people lost their lives to the D.C.-area snipers, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, who had a fondness for jihadist thinking. The D.C. shootings were the only fatal jihad-inspired attacks in the continental-U.S. for the remainder of the Bush presidency. Muslim Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar used his SUV in 2006 as a battering ram, attempting to kill, but only injuring six people, ultimately failing his goal “to avenge the deaths or murders of Muslims around the world,” at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The eight terror attacks that hit the U.S. mainland during the Obama presidency caused 85 casualties. That number is only a fraction of the kind of terror that runs rampant across the world as ISIS continues to actively recruit fighters.

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