Brian Nussbaum
CCHS Senior Fellow; Assistant Professor of Public Administration, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs, SUNY at Albany
ISIS has been engaged in appalling violence in Syria and Iraq. From beheadings, to crucifixions, to the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot – all captured on film and posted to the internet for a global audience. This merciless violence has been in addition to horrors that have been documented by journalists and human rights workers rather than by ISIS; from massacres to mass kidnapping to sex slavery. The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) at the University of Maryland lists more than ten individual ISIS attacks in Iraq and Syria that have killed more than 100 people; ten of the more than 1600 attacks GTD attributes to ISIS in the last several years.
This year, there have been three attacks by ISIS that have killed over 100 people outside Syria and Iraq. Attacks that kill more than 100 people are uncommon; the 7/7 attacks in London and the Westgate Mall attack in Kenya did not hit that level. According to the GTD, only about 150 incidents in their database of 140,000 attacks have resulted in more than 100 fatalities. ISIS is in rarefied and awful company.
The massacres in Paris, the March suicide bombings targeting mosques in Yemen, and the bombing of the Russian jetliner all killed more than 100; this in addition to a host of other major attacks that ISIS has committed outside its area of control. The New York Times reports ISIS attacks have occurred in France, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Turkey and Kuwait. Not only has ISIS begun a campaign of mass casualty attacks outside Iraq and Syria, they’ve begun to export their hyper-violence around the region and around the world. In fact, the Times estimates that ISIS has now likely killed over one thousand civilians outside Iraq and Syria.
ISIS has begun to metastasize from a regional threat to a global one. It is time for a global response.
The full publication is available here.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:11/01/2015