Bangladesh less prone to terrorism threats than USA, UK
Slowly but steadily, Bangladesh has been making improvement in tackling terrorism since 2017
The impact of terrorism was lower on Bangladesh than that was on the United States of America and the United Kingdom, according to the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) 2022.
Besides, the country tackles terrorism best in South Asia after Bhutan, said the ninth edition of the index published by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) – a think-tank based in Sydney, Australia – on Wednesday.
Bangladesh stands at the 40th position among 163 countries on the index and scored 4.411 out of 10, while the USA and the UK held the 28th and the 31st positions scoring 4.961 and 4.770 respectively.
Each country in the GTI is scored on a scale from zero to 10, where zero represents no impact of terrorism and 10 represents the highest measurable impact of it. The calculation of score takes into account the deaths, incidents, hostages, and injuries caused by terrorism, weighted over a five-year period.
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A higher rank with a lower score indicates lower impact of terrorism.
Slowly but steadily, Bangladesh has been making improvement in tackling terrorism since 2017, according to the index based on data from TerrorismTracker, which monitors daily terrorist activities and assesses terrorism threats and risks across the globe.
Bangladesh's GTI score has fallen to 4.411 in 2021, from 4.421 in 2020, 4.752 in 2019, 5.032 in 2018 and 5.593 in 2017. The country reached its peak of terrorism impact in 2016 with a score of 5.752.
Terrorism in South Asia
The index reviewed seven countries from South Asia. Bangladesh fell behind Bhutan (93rd) but managed to stay ahead of all the other South Asian neighbours.
Bhutan has been scoring zero on the index since 2014, and showed no record of terrorist attacks in the past five years.
The report stated that the region had the worst average GTI score in 2021, recording 1,829 deaths from terrorism that year, an increase of 8% or 137 deaths from 2020.
This happened mainly because the region is home to two of the ten countries with the highest impact of terrorism – Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Afghanistan, the only country in South Asia to deteriorate in score, has been holding the first position globally on the index since 2019 with the highest impact of terrorism. The country scored 9.109 out of 10 after recording 1,426 terror-related deaths, the highest in the world, 2,199 injuries, and 837 incidents of terrorism in 2021.
Pakistan, the second most impacted country in the region, scored 7.825 and held the tenth position globally on the 2022 index, followed by India (12th), Sri Lanka (25th), and Nepal (34th) in South Asia.
The report mentioned that the biggest improvement in the impact of terrorism in South Asia occurred in Sri Lanka, as the country recorded no attacks or deaths for two consecutive years – 2020 and 2021.
Meanwhile, globally, the total number of deaths from terrorism declined in 2021, falling by 1.2% to 7,142. This is the fourth consecutive year where deaths from terrorism remained fairly constant, the report said.
Of the 163 countries included in the analysis, nearly two thirds or 105 – the highest since 2007 – recorded no attacks or deaths from terrorism in 2020 and 2021.
