Thursday 11 December 2014

Jihadism: Tracking a month of deadly attacks

Goodness me, this is surprising:
The BBC co-sponsoring a study, with King's College London, into the number of murderous Jihad attacks in the month of November.  My, soon they'll be promoting JihadWatch, which has been doing this for years, and usually excoriated and demonised for its troubles....
Jihadist attacks killed more than 5,000 people in just one month, an investigation by the BBC and King's College London has found. 
Civilians bore the brunt of the violence, with more than 2,000 killed in reported jihadist incidents during November. Islamic State carried out the most attacks, adding to the spiralling death toll in Iraq and Syria....
The data gathered by the BBC found that 5,042 people were killed in 664 jihadist attacks across 14 countries - a daily average of 168 deaths, or seven every hour.
About 80% of the deaths came in just four countries - Iraq, Nigeria, Syria and Afghanistan, according to the study of media and civil society reports.
Iraq was the most dangerous place to be, with 1,770 deaths in 233 attacks, ranging from shootings to suicide bombings.
In Nigeria, 786 people, almost all of them civilians, were killed in 27 Boko Haram incidents. These tended to be large and indiscriminate bombings and shootings such as the attack on the central mosque in the northern city of Kano, which left 120 dead.
Leader of the study, Prof Peter Neumann, was just on BBC World Service Radio.  He said something along the lines that "we were all naive to believe that after the death of Osama bin Laden, and the Arab Spring that these problems would go away".
But "we" weren't all naive about that.  We didn't all believe that the "Arab Spring" would bring the blush of democracy. There were plenty sceptical at the outset, including the aforementioned JihadWatch, but all they got for their far more insightful analysis was labelling as hateful "Islamophobes".  Of course JihadWatch and others were right.  
So, if you want to know more about what's happening in the Islamic world, specifically from the jihadist angle, you should be reading Robert Spencer's JihadWatch. (with links to other sites rather more insightful than the good Prof Neumann has shown himself to be).
Interestingly the BBC/King's College study has even more people killed in November than recorded in The Religion of Peace which recorded "only" 2,515 people killed in that month (screenshot left). Like JihadWatch, the TROP blog has been following Jihadi attacks since 2004.  For its efforts, it's been routinely labelled "far-right", and "Islamophobic".  Now that the BBC and King's College have noticed, perhaps there will be a bit more common sense on the issue: the connection of Jihad, Jihad murders, and Islam. (Though don't hold your breath...).