Most lethal terrorist organizations worldwide

Most lethal terrorist organizations worldwide in 2020, by number of fatalities

Characteristic	Number of people killed
Taliban	8,987
Boko Haram	1,898
Al-Shabaab	882
Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF)	834
Houthi extremists (Ansar Allah)	820
Samri militia	766
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)	727
Allied Democratic Forces (ADF)	724
Central Africa Province of the Islamic State	572
Muslim extremists*	562
Fulani extremists*	425
Cooperative for the Development of the Congo (CODECO)	417
New People's Army (NPA)	111
Communist Party of India - Maoist (CPI-Maoist)/Maoists	102
Conspiracy theory extremists*	1

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Release date

July 2022

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Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

2020

Supplementary notes

* Does not represent one single group, but several groups with the same ideology or goal.

In total, 262 different terrorist organizations committed attacks in 2020. In 32 percent of the cases, the responsible group was unknown.

Statistic includes assailant deaths.

Citation formats

A high number of the people killed in terrorist attacks in 2020 worldwide were killed by the Taliban. That year, the Afghan terrorist organization killed nearly 9,000 people. This corresponds with the fact that the group also stood behind the highest number of attacks that year. Boko Haram, who committed the fourth highest number of attacks in 2020, caused the second highest number of fatalities, reaching almost 1,900. 766 people were killed during one attack by the Samri militia in the Ethiopian region of Tigray, an attack known as the Mai Kadra massacre.