Annual change in terrorist attacks worldwide

Annual change in terrorist attacks worldwide from 2019 to 2020, by perpetrator group

Characteristic	Annual percentual change
Conspiracy theory extremists*	1,833%
Cooperative for the Development of the Congo (CODECO)	1,600%
Central Africa Province of the Islamic State	284%
Allied Democratic Forces (ADF)	46%
Fulani extremists*	44%
Taliban	38%
Muslim extremists*	16%
Al-Shabaab	-13%
Boko Haram	-14%
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)	-16%
New People's Army (NPA)	-26%
Communist Party of India - Maoist (CPI-Maoist)/Maoists	-30%
Houthi extremists (Ansar Allah)	-34%

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Release date

July 2022

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Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

2019 to 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.

Citation formats

From 2019 to 2020, there was a significant increase in attacks committed by different conspiracy extremists and the Cooperative for the Development of the Congo (CODECO) worldwide, with an increase of over 1,800 and 1,600 percent, respectively. However, these organizations only stood behind 102 and 116 attacks each that year. There was also a significant increase in the number of attacks committed by the Central Africa Province of the Islamic State, whereas there was a decrease among six different perpetrators included in the table, with Houthi extremists showing the largest decrease.