The global record of jihadist terrorism

In 2025 the world recorded 5,582 deaths from terrorism across 2,944 attacks. Four organisations caused 3,869 of them, seventy per cent of the global total: Islamic State, Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and al-Shabaab. All four are jihadist. None of them fights Israel. Almost everyone they kill is Muslim.

This section exists because of an argument that gets made constantly and is never checked: that jihadist violence is a response to Israel, to the occupation, or to Western support for either. The claim is testable. The data is published annually by an institute in Sydney, compiled from open sources, and it says something the argument cannot survive.

Where terrorism actually kills people

The Institute for Economics and Peace publishes the Global Terrorism Index, scoring 163 countries. The 2026 edition, covering 2025, ranks them like this.

Rank	Country	GTI score	Note
1	Pakistan	8.574	1,139 deaths, first time at the top
2	Burkina Faso	8.324	JNIM and Islamic State Sahel
3	Niger	7.816	JNIM and ISWAP
4	Nigeria	7.792	Boko Haram and ISWAP
5	Mali	7.586	JNIM
6	Syria	7.545	Islamic State remnants
7	Somalia	7.391	al-Shabaab
8	DR Congo	7.171	ADF, an Islamic State affiliate
9	Colombia	7.116	ELN and FARC dissidents
10	Israel	6.790
11	Afghanistan	6.678	Islamic State Khorasan
12	Cameroon	6.593	Boko Haram
13	India	6.428
14	Myanmar	6.245
15	Mozambique	6.022	Islamic State Mozambique

Israel is tenth. Every country above it except Colombia is a place where jihadist organisations kill people, and in every one of those places the dead are overwhelmingly Muslim. Five countries alone, Pakistan, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger and the DRC, account for close to seventy per cent of the world’s terrorism deaths.

The Sahel accounts for more than half of all global terrorism deaths on its own. Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger are landlocked states two and a half thousand miles from Jerusalem, with no Israeli policy to respond to, no settlements, no checkpoints, and no Jews.

The victims are Muslims

This is the fact that decides the argument, and it is not a talking point invented for it. It is what the casualty tables say every year.

Boko Haram’s dead are Nigerian Muslim villagers, and its most famous victims are the schoolgirls it took from Chibok. Al-Shabaab’s dead are Somalis, including roughly 590 killed by one truck bomb at a Mogadishu junction in October 2017, the deadliest terrorist attack in African history, attributed to al-Shabaab though the group never claimed it. Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan’s dead are Pakistani police, soldiers and schoolchildren, 132 of them at the Army Public School in Peshawar in December 2014. Islamic State’s largest single massacre of civilians was of Yazidis at Sinjar in 2014, and its second constituency of victims was Shia Muslims, whom its doctrine classifies as apostates deserving death.

A movement that kills Muslims by the thousand in countries with no Israeli presence is not a movement about Israel. It is a movement with a theology of who may be killed, and Jews are one entry on a list that includes Shia, Sufis, Ahmadis, Yazidis, Christians, Hindus, apostates, and any Sunni Muslim who declines to submit to it.

What this section holds

Jihadist terrorism in the United States, from 9/11 to the 121 people killed since, and what the far-right comparison is used to argue.
Jihadist terrorism in Europe and the West, with Europol’s annual counts and the major attacks by country.
Attacks on Jews outside Israel, the subset that answers whether the target is Israeli policy or Jews.

The word that gets used to stop the conversation

Anyone who reads a table of dead Nigerian villagers and Pakistani schoolchildren as an attack on Muslims has the numbers upside down, and usually knows it. The people in that table are Muslims, killed by other Muslims for being insufficiently Muslim, and the distinction between Islam, Muslim and Islamist is not a courtesy extended to anyone. It is load-bearing: two billion people on one side, a twentieth-century political movement on the other, and the first group supplying almost all of the second group’s victims.

The charge of bigotry is deployed here because the numbers cannot be argued with. It works exactly once per reader, and only before they have seen the table.

What the map settles

Israel is tenth. Nine countries above it, eight of them killing fields for jihadist organisations, more than half the world’s terrorism deaths in the Sahel, and seventy per cent of them from four groups that have never fired a shot at an Israeli.

Every explanation that begins with the occupation has to account for Burkina Faso, and none of them do. The violence aimed at Israel is one regional franchise of something global, which is why every proposal to end it locally has failed for a hundred years, and why the people insisting that this time the local fix will work have never once been asked to explain Mali.

Sources

Every page in this section

The long record: conquest, dhimma and the accountability gap The century of conquest, the dhimmi system, thirteen centuries of slave trading, and why this is the one imperial history the West is not allowed to discuss.