Bangladesh has Achieved Significant Improvement in GTI-2020

News Desk

Bangladesh has achieved a significant improvement in counter-terrorism sector in last couple of years. Among the South Asian countries, the state of Bangladesh is comparatively respectable. According to the study of Institute for Economics & Peace(IEP), South Asia has the highest average GTI score of any region, a position it has held since the inception of the GTI in 2002. The impact of terrorism increased in the region from 2018 to 2019, owing to deteriorations in score in Sri Lanka and Nepal. However, there were improvements elsewhere in the region, with Afghanistan registering an improvement in score and a reduction in total deaths in terrorism for the first time in the past five years. This reduction was driven by a decrease in terrorism deaths attributed to the Taliban and the Khorasan Chapter of the Islamic State following increased counterterrorism operations by US and Afghan forces.

The region is home to three of the ten countries which are amongst the worst ten for the impact of terrorism: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Of the seven countries in the region, only Bhutan has a GTI score of zero, meaning that is has not recorded a terrorist attack in the past five years.

The largest deterioration in the region occurred in Sri Lanka, which saw deaths from terrorism rise from one in 2018, to 266 in 2019. This was the first time in a decade that Sri Lanka recorded more than a hundred deaths from terrorism in a single year. All 266 deaths occurred during the series of attacks on Easter Sunday, in which eight suicide bombers attacked three churches and three hotels in Colombo. The attacks were carried out by National Thowheeth Jama’ath, a Sri Lankan jihadist group that has pledged allegiance to ISIL. Taken as a single incident, this series of bombings was the deadliest terrorist attack of 2019, and a rare instance of Islamist violence in a country where over 85 per cent of attacks with a known perpetrator since 2002 were attributed to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

It is to be mentioned that Globally deaths from terrorism fell for the fifth consecutive year in 2019 to 13,826, a 15 per cent decrease from the prior year. In North America, Western Europe and Oceania, far-right attacks have increased by 250 per cent since 2014 – they are higher now than at any time in the last 50 years. 63 countries recorded at least one death from terrorism, the lowest number since 2013. The global economic impact of terrorism was US$16.4 billion in 2019, a decrease of 25 per cent from the previous year. ISIL’s center of gravity moves to sub-Saharan Africa with total deaths by ISIL in the region increasing by 67%. ISIL and their affiliates were also responsible for attacks in 27 countries in 2019.