Morocco placed 83 in the 2023 Global Terrorism Index

Morocco placed 83 in the 2023 Global Terrorism Index, dropping four spots in the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) ranking, as the Kingdom avoided terrorist attacks for five years straight.

The independent, non-profit think tank devoted to refocusing the world’s attention on peace as a positive indicator of human progress and well-being notes that Morocco achieved significant improvement since 2012.

The report stated that Sub-Saharan Africa recorded the largest increase in terrorism deaths in 2022, while South Asia and MENA recorded the largest falls.

791 deaths were registered in the MENA region in 2022, a 32% decrease and the lowest number since 2013.

In the previous year, attacks decreased by almost 50%, from 1,331 in 2021 to 695 in 2022. The region’s share of worldwide terrorist fatalities has decreased from 57% in 2016 to just 12% in 2022, highlighting the evolving dynamics of terrorism.

Moreover, there has been a significant decrease in suicide bombings throughout MENA. The research states that although suicide bombers claimed 1,947 lives in 2016, just six suicide attacks, which claimed eight lives, were reported in MENA in 2022.

According to the IEP report, the Islamic State (IS) and its affiliates are the deadliest terrorist organizations in the world in 2022, followed by al-Shabaab, the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), and Jamaat Nusrat Al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM).

In the MENA region, Morocco ranked 16.

Syria leads the list followed by Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Yemen, Israel, Libya, Palestine, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and then Morocco, followed by Sudan, Kuwait, Oman, and finally, Qatar.

Nonetheless, there has been a sharp rise in the number of terrorism-related fatalities in many countries which has been blamed on unidentified jihadists, which has increased by 17 times since 2017 to 1,766.

PUBLICITÉ

The report shed light on the disturbing revelation that terrorist assaults were deadlier in 2022, killing an average of 1.7 persons per attack in 2022 compared to 1.3 deaths per attack in 2021.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s Sahel region is currently the epicenter of terrorism, with the Sahel region accounting for more terrorist deaths in 2022 than South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa (MENA) put together.

Compared to barely 1% in 2007, deaths in the Sahel region accounted for 43% of all global deaths in 2022.

In 2021, says the report, slightly under 4% of the residents of the MENA residents declared that war and terrorism are their biggest threats to daily safety.

In its classification, the report used several tags to differentiate how impacted countries are by terrorism, Morocco has a yellow tag, meaning that it’s very low impacted by it.

There were some countries with a green tag, meaning that they are not impacted by terrorism, which put them all at the same rank, which is the 93rd spot.