ISLAMABAD – Pakistan has shown improvement in its global terrorism Index ranking with decline in the terrorism incidences and the deaths related to the terrorist activities.
Pakistan now ranks fifth out of 163 countries on the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) with a score of 8.4 out of 10, the Australia and US-based Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) said in its report.
Iraq is on top of the list with a GTI score of 10 on 10 followed by Afghanistan, Nigeria and Syria.
Pakistan being ranked fifth is the country’s best result in a decade. Since 2007, Pakistan has ranked as at least fourth on the worst country for terrorism index and was ranked second on six occasions.
The GTI is based on data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) which is considered to be the most comprehensive global data set on terrorist activity and has now codified over 170,000 terrorist incidents.
For the second year in a row, the report shows a global decline in the number of deaths from terrorist attacks. In 2016, 25,673 people were affected which is a 22 per cent improvement from the peak in 2014.
“Terrorism has fallen significantly in the epicentres of Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, which are four of the five countries most affected by terrorism”, stated the report.
However, some disturbing trends were observed. While overall terrorism has fallen it has spread out more than the previous years with more countries being affected. “More countries experienced at least one death from terrorism. This is more than at any time in the past 17 years and reflects an increase from 65 countries in 2015 to 77 in 2016,” claimed the report.