US Terrorist Attacks: International vs Domestic

The United States has a long history of confronting serious challenges from terrorists worldwide. Before I came to the U.S. to pursue a Master's degree, the conversation about terrorist attacks with my friends mostly centered around the 9/11 attacks that took more than 3,000 lives. It was not until reading this article that I realized the US has been dealing with a large number of domestic terrorist attacks, too.

I dug deeper into the recent history of terrorism and its patterns by cleaning and visualizing data from The Global Terrorism Database (GTD), which includes information on terrorist attacks around the world from 1970 through 2019.

The GTD classified an incident as a terrorist attack if it intentionally used violence or threat of violence in the pursuit of political, economic, religious or social goals. It also holds that only sub-national groups, instead of states, can commit acts of terrorism. Types of terrorist attacks include bombings, mass shootings, hijackings, etc.

I used a radial chart where the background grids represent the months and years and each colored circle indicates a terrorist attack. The size of the circle is proportional to the number of deaths in the attack.

Attacks with zero deaths are also presented in the chart. Of the 938 terrorist attacks documented by the dataset, 795 incidents had no casualties.

The other 136 attacks killed more than 3,600 people.

Each circle is color based on the type of attack including islamic extremists, right-wing extremists, incel extremists, animal-rights-related and others

Here’s the 9/11 attack initiated by the Islamic terrorist group, Al-Qaeda.

There was a series of terrorist attacks by the same group on that day, which injured more than 25,000 people and killed more than 3,000 people including around 300 firefighters and emergency responders.

Since then, the conversation on terrorism has focused mainly on Islamic extremist groups.

But what's also worth noticing is that between 2002 and 2019, attacks initiated by domestic far-right extremists killed 103 people in the United States.

That's almost exactly the same number of people killed by "Jihadi-inspired" terror attacks, which claimed 110 lives.

The types of right-wing extremist groups in this visualization include anti-government, anti-abortion, white supremacist, anti-Semitics, anti-LGBT and Neo-Nazi.

Many white extremist killers were inspired by earlier attacks.

An analysis done by The New York Times indicated that "… at least a third of white extremist killers since 2011 were inspired by others who perpetrated similar attacks …"

Many of these attacks targeted places of worship. The deadliest attacks by white extremist groups include a shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012 and a shooting at a Black church in South Carolina in 2015.

There are other domestic extremist groups with different claims as well.

Some radical Incel extremists seek violence against women to do justice to men having sexual failures.

Groups with environmental-related claims such as the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front have emerged in the past 10 years and were labeled as serious terrorist threats by the FBI.

Explore it yourself!