Most Terrorists Attacks Happen in Muslim-Majority Countries
The same day the Christchurch shooter went on his rampage, another terrorist attack claimed the lives of at least six civilians in Syria. As crowds of people attempted to flee one of ISIS's last strongholds inthe town of Baghouz, suicide bombers attacked the "exodus of veiled women, dusty children, and wounded men," according to Agence France-Presse.
The day before the Christchurch attack, on March 14th in Somalia, an explosion in a bustling market in the nation's capital killed eight people and critically injured dozens more.
Though the identities of the victims in these attacks have not yet been released, Syria and Somalia are both on the list of Muslim-majority counties rocked by terrorist violence every year. In Somalia, where as many as 98.9 percent of people are Muslim, terrorists carried out over 359 attacks in 2016 alone.
In 2017, researchers with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START (which is hosted at the University of Maryland), told ABC News that Muslims are "absolutely" the most likely people to be victims of terrorist attacks worldwide. William Braniff, the executive director of START, explained that his team's data showed that the vast majority of terrorist attacks occur in Muslim-majority countries, and that the majority of victims of terrorism are Muslim.
