2018 Global Terrorist Attacks

The Global Terrorist Database has released its report into global terrorism trends in 2018. There were more than 9,600 terrorist attacks across the globe in 2018. More than 22,980 people were killed in those attacks.

The 2018 GTD report is illustrated with a static map which shows all the terrorist attacks which occurred across the world in 2018. Although the map shows that Iraq still suffered a large number of terrorist attacks, in 2018 the country actually saw a 46% decrease in the number of attacks. From 2013-2017 Iraq suffered more terrorist attacks than any other country. This huge fall of attacks in Iraq has an effect on the total incidence rate of terrorism and in 2018 there was a 43% lower number of terrorism attacks worldwide compared to 2014.

The Global Terrorism Database has data dating back to 1970. You can search the entire database by date, attack type, weapon type, perpetrators, causalities, fatalities and by location. You can also download the data at no cost if you want to use it for personal research purposes.



If you want to view an interactive map of global terrorist attacks in 2018 then you can refer to Esri's Terrorist Attacks map. Esri's map uses crowdsourced data from Wikipedia to map terrorist incidents by date. The map doesn't use the same data as the Global Terrorism database, however the map does show similar hotspots of terrorist activity in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, a number of Central African countries and in Colombia.

All the terrorist attacks on Esri's map are color coded to show the responsible terrorist groups. This map is also not restricted just to attacks from 2018. You can therefore use the date control to view the terrorist attacks around the world for any period since the beginning of 2016.