In 45 years, nearly 70,000 Islamic terrorist attacks committed worldwide

By Bethany Blankley
The Center Square

Twenty-four years after 9/11, and after multiple wars and U.S. military interventions overseas, the U.S. hasn’t stopped Islamic terrorist attacks from occurring at home or abroad.  

While 9/11 was the greatest attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor, Islamic terrorist attacks have been occurring worldwide since the seventh century. 

Nearly 70,000 Islamic terrorist attacks occurred worldwide in the last 45 years, according to an analysis by the French think tank Fondation Pour L’Innovation Politique (Fondapol), which focuses on European integration and a free economy. 

Fondapol’s data covers the timeframe after the Iranian Revolution ended in February 1979 through April 2024. It found that at least 66,872 Islamic terrorist attacks occurred during this period, killing at least 249,941 people.  

The majority of attacks, 35.2%, occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa, causing 30% of deaths from Islamic terrorism worldwide, according to the analysis.  

Nearly one-third of the attacks occurred in South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, causing 33.7% and 33% of worldwide terrorism related deaths, respectively.  

A fraction of the number of attacks occurred in North America of 0.1%, causing 1.3% of terrorism-related deaths worldwide. The remainder occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa, followed by Southeast Asia, Europe and Russia, Oceania and South America, according to the analysis.

The majority of Islamic terrorist attacks, 86%, occurred in Muslim countries, according to the data. The data isn’t exhaustive; not all countries compile Islamic terrorist attack data or allow access to it if they do. Likewise, not all who are murdered are reported. Fonapol evaluated accessible data from roughly 40 Muslim majority countries noting that Mozambique prohibited it from identifying attack targets.

The majority of attacks in Muslim majority countries occurred where U.S. military forces were involved in various conflicts. 

Afghanistan has suffered the most from Islamic terrorist attacks, according to the data. More than 17,000 have been killed there, followed by nearly 11,000 killed in Somalia and more than 8,200 killed in Iraq.  

Islamic terrorist attacks are ongoing in Muslim countries with U.S. troops who are stationed there continuing to be targeted. Two U.S. soldiers from Iowa were just killed in Syria.

After the U.S. fought the Taliban for 20 years, the Biden administration withdrew troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, leaving billions of dollars worth of weapons, equipment and cash with the Islamic terrorist organization. The Taliban not only controls Afghanistan but is the deadliest Islamic terrorist group in the world, killing at least 71,965 people, according to the analysis. 

ISIS is identified as the second deadliest, killing at least 69,641, followed by Boko Haram killing more than 26,000, Al Shabaab killing nearly 22,000 and al Queda killing nearly 15,000, according to the analysis.

U.S. and Russian wars in Afghanistan directly led to Islamic terrorists targeting Americans and Russians on their own soil: 86 attacks in Russia killed 988, 60 attacks in the U.S. killed 3,121, including on 9/11, according to the data.

Since April 2024, total terrorist attacks and death totals have only gone up worldwide and in the U.S.  

Between April 2021 and June 2025, there were more than 50 jihadist cases in 30 U.S. states, including dozens of attempts to provide material support to ISIS, Hizballah and al Queda, according to a U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security terror threat assessment report. According to Georgetown University's Project on Extremism, 170 individuals have been charged in the U.S. since 2014 for offenses related to ISIS.  

U.S. military intervention in multiple countries hasn’t ended Islamic terrorism abroad or in the U.S. 

Twenty-four years after 9/11, Republican committee members argue foreign jihadist networks and homegrown violent Islamic extremism cause a persistent terrorism threat to Americans.

“From the resurgence of foreign jihadist networks across the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia to the rise of homegrown extremists and online radicalization, the West is facing a dynamic and volatile terror threat landscape. This landscape has only intensified in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, with a disturbing rise in antisemitic and anti-Israel violence on U.S. soil, as well as the reckless anti-enforcement, open-border policies of the Biden-Harris administration,” U.S. Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, argues. 

Pfluger, who chairs the committee’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, fought ISIS as a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot in Iraq and Syria nearly 10 years ago.

He and other committee members have raised concerns about how many known or suspected terrorists were released into the country or illegally entered undetected during the Biden administration, The Center Square reported.

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