Bahrain under terrorism threat, says new research

Bahrain has ranked first among GCC states and 31st globally for being under threat of terrorism, new research shows.

The Global Terrorism Index 2015 has scored Bahrain 4.871 out of 10 from among 162 countries.

Saudi Arabia came in the 43rd place with a score of 4.006, UAE in 101st place with 1.045, Kuwait in 123rd with 0.019. Oman and Qatar statistically has no terrorism threat.

The index is compiled by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a global think tank based in Sydney, New York and Mexico. More than 60 per cent of the 162 countries covered in the report did not have any deaths from terrorism in 2014. The Global Terrorism Index, now in its third year, ranks 162 countries by how greatly terrorism affects them both directly and indirectly.

Bahraini police had recently uncovered more than 1.5 tons of explosive materials and a large bomb-making factory in two separate locations in the country. The discovery was made during a counterterrorism campaign that also resulted in the arrest of several terror suspects and escaped convicts in terrorism cases. The arrested were found to have close links to “terrorist elements in Iraq and Iran”.

Bahrain also alleges neighbouring Iran for several attacks on security forces that killed and wounded several people this year. The number of people killed globally by terrorism reached a record high in 2014, with almost four in five of these deaths occurring in just five countries.

Terrorism killed more than 32,600 people last year, an 80 per cent increase from 2013 and the sharpest yearly rise on record, said the index. The death toll was heavily concentrated. Seventy-eight per cent of fatalities occurred in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria. Nigeria recorded the largest increase in deaths from terrorism. Fatalities quadrupled in 2014, reaching more than 7500.

But Iraq stands out as the worst affected country, accounting for 30 per cent of all deaths from terrorism, according to the report. More than 9900 people died in 3370 attacks in Iraq last year. "This is the highest number of terrorism incidents and fatalities ever recorded by a single country," the institute's press release reads. The report highlighted the start of the increases in deaths from terrorism in Iraq coincided with the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Deaths from terrorism spiked in 2007 with the surge in US troops in Iraq and then subsequently fell by 56 per cent. "It was only in 2013 with the rise of ISIL [Islamic State] that Iraq suffered from the same level of terrorism again."

The recent attacks in France have sparked fierce debate over the disproportionate attention media outlets give to terrorism attacks in Western countries. Less than three per cent of the lives lost to terrorism since 2000 have been in the West, the report found.

This figure drops to 0.5 per cent when the September 11 attacks are excluded. Islamic State and Boko Haram were jointly responsible for half (51 per cent) of all lives lost in terrorist attacks in 2014. Together, the groups killed more than 12,700 people last year, with Boko Haram killing about 570 more than Islamic State. Boko Haram pledged allegiance to Islamic State in March 2015.

Caption : Some of the weapons the Bahraini police found hidden in a house in Nuweidrat in September