Study on Correlation Factors that Influence Terrorist Attack Fatalities Using Global Terrorism Database

A better understanding of terrorist attacks and the relationships between the fatality and the influencing factors is helpful to improve the decisions to allocate resources in the fight against terrorism. The fatality is divided into four levels: 1-2, 3-9, 10-29 and ≥30. The article uses a novel approach of correspondence analysis to explore the associations between terrorist attacks and factors. The fatality level of terrorist attacks is influenced by countries, regions, weapons, attack types and targets. The factors that tend to result in high fatality levels are identified. The attacks occur in developing countries and regions are associated with fatality level of ≥30 while the developed countries such as the North America and Western Europe tend to be related with low fatality level. The attacks caused by the weapons of Incendiary and WMD (Biological, Chemical, Radiological, Nuclear) tend to precipitate a relatively high fatalities. The attack types of Hijacking, Barricade Incident and Facility/Infrastructure Attack have strong relationships with fatality level of ≥30. Compared to other targets, Airports & Airlines and Maritime are more likely to generate extremely high fatalities. The results are useful for understanding the fundamental cause of fatalities in terrorist attacks.