New Tracker on Jihadist Attacks in North America and Europe

The Program on Extremism at George Washington University released a new tracker that monitors jihadist motivated terrorist attacks in North America and Europe. The tracker examines a number of dynamics related to jihadist attacks in the West since 2014 and their perpetrators. Some of the authors’ key findings for the 104 attacks captured in the tracker include:

• 71 percent of attackers were known to authorities prior to the attack, 51 percent had a criminal background, and 30 percent of served time in prison.
• 58 percent of were citizens of the country in which they conducted an attack, and 18 percent of were legal residents.
• 27 percent of attackers had an operational connection to a terrorist group, and 46 percent of had a known local extremist network.