Mourners arrive for a burial ceramony of a victim from the March 15 mosque attacks at the Memorial Park Cemetery in Christchurch, New Zealand, Thursday, March 21, 2019.
Despite popular media representations of Muslims as the perpetrators of terrorism, a new study has found that they are its main victims across the globe.
The French Terror Victims Association (AFVT) said on Thursday that nearly 80 percent of victims of terrorism are Muslims.
Before the start of the International Congress for the Victims of Terrorism being held in Nice, Guillaume Denoix de Saint-Marc, head of AFVT said: “Muslims are the first to suffer the consequences of terror attacks.”
“It is important to remember this in Europe because it is assumed that those who conduct terror attacks are Muslims and the victims are non-Muslims. This is not true."
Saint-Marc also emphasised the importance of working to prevent Muslims from radicalisation.
Around 450 terror victims from 80 countries are participating in the Congress, which began Thursday.
According to the report shared by the Institute for Economics & Peace, a global think tank headquartered in Sydney, there were 15,952 deaths from terrorism last year.
Despite casualties declining from their peak of 33,555 in 2014, terrorism remains a real presence in the lives of many.
In 2018, Afghanistan was the most impacted country with 7,379 deaths. Elsewhere, 2,040 and 1,054 were killed by terrorists in Nigeria and Iraq respectively.
Syria and Somalia also suffered large casualties due to terrorism, while 4,171 were killed across the rest of the world .
“Between 2002 and 2018, the Middle East, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 93 percent of all deaths from terrorism,” the report said.
Increasing far-right terrorism
Far-right terrorism, mainly targeting Muslims and migrants, has increased by 320 percent over the past five years.
The report classified just below 20 percent of mass-shootings since 1982 in the US as terrorist attack.
On March, 51 people were killed in New Zealand by a far-right terrorist. The attackers gun was emblazoned with racist and white supremacist messages across it.
Increasing levels of far-right violence have been spurred on by rising levels of anti-Muslim hate in Western countries. Some Western far-right politicians and even mainstream ones have openly depicted Muslims as an enemy.
Anti-Islam conspiracy theories are one of the main drivers of far-right terrorist ideology.
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