Violence in Iraq and Afghanistan- Pre and Post “Surge”: PART I

There has been a heavy emphasis on the shift in violence from Iraq to Afghanistan in recent months by both the press and presidential candidates. While there has been anecdotal evidence to support this assertion, there has not been a quantitative analysis of the violence made available to the public. To fill this gap the GeoCommons data team collected information from the National Counterterrorism Center’s (NCTC) Worldwide Incident Tracking System (WITS) on Iraq and Afghanistan regarding events of violence between 2005 and 2008. The datasets were uploaded into GeoCommons’ Finder! to make the raw data available to the public for further inspection and analysis. GeoCommons’ Maker! was then utilized to create interactive maps from the raw data to visually share the findings with the public. In addition to Maker! generated maps, several charts and GIS visualizations were created with the raw data in Finder! .

Our key findings were summarized in a Report entitled “Analysis of the Relative Violence in Iraq and Afghanistan Pre and Post ‘Surge’”. During the next 4 days, we will be featuring a seven part blog series on these findings.

Key Finding #1
Using the CSV files (Pre Surge, Post Surge) downloaded from Finder!, we were able to analyze the statistics of the attacks for a better understanding of the levels of violence in both countries. There has been a shift in violence from Iraq to Afghanistan. When all events of violence were tabulated there was a 13% increase in attacks in Afghanistan and 23% decrease in attacks in Iraq. The most profound shift has been in the number of IED fatalities. Following the surge up until March, 2008, fatalities associated with IED attacks increased more than two-fold in Afghanistan.

Table 1: Pre and Post-Surge Violence in Afghanistan

Table 2: Pre and Post-Surge Violence in Iraq

Click here to see the map of the attacks by IED fatalities.