Terrorism is on the rise worldwide, and a new Global Terrorism Index report from the Institute for Economics and Peace suggests America's war on terror could be exacerbating the problem. After 13 years of spending trillions on two wars with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, the annual count of terror attacks has more than quadrupled, from about 1,500 in 2000 to almost 10,000 in 2013.
The report connects American foreign policy with this spike, noting that the "rise in terrorist activity coincided with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This created large power vacuums in the country allowing different factions to surface and become violent." Four out of the five countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria) that witness 80 percent of terror attacks today are sites of U.S. intervention.
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