In considering the recent GTD data release, Andrew Flowers (of FiveThirtyEight) did interpret something correctly when he observed that "Terrorism Declined Last Year- but Not in the West." In his brief article, he correctly cited START's GTD statistics that support the claim that terrorism was reduced abroad from the previous year (2014). However, in his search to understand why, he interviewed the GTD's program manager, Erin Miller, who stated that "it's possible that '2014 was just a really bad year and 2015 was still violent but somewhat less so by comparison.'" This is somewhat incomplete, because it doesn't take into account the shifting sands, so to speak, in the battle against the Islamic State (IS) transnational terrorist army. For instance, the introduction of Russian Airstrikes would have had some impact on the Islamic State's ability to act effectively in carrying out terrorist attacks in the region. Additionally, the combined efforts of the Iraqi/Iranian governments and U.S. (and allied) air support had to have hindered some of the key logistical elements that IS would have needed to attack locally.

Potentially Misleading Statistics on Global Terrorism

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