State Department itself publishes — the statistical annex to Country Reports on Terrorism, and before it Patterns of Global Terrorism, the congressionally mandated series that has catalogued international terrorist incidents year by year since 1990.

Year after year across 2004–2023, the most active and lethal groups are Sunni: the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda and its affiliates, al-Shabaab, the TTP. On the order of nine in ten attacks in the reporting trace back to Sunni extremist actors operating out of the Salafi-jihadist tradition.

A separate French dataset, compiled by FONDAPOL over a longer 1979–April 2024 window, lands in the same place. The five deadliest Islamist groups over that period account for better than 80 percent of all victims of Islamist terrorism — and every one of the five is Sunni: the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and al-Qaeda.

The Sunni groups that dominate the casualty tables have drawn financial support from the Gulf Arab states — and, more awkwardly, from the United States itself. The paper trail runs through Syria: US and allied money reaching outfits spun off from ISIS, including the al-Nusra lineage that produced Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, whose leader Washington once had a $10 million bounty on before quietly retiring it. The same government that brands Iran the foremost sponsor of terrorism has, at various points, been a facilitator of the very groups doing the most killing.

The designation is doing political work, not analytical work. Iran is not, by the government’s own incident data, the major driver of global terrorism; the perpetrators overwhelmingly belong to a Sunni jihadist current that is hostile to Iran and financed from elsewhere. A serious campaign against the sponsors of terrorism would start with the Gulf states, not with Tehran. Instead, a charge the data won’t support is being used as the pretext for an unprovoked war. A country living in a glass house should think twice before throwing rocks.

https://sonar21.com/the-data-doesnt-support-the-charge-iran-and-the-number-one-s...