Diary of Terror
How we reported 'Diary of Terror'
We just published a wide-ranging report of 30 days of terror across the world. Editors Braden Goyette and Steve Padilla describe the story behind our story.
Why did you start tracking terrorist attacks in the first place?
After the attacks in Brussels and the bombing in Lahore, Pakistan, the question was swirling around: Is terror the “new normal”? Of course, terrorism itself isn’t new. But recent attacks hitting closer to home have certainly raised the profile of its prevalence for us in America.
As we in the newsroom were following and pondering the broader conversations around these events, we decided to look a little deeper. The idea was to take a snapshot of time across the globe to try to understand how and where terror happens.
We logged every fatal terrorist event for 30 days.
How do you even start to track a month of terror all over the world?
Before April began, we asked our correspondents around the world to log terror attacks in their regions as they noticed them being reported. At the end of the month, we realized that there were many, many more attacks than the ones our reporters had logged at the time.
So we started to comb through news reports around the world trying to find attacks we had missed, and we just kept finding them. None of us expected just how many attacks there would be in one month when we started on this project.
And many of them happen in places where terror has become so quotidian, it gets little coverage, even locally.
Naseem Hameed, a crime reporter in Quetta, Pakistan, who spoke to one of our reporters, summed it up very well: “The death of a donkey in cities like Karachi and Lahore gets more attention on TV media than death of human beings in Baluchistan."
So our reporters tracked attacks throughout the month, and got us a solid foundation to start off. The database grew significantly – after we thought we were finished. Then we went about trying to verify each of the attacks we had in our spreadsheet.
When did you consider an attack verified?
If two credible news outlets reported on it independently of each other. We turned to local news reports for a lot of the attacks the wire services didn't cover. In some cases where we couldn't find two news reports, we had our correspondents confirm it themselves.
For example, we couldn't find any good numbers on how many people died as they returned home to Ramadi, Iraq, because Islamic State had rigged up bombs throughout the city before they were pushed out. Our reporter called the mayor of Ramadi and got his estimate.
After we had put together as comprehensive a list of confirmed attacks as we could, we went about narrowing it down. We had a three-hour-long meeting with several editors working on the project going through the list, attack by attack, and debated whether it counted as terror rather than fighting, murder or war crimes.
So what was that working definition: What is and isn’t terrorism?
That’s a complicated question – and there’s no one definition.
We focused on deadly violence that was politically or ideologically motivated, and that was designed to send a message. We weren’t tracking state violence; we focused only on attacks carried out by people who were not acting on behalf of internationally recognized governments.
There was considerable and careful debate over whether certain events constituted terror or warfare. We drew the line between terror and fighting by including only attacks that were designed to spread fear -- not to gain tactical advantage on the battlefield.
If Islamic State clashes with an army to gain territory, we deemed it warfare. But if an Islamic State insurgent blows himself up in a crowded restaurant, that’s clearly terror.
But even when you have a workable abstract definition of terror, there are a lot of gray areas.
What did you do with those gray areas?
It was hard in cases where there was no claim of responsibility, and in cases where the attack occurred in areas with ongoing conflicts.
There were a few examples of people who were shot dead in areas where terror groups frequently carry out targeted killings. But there was no claim of responsibility -- most terror attacks are unclaimed. So we had to make some judgment calls.
If the attack bore the hallmarks of others the group has been known to carry out, we counted it. But in some cases, we just didn't have enough information to say that a killing wasn't something other than terror -- a personal dispute, or the work of criminals who aren't motivated by ideology.
What was the most striking takeaway?
By our tally, 858 people died throughout the month. That was actually a relatively light death toll, according to terror experts.
Also, we expected to record events with multiple victims, like an attack in Kabul that killed 64. But we also found acts of terror — a bombing, a shooting, a stabbing — that claimed a single life. Somehow, those deaths we found especially sad. A family has been devastated for no obvious political gain — and the death goes unknown and unacknowledged.
Lots of people around the world live with the constant threat of terror, and the brunt of terror is largely borne by people outside the West. We knew that before, but reading about what happened worldwide day to day for a month really drives that home.