Open the newspaper or turn on the news, and nearly every day there are reports of terror-inspired violence in Iraq. Just today, a deadly car bomb took the lives of 11 and wounded 45 others in an area near the northern city of Kirkuk. Sixty badly decomposed bodies were found on August 6 in a secluded area of the turbulant Diyala Province. A brief moment of normalcy for some Iraqis was violently disrupted when a car bomb hit a bustling ice cream parlor on August 1, killing 60 people. On July 30, six were killed and several wounded in a car bomb that abruptly interrupted the fesitivies following Iraq's win in the Asian Soccer Cup. These are just a few examples of what a typical day in Iraq looks like.

The statistics on violence in Iraq are bleak. MSNBC reports :

The number U.S. casualties per day in Iraq is around 25.

The average number of Iraqis who are wounded or killed each day is 100.

There are roughly 1000 attacks per week on people of all nationalities.

This is up from 600 just a year ago.

U.S. citizens are the target of more than 75% of the attacks that occur in Iraq.

Terror Hotspots in Iraq

The National Counter Terrorism Center maintains a database, called the World Wide Incidents Tracking System, that provides a record of observed terror incidents across the globe going back to 2004. According to the center, "Terrorism occurs when groups or individuals acting on political motivation deliberately or recklessly attack civilians/non-combatants or their property and the attack does not fall into another special category of political violence, such as crime, rioting, or tribal violence."

Included in the dataset is detailed information on each incident - e.g., nationality of perpetrator, nationality of victim, weapon of choice, event type and faciltiy targeted. The number of fatalities, wounded and hostages taken per incident are also on record.

So, which areas of Iraq have been most prone to terrorism? To answer this question, all of the records for Iraq were extracted from the database, and for most incidents geocoded to the city level and mapped according to fatalites. The map below shows where there are "concentrations" of incidents with high impacts. Other lower impact events are scattered all over Iraq and you can see this in geocommons by selecting Show Points and Shapes when viewing the "Violence in Iraq (2004 through March 2007) data set in MyMaps.

Gaining a Richer Understanding of the Problem

In the upcoming weeks, I will be taking a more fine-grained look at the World Wide Incidents Tracking data for Iraq. The data that was extracted for today's blog includes unique identification codes that can be joined to subsets of the incident data based on any of the criteria present in the records. Future blogs wll examine how the spatial pattern of terror attacks in Iraq has changed over time, whether the location of hotspots differ by weapon of choice or nationality of the victim and any other interesting tidbits that surface from the datamining exercise.

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