Citation

Xiao C, Zhang C. Environ. Plann. A 2018; 50(3): 497-499.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0308518X17749710

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This research aims to map the spatial and temporal distribution of terrorist incidents initiated by The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) from the beginning of 2002 to the end of 2016, provide visualization of these attacks' geographic distributions and temporal trends, and differentiate their consecutive, sporadic, and new space-time clusters. To our knowledge, this is the first effort to conduct a three-dimensional mapping of a terrorist group's attacks.

To achieve this, we utilize the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), a widely used dataset of terrorist attacks around the world developed by trained researchers who collected information of terrorist events from newspapers, government reports, the Internet, and other resources (LaFree et al., 2012). Tracing the attacks initiated and launched by ISIL and its predecessors including Tawhid and Jihad (TJ), Al-Qaida in Iraq, Mujahideen Shura Council, and the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), we obtain data as to the date, location, and casualties of each incident through 2002-2016. Note that although TJ was first created 1999, the attacks it initiated in the first three years were minimal, and GTD's record of the attacks conducted by ISIL's predecessors started in 2002.

To visualize and analyze the incidents, we combine the approach of space time cube and that of space time hot spot. In the first step, we use space time scatter plot...

Language: en