Boko Haram terrorists are by far the biggest killers in Africa and killed over 8,000 people in 2015 alone, according to a Voice of America (VOA) report quoting original analysis of data from ACLED, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project. ACLED tracks political violence, protests and terrorist events across Africa. Their reports include attacks since 1997 based on data collected from local news media, government statements, non-governmental organisations and published research.

To conduct its review, VOA analysed a portion of the full ACLED dataset by comparing the primary perpetrator of each attack to a list of 34 terrorist organisations. Those groups are named on the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Terrorist Exclusion lists, or in a separate analysis conducted by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. All known aliases were included, accounting for more than 100 group names.

The report noted that “the number of terrorism deaths in Africa reached an all-time high in 2015, when Boko Haram killed more than 8,000 people across Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger.”

“No group has inflicted more death and destruction on the continent than Boko Haram, which has accounted for one-third of terrorism deaths in Africa in the past 20 years,” VOA reported.

It noted that since 2015, the number of terrorism deaths has dropped, in no small part because of military campaigns to weaken the radical Islamist group carried out by the Nigerian army and a multinational task force.