This document provides a summary of incidents and trends involving improvised explosive devices (IEDs) as reported in various unclassified publications from March to May 2012. As this report seeks to share information of explosive events with the broader civil-military community, the use of the term IED has been expanded to include explosive incidents in general and is not restricted solely to devices that have been improvised. Related information is available at www.cimicweb.org. Hyperlinks to source material are highlighted in blue and underlined in the text.
NATO’s Centre of Excellence Defence Against Terrorism (COE-DAT) reported 356 people were killed and 1,340 others were injured from 270 reported global IED, vehicle-borne IED (VBIED) or suicide attacks during March 2012. A further 340 people were killed and 869 were injured in 271 attacks in April 2012. In May 2012, 456 more people were killed and 1,460 were injured in 217 attacks. Combined, there were 758 IED incidents from March to May 2012 which killed 1,152 people and injured another 3,669. In comparison, there were 940 non-IED incidents globally in March, April and May 2012 that resulted in 1,543 killed and 1,450 wounded, according to COE-DAT. (For a discussion of data sources, see Box 1, next page.)
