ew Jersey

If we were to judge the state of the world by the news headlines, 2015 was the year of Islamist terror, especially in Paris. It began with the massacre at Charlie Hebdo and included the much deadlier Nov. 13 shootings in the city, in addition to attacks in Beirut, Ankara and on a center for disabled people in San Bernadino, California.

But even if we focused on terrorism, that would be a misleading view of the year's events. In 2015, terrorism killed more people in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria and Kenya than in France or the United States. And if the crash in October of a Russian civilian airliner in Egypt's Sinai Desert was, as experts on the Islamic State group and Russia assert, the result of an IS plot, then that incident alone killed more people than both terrorist attacks in Paris.