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The Human Toll of Terror

The New York Times: “The pace and scope of the killing are dizzying. Some 300 members of families blown apart by bombs as they celebrated the end of Ramadan in Baghdad. Forty-nine dead at the Istanbul airport, 40 more in Afghanistan. Nine Italians, seven Japanese, three students at American universities and one local woman brutalized in the diplomatic quarter of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The bodies piled up on a bus in Somalia, at a mosque and video club in Cameroon, at a shrine in Saudi Arabia. All that carnage was in a single week — a single week of summer in what feels like an endless stream of terror attacks. Orlando and Beirut. Paris and Nice and St. Etienne-du-Rouvray, France. Germany and Japan and Egypt. Each bomb or bullet tearing holes in homes and communities. We stopped the clock on two weeks in March when there were high-profile attacks that commanded headlines — and attacks in places where they have become almost routine. In that period, we counted 247 men, women and children cut down by Islamist extremists in mass killings carried out at soft targets in six countries…The snapshots we collected show the moments that make up a life. A bride in her gown, sitting on the floor and eating a snack. A soldier, dapper in his dress uniform. Graduates in cap and gown on their big day.A man on horseback, a man strumming a guitar, a man walking a lonely country road surrounded by wildflowers. Reading a book or drinking beer, celebrating a major life event or enjoying a typical family dinner. They were killed in the moments that might have made the next set of snapshots. Waiting for a bus, or a subway or a plane. Chilling out at the beach. Lining up for trophies after a soccer match. Praying, riding a bicycle, taking that Sunday stroll in a park. What emerges is a tapestry of lives interrupted, splayed out gradually in those photographs, in anecdotal shards or bits of memory shared by those left behind, in the details of their dreams and the things left undone…”

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