We’ve all heard it before—in this era of technology, our lives are full of endless possibilities because anything we want to know and anything we want to do is right at our fingertips. We’re constantly awash with news and information, news and information, news and information, until our eyes, and minds, can’t take it anymore. But just because we have such wide access to all that information doesn’t mean we necessarily see all there is to see.
Different topics are given different priority and as a result, some things are filtered out, going unseen even though they shouldn’t. That’s not to say that some of the stories that are given an abundance of media coverage shouldn’t be, but simply that there are some stories that seem to warrant comparable media coverage that doesn't receive it.
The terrorist attacks at the airport and metro station in Brussels have been the focus of news reports and investigations worldwide, as they should. However, since 2016 began, there have been a handful of other terrorist attacks that were not discussed nearly to the same extent.
January: A suicide bombing by an ISIL follower from Syria killed 13 and injured 14 more in Istanbul, Turkey. Within days of that attack, ISIL also attacked Jakarta, Indonesia. The shootings and suicide bombings there resulted in the deaths of eight people, with 24 others receiving injuries. At least 30 more people were killed and at least 56 more were injured in an al-Qaeda-supported attack on the Splendid Hotel in Burkina Faso. At the end of the month, an attack on a Nigerian village by extremist group Boko Haram left at least 65 dead and 136 injured.
February: An attack in Ankara, Turkey killed at least 29 people and injured another 60. Kurdish freedom fighters said that the target was military forces, but the car bomb killed soldiers and civilians alike. In Mogadishu, Somalia, a suicide bomber and four gunmen of al-Shabaab attacked the SYL (Somali Youth League) Hotel, killing at least 14 and injuring at least 16.
March: Another group linked to al-Qaeda attacked another hotel, this time, the Étoile du Sud in Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast. This attack killed at least 18 and injured at least 33. Ankara and Istanbul were both attacked a second time: in Ankara, the detonation of a car bomb killed at least 37 people; in Istanbul, a suicide bombing killed at least 5 and wounded at least 36.
And this is just a mere snapshot of what has been going on in the world throughout the past few months. Regardless of the reason for the lower level of news coverage for some of these events—though there clearly was, at least, some coverage, given that I was able to find information on them—they all deserve our awareness. While our hearts are going out to Belgium in the wake of the attacks there, let them also go out to these nations, as well as to all the others that have been the unreported or underreported victims of terrorist attacks in recent months.
