Days before, a would-be suicide bomber from Nigeria was wrestled to the floor of a Northwest Airlines ( NWA - news - people ) flight from Amsterdam to Detroit when the explosive chemicals he’d sewn into his underwear failed to detonate.
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While a U.S.-bound commercial jet and a rural military base in a war-torn nation are night and day in terms of everyday security threats, the recent events illustrate that no place is truly, 100% safe all the time. And in between the two are dozens of countries where danger is just a part of everyday life.
Afghanistan tops our list of the world's most dangerous countries. Even with thousands of private security and army personnel there (and 20,000 more U.S. troops to be deployed), certain parts of the country, like the region bordering Pakistan--where it's said that nearly every resident owns some sort of automatic weapon for protection's sake--are hotbeds of violence.
Longstanding tribal warfare, political corruption and--ironically--the increased military presence all have combined to push Afghanistan's violence from being concentrated in a few areas like the Khost Province in the southeastern border region, to being displaced to other regions that were once deemed safer, like the north. Also, transit routes for military personnel and private contractors are big targets for militants. The more roads are built, the more violence spreads out to areas lacking
Ed Daly, a director at Maryland-based risk-assessment firm iJet, says that the growing number of attacks on both foreign troops and civilians far beyond traditional Pashtun areas suggest that Afghanistan is only going to get worse.
"Political corruption is fueling disaffection among Afghans," adds Claudine Fry, an analyst with risk-assessment firm Control Risk in London. Having failed to see improvements that the government and military leaders had promised, many Afghanis have become disgruntled--some even taking up arms with the Taliban for a wage, Fry notes.
To determine the world's most dangerous countries we combined rankings provided by iJet and Control Risks, giving equal weight to each set of data. The two firms used crime rates, police protection, civil unrest, terrorism risk, kidnapping threat and geopolitical stability to develop their own rankings. Where there was a tie we assigned the higher spot to the nation with a more recent travel alert on the U.S. State Department's watch list. We eliminated any country that didn't appear on at least two of these three lists.
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