The Global Arms Trade Is Booming, but Terror Groups Often Loot Armies

Last updated on October 18th, 2026 at 04:31 pm

The arms trade and globalization have made weapons easier to build, sell and ship, yet the best field evidence suggests terror groups mostly get their guns another way. Arms producers booked a record $679 billion in 2024 (SIPRI, 2025) as states rushed to expand their arsenals.

Armed extremists, in contrast, have tended to arm themselves by capturing weapons from collapsing armies (Conflict Armament Research, 2017) and by raiding military posts (Conflict Armament Research, 2025). Both stories are true at once.

Blending them into one tidy villain is where most coverage of this topic goes wrong, so I rebuilt this piece from primary data.

Globalization of arms trade and terrorism have become profit-mongering aspects of the modern world.

They both profit from each other. As for terrorism, it can now show a stronger presence with even more devastating prospects to the opponent with modernised weapons, while through the prospect of globalisation, more weapons and new ways of killing are sent to the terrorist groups.

Now the killing of civilians by the terrorists, terrorising the law-abiding citizens; rivalry against rivals, and nations against nations have become unexpectedly easier. Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind said, “There is nothing that money can’t buy”.

True, some just need to have money to buy arms or weapons to kill anyone who is not compatible ideologically.

Globalization of arms trading business

Along with economic prosperity, followed the fear of life, the fear of losing social supremacy.

The growing fear and threat from the religious, political and economic majority give birth to the fear of the existence of life which in turn gives birth to a new demand to possess weaponry under the pretext of self-protection.

According to Pew Research, more than 42 per cent of adult Americans own a gun or grew up with a family that owns a gun for personal protection. According to Estimating Global Civilian Held Firearms Numbers by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Australia, at the end of 2017, there were approximately 1,013 million firearms in the 230 countries and autonomous territories of the world, 84.6 per cent of which were held by civilians, 13.1 per cent by state militaries, and 2.2 per cent by law enforcement agencies.

National ownership rates vary from about 120.5 firearms for every 100 residents in the United States to less than 1 firearm for every 100 residents in countries like Indonesia, Japan, Malawi, and several Pacific Island states.

Nearly 700,000 civilians in Bangladesh own a firearm, of which about 200,000 firearms are unregistered. With financial security and racial supremacy comes individual insecurity. National spending on arms is growing, as well. The production of arms is growing with burgeoning demand, with that growing possession of arms, while possessing becoming easier.

The world military expenditures stand at 1981 billion USD, with US 778 billion and China 252 billion USD in 2020.

Availability and accessibility to a firearm are also responsible for the increased homicide, suicide and accidental injuries.

Given the data published by health-data, the phenomena are very plausible. They found 43,200 firearm-related deaths in Brazil, 37,200 in US, 26,500 in India, Mexico 15,400, 13,300 in Colombia, 12,800 in Venezuela, 8,020 in the Philippines, 5090 in Guatemala, 4,380 in Russia and 4,050 in Afghanistan.

In Greenland, 22.0 persons die in 100,000 people of suicide by firearms, which is 6.4 in the United States, 4.2 in Uruguay, 3.1 in Zimbabwe, 3.0 in Venezuela, 2.7 in Argentina, 2.5 in Switzerland, 2.5 in Montenegro, 2.4 in Finland and 2.4 in Serbia.

According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the total value of the global arms trade of 25 companies is 361 billion USD, in 2019.

With Russia, France, China, Germany, Italy, the UK, South Korea, Spain, Israel, and the 9.2 per cent share of the other countries as the major exporters, the USA alone shares 39 per cent of the total arms trading business globally.

Saudi Arabia, India, Egypt, Australia, China, Qatar, South Korea, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates and Japan are the major importer country with 55 per cent of the global share, while the Middle East received 27.1 per cent of the global total in 2017-2021.

As the availability and affordability of a firearm are growing, so is the number of deaths across the world.

The world would not have witnessed a Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 had there been no easy access to the AR-15 rifle, the civilian semiautomatic version of an M16 rifle by the shooter Adam Lanza. Arms-related casualties and conflicts of the sort are prevalent on the page of human history.

According to the Gun Violence Archive from January 1, 2022, to August 5, 2022, 399 mass shootings took place in the USA killing 412, and injuring 1,714 people.

Terrorism related disasters

There were 120,000 armed conflict-related fatalities in 2020 in 39 states, let alone the death from terrorism-related casualties.

There were 236,422 deaths from terrorism between 2002 and 2019. Over the last two decades, just under 99,000 people have been killed in terrorist attacks on police, the military, and infrastructure targets in countries in conflict. By contrast, nearly 126,000 people were killed in attacks targeting civilians in conflict countries.

Between 2002 and 2019, the largest number of deaths from terrorism was recorded in MENA (the Middle East and North Africa), at more than 96,000 deaths.

56 million people died in 2017, of which 2,644 people died in terrorism. Terrorism is one of the primary causes of death globally.

The GTD-2020 (Global terrorism data) contains over 170,000 terrorist incidents for the period of 50 years, from 1970 to 2019.

As per the Global Terrorism Index 2014: the large loss of life and destruction of infrastructure from September 11 totalled $55 billion in New York alone, while secondary effects such as increased security ($589 billion), decreased economic activity ($123 billion) and other costs have been totalled to as much as $3.3 trillion.

Global Terrorism Index 2019 reports that “the global economic impact of terrorism was estimated to be US$26.4 billion in 2019 which was 116 billion in 2014”.

According to the Global Terrorism Index-2022, global deaths from terrorism have declined while Sub-Sarahan Africa has been found to be an emerging epicentre of terrorism. The region accounted for 48% of global terrorism. Even though the latest data records a 1.2% decrease of global terrorist-related deaths to 7,142, the attacks rate is increased by 17%.

But he terrorism-related casualties are expected to increase due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Can arms casualties and terrorism-related deaths be one of the contributing factors to human extinction? Arms industries are flourishing, and the terrorist and rival groups are getting stronger, with a stronger presence among the weaker, innocuous many.

Almost every conflict, struggle, rivalry involve modernised weapons that cause greater devastation. Again, the terrorist group in Nigeria attacked a mosque and killed 18 worshipers in the mosque on 26 October 2021.

Kabul has seen the deadliest terrorist attack on the Shiite minority community mosque on 15 October. Killing Muslims by Islamic sectarians or Islamic terrorists see no respite.

Do arms companies make money from terrorism?

Not directly, and the difference matters. SIPRI links the 2024 jump in arms revenue to demand boosted by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, geopolitical tension and ever-higher military spending (SIPRI, 2025), and it expects further increases because order backlogs are large. Terror groups do not appear anywhere in that explanation. The customers are states.

The link people usually mean is indirect, and it runs through the war on terror. Policy analyst William Hartung, writing for Brown University’s Costs of War project, found that Pentagon spending topped $14 trillion after the Afghanistan war began, with one-third to one-half going to military contractors (Costs of War, 2021).

Five firms, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, took between a quarter and a third of all Pentagon contracts in recent years.

A later Quincy Institute report puts their take at about $2 trillion over two decades of post-9/11 wars (Quincy Institute). Hartung’s conclusion is blunt: cutting war profits depends on “reducing the resort to war in the first place”.

Look at what that evidence does and does not show. Contractors earned enormous sums because governments answered terrorism with war. Nothing in it shows anyone wanting attacks to continue. That would be a claim about motive, and none of these sources make it.

None of this is a new worry. In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower told Americans to guard against “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” (National Archives). He also accepted that the country needed a large, permanent arms industry (Air & Space Forces Magazine). Journalist James Ledbetter calls the phrase a “rhetorical Rorschach blot” because readers pour their own meaning into it.

I think that is fair, and it is a good reason to distrust any article, mine included, that hands you a single villain.

How big is the arms business in 2026?

Very big, and still growing. Start with spending. SIPRI reports that world military expenditure reached $2,887 billion in 2025, up 2.9% in real terms. The United States, China and Russia together accounted for $1.48 trillion, or 51% of the total (European Pravda, relaying SIPRI).

US spending dipped to $954 billion mainly because no new Ukraine aid package was approved, but SIPRI’s Nan Tian warns the fall “is likely to be short-lived”, since Congress has approved more than $1 trillion for 2026. China spent $336 billion, up 7.4%, and India, the fifth biggest spender, $92.1 billion, up 8.9%.

Now the companies. In SIPRI’s Top 100, 77 firms grew their arms revenue in 2024 while the eight Chinese companies fell 10% to $88.3 billion. The 39 US companies earned $334 billion, and a record nine Middle Eastern companies reached $31.0 billion. The sharpest riser was Czechoslovak Group, up 193% to $3.6 billion from making artillery shells for Ukraine.

Then the trade between states. SIPRI’s March 2026 fact sheet found the volume of major arms transferred was 9.2% higher in 2021 to 2025 than in the previous five years. Ukraine became the biggest recipient with 9.7% of global imports, up from 0.1%, and European imports rose 210%.

In contrast, imports fell 41% in Africa and 13% in the Middle East. The United States exported 27% more and took a 42% share. France ranked second with 9.8%, and Germany overtook China to take fourth place with 5.7%.

One catch that many summaries skip: SIPRI’s trade figures cover major arms such as combat aircraft, warships, tanks and missiles, and leave out small arms and light weapons. In the Sahel tracing I discuss below, assault rifles made up nearly 80% of the weapons examined. In other words, the headline arms-trade statistics mostly measure a different kind of weapon from the one armed groups carry. Keep that in mind whenever someone uses a SIPRI total to argue about terrorism.

Where do terror groups really get their weapons?

Mostly by capturing, looting and diverting weapons that governments already own, at least in the two regions with the best tracing data. The most detailed study I found is Conflict Armament Research’s Weapons of the Islamic State, built on a three-year field investigation in Iraq and Syria (Al Jazeera, 2017). Its main findings, as reported by Reuters and others:

• Most Islamic State weapons were looted from the Iraqi and Syrian armies.
• About 90% of the weapons and ammunition originated in China, Russia and Eastern Europe, and China and Russia alone accounted for over half.
• CAR documented at least 12 cases of US-purchased weapons reaching IS, either captured on the battlefield or through shifting alliances within the Syrian opposition.
• At least 12% of recovered weapons came from Iraqi national stockpiles, much of it captured around Mosul in 2014.
• Fewer than 2% of the weapons were made since 2010.

What stands out to me is the arithmetic. Roughly nine in ten of those weapons came from a handful of producer regions, yet the route into IS hands was not a sale to IS. It ran through a sale to a state, then a military collapse, and in some cases through weapons passed to rebel factions who later lost them. CAR described its findings as a reminder of the contradictions in supplying weapons into wars where many armed groups overlap. That is a harder lesson than “arms dealers arm terrorists,” because it implicates the people trying to fight terrorism.

What does the Sahel evidence show?

It shows the same pattern in a very different place: local looting beats long-distance smuggling. In 2025 CAR published Point-Blank, a study of more than 700 weapons recovered between 2015 and 2023 from groups such as JNIM, Islamic State Sahel Province, ISWAP and Boko Haram in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and the Lake Chad region.

It found that at least one fifth were diverted from state custody in eight North and West African countries. The groups, CAR says, “have no unique weapon supply sources” and use predatory local methods like other armed actors. Researchers also found no evidence that the groups can get weapons directly from outside the central Sahel.

The Libya story, so often repeated, is smaller than people assume. Weapons produced and exported to the region after Gadhafi’s fall in 2011 made up just 7% of those seized, and CAR saw no sign of systematic long-range supply from Libya. Older Libyan-origin weapons were most likely bought on local markets (same report).

Co-author Leo Jarry told AFP that the 20% figure is probably an underestimate and that captured military materiel is the single biggest source, according to AFP’s account. He also said it was the groups’ local effectiveness that drew the attention of global jihadist networks, not the reverse. Some groups occasionally sell captured weapons, mainly for gold, which can push government-issued guns into wider circulation. After an attack on Wulgo, ISWAP even posted photos of drones among the items it seized.

CAR investigator Ashley Hamer put the risk this way: “Battlefield losses may be expected”, but the danger starts when unauthorized actors capture weapons and pass them on.

The stakes are high. The Sahel produced more than half of all terrorism deaths in 2025, compared with under 1% in 2007.

Did the weapons left in Afghanistan end up with militants?

Some reached the Taliban, but the scale is disputed and I could not verify a trail to other groups. The Pentagon’s inspector general reported that the Defense Department estimated about $7.12 billion in US-funded equipment was in Afghan forces’ inventory when the government collapsed, roughly 38% of the $18.6 billion allocated for such equipment from 2005 to 2021.

That included part of the 427,300 weapons, among them 258,300 rifles, the Defense Department had bought for Afghan forces.

Still, the number is shaky. SIGAR said it was unclear whether the $7.1 billion figure is accurate because of long-standing equipment tracking problems. SIGAR also called claims that the Taliban hold $80 billion to $85 billion of US equipment “significantly inflated”. One report says UN monitors warn that captured US-origin weapons are reaching the TTP, but that is a secondary account and I could not confirm it from UN documents. Pakistan now tops the terrorism index, so the question matters, yet I will not state a link the evidence does not support.

Is terrorism actually getting worse?

By deaths, no. The Global Terrorism Index 2026 from the Institute for Economics and Peace counted 5,582 deaths in 2025, down 28%, with incidents down 22% to 2,944. Both are the lowest since 2007.

The picture is uneven, though. Pakistan leads the index for the first time, with 1,139 deaths, and six of the ten worst-hit countries are in sub-Saharan Africa. Nearly 70% of deaths occurred in just five countries: Pakistan, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Western terrorism deaths rose 280% to 57, and 93% of fatal Western attacks since 2021 were carried out by lone actors. Islamic State and its affiliates stayed the deadliest group, behind just under 17% of attacks (all from the IEP key findings).

Terrorism is also a conflict-zone problem. In the 2024 edition, over 90% of attacks and 98% of deaths in 2023 happened in conflict zones. My reading is that the sharper question is how weapons circulate in war zones with weak stockpile control, not how they move through peacetime trade.

For scale, UNODC estimated 458,000 intentional homicides in 2021, and an average of about 440,000 a year from 2019 to 2021, more than conflict and terrorism deaths combined. Firearms were used in an estimated 75% of killings in the Americas, against 17% in Europe and 18% in Asia, and organized crime accounted for 22% of homicides. Comparing 2021 homicides with 2025 terrorism deaths is not apples to apples, but the gap is more than eighty to one. Terrorism is real and concentrated. It is not the main way guns kill.

How many guns are there, and who holds them?

About a billion, and most sit in civilian hands, according to the best worldwide estimate, which is now several years old. The Small Arms Survey estimated 1.013 billion firearms at the end of 2017: 857 million (85%) held by civilians, 133 million (13%) by militaries and 23 million (2%) by law enforcement. Civilian holdings grew from 650 million in 2006.

Americans held about 46% of the civilian total, with 120 guns per 100 residents, while Yemen came next at nearly 53 per 100. Survey author Aaron Karp was candid about the limits, noting that every figure for 230 countries and territories “includes some degree of estimation”. I could not find a newer worldwide count from the same project, so read these as 2017 numbers.

Trafficking is the harder part to measure. UNODC’s 2020 Global Study on Firearms Trafficking counted at least 550,000 seizures and said the real figure is higher. Around two-thirds of seizures were made on the legal ground of illicit possession, and trafficking often shows up only once a weapon is used in another crime.

Per a regional summary, fewer than 10% of seizures happen at borders. In other words, most weapons trouble is local, which fits the Iraq and Sahel findings.

What does globalization actually change?

More sellers, more routes and more places for a weapon to go missing. SIPRI identified 66 states as suppliers of major arms in 2021 to 2025. A record nine Middle Eastern firms and five Turkish ones made the Top 100, and Turkish drone maker Baykar earned 95% of its $1.9 billion arms revenue from exports. SIPRI also notes that China has tightened exports of critical materials since 2020, and that states and companies are diversifying their suppliers in response.

Here is my inference, not a finding in these sources: more suppliers means more export systems to police and more handoffs where a weapon can be lost. Yet the tracing data complicates the story.

Major-arms imports fell in Africa and the Middle East in 2021 to 2025, and CAR found no evidence of direct outside supply to the central Sahel groups. The legal trade has globalized. As a direct supply line to these particular groups, I cannot show that it has.

Does the Arms Trade Treaty stop diversion?

It sets the rule, but states struggle to apply it. The treaty now unites 118 States Parties, according to the EU statement at the 12th Conference of States Parties in Geneva in August 2026.

Article 11 requires every State Party involved in a transfer to prevent, detect and address diversion at every stage of the chain, and a Stimson Center study found significant strengthening of States Parties’ counter-diversion systems.

Still, a 2025 EU Council decision backing the treaty secretariat says diversion remains a major obstacle and that many States Parties face significant capacity challenges. The EU supports the treaty, so read that as an advocate’s assessment, though it matches what the tracing studies show.

A UN arms embargo on Libya has been in force since 2011, yet firearms from Gadhafi-era stocks still circulate in the Sahel because guns last for decades. Embargoes and licensing control the flow of new weapons. They do much less about stock already in the field.

What would actually shrink the flow of weapons to armed groups?

Securing the stockpiles that already exist, because that is where the leaks start. This is my reading of the evidence, not a policy consensus, and every option has a cost.

Start with the armies themselves. If at least a fifth of weapons seized from Sahel groups came from state custody, then barracks security, inventory control and ammunition tracking are counterterrorism tools as much as border patrols are. Hamer also argues that manufacturers and exporting countries could do more to limit diversion.

Next, think harder about who gets what. The Iraq and Syria cases show weapons moving from a donor to a state or rebel faction, then to IS after a collapse or a battlefield loss. Post-delivery monitoring is hard, yet it is exactly what Article 11 asks of states.

Finally, fix the data problem. UNODC’s Executive Director Ghada Waly calls firearms trafficking an “enabler and multiplier of violence and crime in every part of the world”, and the study describes it as largely invisible until a weapon turns up in another crime. Tracing seized weapons back to their point of diversion is how researchers like CAR found these patterns at all.

The trade-off is real. Sahel armies need weapons to fight groups responsible for more than half of terrorism deaths worldwide, and I do not have a clean answer for how to arm them without some leakage.

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About Sopranu

Sopranu is a Bangladeshi-born writer, lifelong bookaholic and devoted cinephile. He writes reviews, opinions and reflections shaped by close reading, careful research and a love of philosophy. Every piece on this site starts with the same question: what is this work really trying to say, and does it succeed?

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