Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker set off a political firestorm after telling Axios this week that the United States has killed more people than al-Qaeda “pound for pound.”
The comment came during the September 17 episode of The Axios Show. Correspondent Alex Thompson asked Piker point-blank: “You once said that America is the top dog in terrorism. Do you think America then is worse than al Qaeda?”
“Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths, yes,” Piker answered. “We have caused tremendous terror all around the world.” He pointed to the February 2026 strike on a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, which Iranian authorities say killed more than 140 students.
“If you’re killing 140 schoolgirls, that is an act of terror,” he said, adding that he did not “mean that all Americans are terrorists.”
By the next morning, the clip was everywhere, and the remark set off immediate backlash from both parties. The Republican Party’s official account demanded that “every single Democrat” disavow him. New Jersey Representative Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat, wrote that “comparing America to al-Qaeda wasn’t an accident. Piker has built a brand on anti-American hate.”
While Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers, a Republican, tried to tie the remark to Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed, closely tied with Piker, Piker responded that he did not “agree with this statement” and gave “much weight to the statements made by a social media streamer.”
Piker, who faced similar criticism after saying on Twitch in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11,” a remark he later called imprecise and walked back, later wrote on X that Axios had turned “a nuanced answer about acts of terror this admin has caused” into “clickbait.”
A Term That Gained New Weight After 9/11
The word “terrorism” existed in law and scholarship long before September 11, 2001, but the attacks reshaped how central it became to American politics, policy and everyday language.
Nine days after the towers fell, President George W. Bush stood before Congress and declared a “war on terror,” a phrase that would define two decades of U.S. foreign policy, two invasions and a sprawling expansion of federal counterterrorism law and agencies. The word itself, already unsettled in legal and academic circles, took on new political stakes it has never fully shed.
Newsweek asked three of the country’s leading authorities on terrorism and the laws of war to explain how their fields actually define the term, and where the legal and academic lines fall.
“There is no universally accepted definition of terrorism,” Geoffrey Corn, a professor at Texas Tech University School of Law and director of its Center for Military Law and Policy, told Newsweek. Corn spent 21 years as a U.S. Army officer, finishing his military career as the Army’s senior law of war advisor. “Who gets to decide? Usually the government condemning it.”
A rough consensus does exist, Corn said. Terrorism generally involves “the use of unlawful violence, usually intentionally targeting people or things, to influence the policies and actions of governments or to simply spread terror.”
Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor and author of Inside Terrorism, a book that has stayed in print for nearly 30 years, defines it somewhat differently: “the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence by non-state actors in the pursuit of political change.”
“That is more or less the normative definition among scholars,” Hoffman said. “The legal definition is not terribly different, but there is no universal consensus or a single agreed upon definition of terrorism.”
Mary Ellen O’Connell, the Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, starts from a different premise than Corn or Hoffman. International law, she argues, not any single country’s domestic statute, is the framework that settles these questions for everyone.
“It is the only authoritative source of rights, duties, and definitions for all. Within international law we have had a consensus definition of terrorism since the 1930s. It is not considered technically binding because so many different states tend to support one national liberation organization or another,” she said.
The Numbers Behind the Claim
Brown University’s Costs of War Project found that more than 940,000 people were killed by direct violence in post-9/11 wars across Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan, including more than 432,000 civilians. Add indirect deaths from disease, displacement and the collapse of health systems, and the project’s total climbs past 4.5 million.
Al-Qaeda’s confirmed toll is smaller by orders of magnitude. The September 11 attacks killed 2,977 people. Its other major operations, the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings, the USS Cole and the 2004 Madrid train bombings, add a few hundred more.
But the Costs of War Project has repeatedly cautioned against reading its own numbers as a body count attributable to the United States specifically. Project director Stephanie Savell has said the research “does not ascribe blame to a country” because multiple armed parties fought in every one of these wars.
A 2011 peer-reviewed study in PLOS Medicine, built on the Iraq Body Count database, found that coalition forces were directly responsible for about 12 percent of more than 92,000 documented Iraqi civilian deaths between 2003 and 2008. Sectarian violence and unidentified perpetrators caused 74 percent. Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent groups caused roughly 11 percent.
London-based monitoring group Airwars puts U.S. airstrike deaths at a minimum of 22,000 civilians across six countries since 2001, with some estimates running as high as 48,000. The United Nations mission in Afghanistan found that in most years, the Taliban and other anti-government forces killed the clear majority of civilians there, though American airstrikes closed that gap in 2019.
Al-Qaeda’s own toll grows considerably once its offshoots are counted. A database maintained by the French think tank Fondapol attributes roughly 14,900 deaths to al-Qaeda directly and nearly 70,000 more to the Islamic State, which grew out of al-Qaeda’s Iraq branch. About 90 percent of Islamist terrorism’s victims have died in Muslim-majority countries, and most of them were Muslim themselves.
Intent, Not Body Count
Corn walked through the legal mechanics dividing the two categories of violence. International humanitarian law bars intentionally attacking anyone who doesn’t qualify as a lawful military target, and civilians fall into that protected category unless they take a direct part in hostilities.
“The law does not prohibit inflicting civilian casualties as long as they were not the intentional target, and killed or injured incidentally to an attack on a proximate lawful target, unless the civilian risk was assessed as excessive in comparison to the anticipated military advantage of attacking the target,” he said. “This is called the proportionality rule, but the test of legality is excessive imbalance.”
He added a caveat about a live example: the ongoing U.S. campaign of lethal strikes on alleged drug-trafficking vessels, which he said he would treat separately from that framework. “U.S. forces don’t intentionally target civilians or other protected persons or things,” he said of the broader military. “And when there is an outlier who does, he or she faces criminal consequences.”
Hoffman frames the divide through who is doing the killing. “Terrorism is mostly seen as a criminal act. Wars not necessarily so,” he said. “International law does allow countries to use violence in self-defense, but it is supposed to be proportional, and civilians should not be deliberately targeted. If they are, it is a war crime, not terrorism.”
He draws a further line that terrorism scholars have long debated among themselves. “The distinction that many terrorism scholars draw is between terrorism, violence by non-state actors, and state terror, violence committed by states designed to terrorize a population of its own citizens or foreigners and that is perpetrated by state agents or proxies on behalf of that state,” Hoffman said.
Why “State Terrorism” Never Made It Into Law
Piker’s comparison touches, whether he intended it or not, on a concept scholars call state terrorism. The term carries rhetorical force, but it carries almost no legal one.
The United Nations has tried and failed for more than two decades to pass a Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism, largely because member states can’t agree on whether a state’s own armed forces should ever fall under the term. Corn said the standstill reflects a hard truth.
“States cannot agree on a consensus general definition for international law purposes,” he said. The term can carry weight in narrower domestic contexts, he added, “for example by triggering sanctions or criminal liabilities,” but beyond that, “it is primarily a symbolic term.”
Hoffman agreed the label rarely produces legal consequences for state actors. “It is rhetorical,” he said, “since states or the leaders are rarely charged with terrorist offenses but with crimes against humanity or genocide for wantonly and deliberately targeting civilians.”
O’Connell rejects the idea that this gap is only political. “Regardless of this political stumbling block, there is plenty of solid law that makes the violence involved in terrorism always unlawful, whether by a state or non-state actor and whether perpetrated during armed conflict hostilities or in peace,” she said.
Applied to recent events, her framework leads somewhere Corn and Hoffman do not go. “Every person killed in the Iran War has been killed unlawfully,” she said, referring to recent U.S. strikes inside Iran, including the one on the school in Minab that Piker cited. “Some of those deaths were also war crimes.”
The Accountability Record
Separate from the legal definitions, a documented record exists on how the United States has handled its own civilian casualty cases. The Pentagon’s own internal files, obtained by The New York Times in 2021 and 2022, showed more than 1,300 civilian casualty allegations with few substantiated findings and rare disciplinary action.
In the 2021 Kabul drone strike that killed aid worker Zemari Ahmadi and seven children, an Air Force investigation concluded it was an honest mistake with no violation of the law of war. No one was disciplined. In the 2015 U.S. strike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that killed 42 people, sixteen personnel received administrative punishments and none faced criminal charges.
The 2007 Nisour Square shooting by Blackwater contractors in Baghdad, which killed 14 to 17 Iraqi civilians, produced convictions that President Trump later pardoned in 2020, a move United Nations experts called “an affront to justice.”
By comparison, no accountability mechanism exists for al-Qaeda’s leadership beyond military and intelligence operations aimed at killing or capturing them, since the group operates outside any state or legal system that could prosecute its members through conventional courts.
Corn and Hoffman both describe Piker’s numerical comparison as resting on a mistaken equivalence, between incidental civilian deaths under a body of law built around intent, and deliberate civilian killing that defines terrorism by most accepted measures. O’Connell draws her line elsewhere, not at whether a death was intentional, but at whether the use of force behind it was lawful to begin with.
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here.
