A new study found on average, "an increase in deaths from natural disasters of 25,000 leads to an increase in the following year of approximately 33 percent in the number of deaths from terrorism." Azure Gilman preempts the "correlation isn't causation" rejoinder:
After a disaster, a government must redirect its resources to cleaning up and rebuilding. This leaves them more vulnerable than they would otherwise be, and terrorists usually prefer “soft” targets. In the clean-up process, money and resources are often given to the least-vulnerable parts of the country in efforts to rebuild, which often greatly angers the most vulnerable. Natural disasters, then, reveal pre-existing fractures that are easily exploited by terrorists.
The Dish 