WASHINGTON (AP) – Terrorist attacks worldwide shot up by 25 percent between 2005 and last year, killing 40 percent more people as extremists used increasingly lethal means to carry out high casualty hits, the State Department says.

In its annual global survey of terrorism to be released later Monday, the department says about 14,000 attacks took place in 2006, mainly in Iraq and Afghanistan, claiming more than 20,000 lives. That is 3,000 more attacks than in 2005 and 5,800 more deaths, it says.

In addition, the number of injuries from terrorist attacks rose by 54 percent between 2005 and 2006 with a doubling in the number wounded in Iraq over the period, according to the department’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2006.

“By far the largest number of reported terrorist incidents occurred in the Near East and South Asia,” says the 335-page report, referring to the regions where Iraq and Afghanistan are located.

“These two regions also were the locations for 90 percent of all the 290 high-casualty attacks that killed 10 or more people,” says the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its official release.

The report says 6,600, or 45 percent, of the attacks took place in Iraq, killing about 13,000 people, or 65 percent of the worldwide total of terrorist-related deaths.

Afghanistan had 749 strikes in 2006, a 50-percent rise from 2005 when 491 attacks were tallied, according to the report.