Washington ? Deaths and injuries from terrorist attacks increased sharply last year, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, with government officials, police and security guards coming under greater attack than ever before, the State Department’s annual survey of global terrorism concluded Monday.

The scorecard on terrorist trends and attacks found that more than 20,000 people died and more than 38,000 were injured in about 14,000 incidents last year, an increase of 6,000 deaths, or 30 percent, from 2005, according to the department’s “Country Reports on Terrorism 2006.”

As in 2005, the vast majority of incidents and deaths occurred in the Near East and South Asia, primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.S. troops and local forces are battling Islamist militants. The two regions also accounted for 90 percent of the 290 attacks considered high-casualty incidents because they killed 10 or more people, the report said.

The report said 45 percent of all incidents considered terrorist attacks, about 6,600, occurred in Iraq, killing at least 13,340 people. The Iraq fatalities made up about 65 percent of the worldwide total of victims for the year. A U.N. report earlier this year estimated there were nearly 35,000 civilian casualties in Iraq last year but did not blame terrorism for all of them.

As fighting has intensified in Afghanistan, 749 attacks were reported there in 2006, an increase of more than 50 percent over the 491 attacks reported for 2005, the U.S. report said. At least 1,040 people were killed in Afghanistan, up from 684 reported dead from terrorist incidents the prior year.

Russell Travers, deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, which compiled the statistics, said analysts used the State Department’s definition of terrorist attacks. That definition includes many attacks in Iraq that some contend are not terrorist incidents but acts of guerrilla warfare. The figures do not include attacks on U.S. troops.

The annual report is mandated by Congress as a way of informing policymakers, the public and allies about trends in global terrorism.