The National Counterterrorism Center's interim director, John Brennan, called a new database that was to go online Wednesday "the most comprehensive U.S. effort to date to track terrorist incidents worldwide."

But he cautioned that comparing the new tally to previous ones was comparing apples to oranges.

In 2004, the counterterrorism center says, there were 3,192 terror attacks worldwide with 28,433 people wounded or killed.

In government numbers made public in April, using a more stringent definition of terrorism, the State Department and the counterterrorism center had tallied 651 significant international terror attacks with more than 9,000 victims.

<FORM class=yqin action=http://yq.search.yahoo.com/search method=post>    </FORM>Iraq leads the list with the greatest number of terror attacks, 866, according to the new database. In April, using the different definition, Iraq was said to have had 201.

Brennan said the shift was primarily the result of new, broader criteria for what constitutes a terror attack. An increase in analysts working on the project also contributed to the higher numbers, he added.

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