While there were few if any successful suicide attacks anywhere in the world from the end of World War II until 1980,
[1] between 1981 and June 2015, a total of 4,620 suicide attacks occurred in over 40 countries, killing over 45,000 people.
[2] During this time the global rate of such attacks grew from an average of three a year in the 1980s, to about one a month in the 1990s, to almost one a week from 2001 to 2003,
[3] to approximately one a day from 2003 to 2015.
[2] Suicide attacks tend to be more deadly and destructive than other terror attacks
[4] because they give their perpetrators the ability to conceal weapons, make last-minute adjustments, and because they dispense with the need for remote or delayed detonation, escape plans or rescue teams.
[5] They constituted only 4% of all terrorist attacks around the world over one period (between 1981 and 2006), but caused 32% of all terrorism-related deaths (14,599). Ninety per cent of those attacks occurred in
Iraq, Israel, the
Palestinian territories,
Afghanistan, Pakistan or
Sri Lanka.
[6] (Over all, as of mid-2015 about 3/4 of all attacks occurred in just three countries—Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
[7])
Suicide attacks have been describes as a weapon of
psychological warfare[8] to instill fear in the target population,
[9] a strategy to eliminate or at least drastically diminish areas where the public feels safe, and the "fabric of trust that holds societies together".
[5]
The motivation of suicide attackers themselves varies. Kamikaze acted under military orders motivated by obedience and nationalism. Before 2003, most attacks targeted forces occupying the attackers' homeland, according to analyst
Robert Pape.
[10] Anthropologist
Scott Atran states that since 2004 the overwhelming majority of bombers have been motivated by the ideology of
Islamist martyrdom.
[11]
Puzzels
