"Military
suicide" redirects here. It is not to be confused with Suicide in the
military. Result of Kiyoshi Ogawa's Kamikaze attack on USS Bunker Hill
(CV-17), May 1945.
A suicide attack is a violent
attack in which the attacker intends to kill others or cause great destruction
and expects to die in the process. Between 1981 and 2006, 1200 suicide attacks
occurred around the world, constituting 4% of all terrorist attacks but 32%
(14,599 people) of all terrorism-related deaths. 90% of these attacks occurred
in Iraq, Israel, the Palestinian
territories, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Sri Lanka.[1] Its primary use is as a weapon of psychological warfare
intended to affect a larger public audience.[2]
Although the use of suicide attacks
has been prevalent throughout history, particularly with the Japanese Kamikaze pilots of World War II, suicide attacks gained global
notoriety on October 23, 1983. Suicide attackers targeted the United States
Marine Corps and French
paratrooper barracks in Lebanon in the 1983 Beirut
barracks bombings during the Lebanese Civil War.
The suicide attack resulted in the death of 299 Multinational
Forces (MNF), including 241 United States servicemen and 58 French
paratroopers. The success of this attack undoubtedly played a significant role
in the attractiveness of suicide attacks to terrorist and insurgency
organizations worldwide. More recently, the number of suicide attacks has grown
significantly, from an average of less than five a year in the 1980s to 180 a
year in 2001-2005, in the main due to bombings in Iraq following the 2003 US-led invasion.[3]
The motivation of suicide attackers
is disputed. Robert Pape attributes
over 90% of attacks prior to the Iraq Civil War to a goal of withdrawal of
occupying forces.[4] Anthropologist Scott Atran argues that since 2004 the
overwhelming majority of bombers have been motivated by the ideology of Islamist martyrdom, and these attacks have been
much more numerous. In just two years, 2004–2005, there were more suicide
attacks, "roughly 600, than in Pape's entire sample."[5]
In recent times, the usual means of
suicide attack are an individual wearing a vest or driving a vehicle or
aircraft filled with explosives because the attacker can cause significant
casualties and devastation within a short time. Synonyms include suicide
bombing, suicide-homicide bombing, martyrdom operation, predatory
martyrdom, kamikaze and human bomb.
