Suicide bombing

In a suicide bombing, the person perpetrating the attack and/or detonating the bomb expects to die. Suicide bombings, often called suicide attacks, have occurred throughout history as part of military or terrorist campaigns. The attacks turn humans into weapons, with the goal of killing as many other people as possible. To inflict the most damage, suicide bombings are generally carried out in crowded spaces, where the suicide bomber walks into the crowd and detonates explosives on his or her person. Suicide bombers often wear explosives under their clothes in the form of a vest or belt to blend in with the crowd as much as possible. However, other forms of suicide bombing, such as vehicle bombs, are prevalent as well. A main motivating factor behind suicide bombings is the idea of martyrdom, which is when someone is willing to give up his or her life for a cause. Some modern suicide bombers associated with terrorist groups are willing to go forward with attacks because of promised riches in the afterlife.

Background

Although suicide bombings have become a common occurrence in the twenty-first century, they are not new. The first recorded suicide bombing happened on March 13, 1881, with the assassination of Alexander II, the czar of Imperial Russia. The act was carried out by Ignaty Grinevitsky, a Polish anarchist and member of the People's Will, a terrorist group committed to killing the czar. The organization tried to kill the czar with dynamite bombs on numerous occasions between 1879 and 1881. All those attempts failed, and Grinevitsky and the organization grew desperate. On March 13, 1881, Grinevitsky and an accomplice planned to ambush the czar outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. The first attacker threw his bomb from a short distance away. The explosion damaged the carriage in which the czar was riding and forced it to stop. Grinevitsky then rushed toward his target and dropped a bomb at the czar's feet. The explosion killed them both. The night before, Grinevitsky had written that with his death, he would do all that it was his duty to do. In other words, he was willing and prepared to die for his cause.

In the decades after Grinevitsky's attack, other Russian revolutionaries killed themselves to attack their targets at close range. The attacks on Imperial Russia, however, never organized into a greater movement. None of the groups involved developed recruiting structures, for example, and the decision to die remained in the hands of individual bombers rather than the organization. It was not until World War II that suicide bombers became an organized military weapon. Imperial Japan launched more than three thousand human bombs, in the form of kamikaze-piloted planes, against American naval forces during the last year of World War II. The special attack units, known as Tokkotai, were created in desperation. With its navy destroyed in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, Japan was subject to increasingly brutal aerial bombardment. The Tokkotai were meant not only to have an impact on the battlefield, but also to send a message to Japan's enemies that would make the idea of a full-scale invasion of Japan more intimidating.

By the 1980s, suicide bombing became widely used by militant groups throughout the Middle East. On October 23, 1983, a young man crashed his vehicle into a building serving as a base for US Marines deployed as peacekeepers in Lebanon. After the truck came to a stop, the driver detonated tons of explosives inside, killing himself and 241 US military personnel. Shortly thereafter, a second bomber struck French troops stationed five miles north, killing 58 people. These attacks, and several before them, were the work of Shiite militant groups sponsored by Iran. Like the kamikaze pilots, the use of suicide bombers by the Shiite group was motivated by desperation. In 1982, Israel launched an invasion to destroy a Palestinian Liberation Organization in Lebanon. The Shiites, reeling from a multifront civil war, were caught in the middle and desperate for a retaliatory weapon. Iran's government provided it by organizing systemic use of suicide bombing by the Shiites. Leaders in Iran glorified the idea of self-sacrifice and provided the expertise and explosives that made mass vehicular bombs a reality.

Overview

Suicide bombings continued to grow in frequency throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Perhaps one of the deadliest suicide attacks of modern times was the coordinated events of September 11, 2001 (commonly referred to as 9/11). That morning, nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four American jetliners, all leaving airports on the East Coast and bound for California. Two of the planes crashed into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, causing their eventual collapse. A third plane struck the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and a fourth attack was thwarted by passengers on board who fought with the terrorists and brought the plane down in a field in Pennsylvania. The suicide attacks that day killed 2,996 people and injured more than 6,000.

The 9/11 attacks were a turning point in many ways. First, it showed advancement of terrorist tactics, particularly with regard to suicide attacks. Before 9/11, hijackings were long, drawn-out affairs in which the hijackers traded power over their hostages' lives for political concessions. The attacks on September 11, however, were about the aircraft rather than those on board. The passengers even proved to be a liability, as shown by the plane brought down in a Pennsylvania field. The goal of the attacks was to take over the planes and use them as massive missiles. To direct those missiles to their targets, the hijackers became the guidance system. Prior to their attack, the 9/11 suicide bombers went through pilot training to be able to properly guide the planes to their intended targets.

As evidenced by the 9/11 attack, the goal of suicide bombings is often to inflict as much damage and amass as many causalities as possible. In 2016, 469 suicide bombings were carried out by eight hundred attackers in twenty-eight countries. These bombings caused the deaths of more than 5,600 people. Although some attacks are carried out by individuals with no ties to a formal organization, often called lone wolves, most are the work of terror groups, such as al-Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and Boko Haram. To recruit willing participants, terrorist organizations glorify martyrdom and the afterlife. In many cases, suicide bombers are treated like heroes, and their recruiters make promises to care for their family members after they are gone. Suicide bombings declined sharply in the later 2010s and early 2020s but were still claiming many lives. In 2022, 31 suicide attacks were carried out in seven countries, killing approximately 360 people.

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