Suicide Bombing

Most prevalent today in the Middle East, armed violence, generally involving civilians, in which the perpetrator is prepared to lose his or her own life in the attack. Since the term implies the existence of a bomb of some sort, suicide bombing per se has only become possible in the modern era with the advent of explosive materials.

The idea of intentionally sacrificing one's life to harm one's enemies is probably as old as warfare itself. In recent decades, however, suicide bombing has been associated primarily with three main phenomena—the Japanese kamikaze attacks of World War II, the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, and the violent Palestinian struggle against Israel.

Insofar as terrorism is a concept that describes violence aimed primarily at instilling fear into a group of people, not all forms of suicide bombing are terrorist, although they are all vicious in nature. Some have argued that suicide attacks against strictly military targets (such as the World War II kamikaze strikes) do not qualify as terrorist acts since their primary goal is to physically destroy an armed opponent and not to terrorize a civilian populace. All suicide bombing, however, owes its effectiveness to the absolute determination of the perpetrator to accomplish his or her deadly mission at all costs.

History of Suicide Bombing

The term “suicide bombing” entered the media vocabulary in the early 1980s, when members of the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah began to detonate bombs after infiltrating enemy compounds in Beirut, Lebanon, killing themselves in the process. The most infamous of these attacks occurred at a Marine barracks in Beirut on October 23, 1983, and left 241 U.S. military personnel dead. War historians subsequently connected Hezbollah's technique with the famous kamikaze attacks perpetrated at the end of World War II by the Japanese air force and navy against American warships in the Pacific.

Since the 1980s, suicide bombing has been adopted by many armed groups, notably Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (all in Palestine), and the Tamil Tigers (in Sri Lanka). On September 11, 2001, 19 Arab men hijacked four commercial planes and piloted them into selected buildings in the United States in a suicide bombing of unprecedented scale, killing themselves and almost 3,000 other people. In recent years, more than 20 countries across the globe have experienced suicide bombings.

As a military tactic, suicide bombing is more likely to be employed in asymmetric warfare—that is, in a conflict between two unequal forces. A perpetrator who does not have to worry about a postoperation escape plan is an enemy that cannot be deterred by the threat of imprisonment, torture, or death. For that reason, antiterrorist specialists have long been frustrated in trying to formulate a coherent strategy to neutralize the devastation wrought by suicide bombers. Most experts agree that the only way to guard against such attacks is to prevent potential perpetrators from acquiring what is, arguably, a death wish.

Profile of a Suicide Bomber

Due to the extensive media coverage of the countless suicide attacks that have occurred in the past two decades in the Middle East, the words “suicide bomber” immediately bring to mind a militant Islamic fundamentalist. Fighting against an Israeli army that is vastly superior in weaponry and organization, for example, Palestinian militants have increasingly resorted to suicide attacks, aimed at striking fear into the hearts of the Jewish civilian population of Israel.

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