Suicide bombing

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A suicide bombing is a attack made in which the attacker expects to, and usually does, die: explosives are strapped to the attacker's body or loaded into the attacker's vehicle and detonated in a crowded area, or near a specific target, intended to kill the attacker and others as well. The primary reason for the "suicide" aspect of it is that by strapping a bomb to yourself you can ensure it goes off in the right place at the right time. Secondly, the bomber ensures they escape legal judgment for their crime, but considering that they're willing to die, they may not necessarily fear much judgment or punishment anyway. Such tactics are common among terrorist groups who profess a belief system that values the group or an afterlife over life on Earth, often out of perceived desperation. Suicide bombers are commended as heroes and martyrs amongst their own. In some cases, suicide bombers might have been coerced by other members of the organization or even forced into the attacks at gunpoint.

As mentioned, terrorists like to immortalize their own as martyrs, but everything is about marketing. Images of wrinkled, broken old men rotting away in prison will attract far fewer new recruits than images of young, fierce martyrs still full of life; there's a reason Che sold more t-shirts than his buddy Fidel. Convincing the recruit to blow themselves up ensures that the recruit "stays" forever young, sort of. More importantly, the martyr never has a chance to mature and later denounce the very same ideology they were once willing to die for.

They are particularly associated in the public mind with militant Islamist groups at this time, though suicide bombing is not exclusive to Islamist groups. Suicide bombing in fact finds its roots with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a terrorist organization which supports a sovereign socialist Tamil state in the north and east of Sri Lanka. Though it would appear it is predominantly politically motivated, the group has always been heavily ethnically and religiously motivated, much like its contemporary Islamic counterparts. During the waning years of World War II, Japanese soldiers were routinely coerced into suicide missions, including Kamikaze airplane pilots, special submarines of the Kõryu and Kairyū class, boats of the Shinyõ class, the Kaiten human torpedo, and human bombs used against tanks, motivated in part by Zen Buddhist ideas.

Because of the association of suicide bombing with extremist religious groups (or just "dirty foreigners" if you're raised with Western-centric Hollywood values) they have been used to powerful effect in pop culture by turning the tables slightly and portraying the bombers as either Western or for a friendly cause. One episode of British SAS comedy drama Ultimate Force showed a nationalistic, BNP-like organisation being behind a series of suicide bombings. In the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, the desperate human survivors resorted to suicide bombing Cylons and their collaborators in an allegory of the Iraq war.

See also

• 9/11
• Homicide bombing
• Shahid