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Thursday 7 June 2018

Suicide bombing

The first known suicide bomber in history was an Indian Queen. Rani Velu Nachiyar, the Queen of the Tamil kingdom of Shivagangai, set herself on fire and ran into an ammunition's storehouse to kill the British in 1780. 

Throughout the 19th century, suicide bombings remained rare.

The first suicide bomber that succeeded in killing a head of state was Ignaty Grinevitsky, a member of the Russian Left-wing terrorist group, The People's Willing. On March 13, 1881 Grinevitsky blew up himself and Tsar Alexander II

Source Today In History

Around 3,860 Japanese kamikaze pilots gave their lives in attacks during World War II when their bomb-loaded fighters crashed into Allied naval vessels.

The usage of the term "suicide bombing" dates back to the early 1940s. One of the first usuages was when a New York Times article referred to a Japanese kamikaze attempt on an American carrier as a "suicide bombing".

USS Bunker Hill (CV-17) after a kamikaze attack by the Japanese

From World War II, there were no reported incidents of suicide bombings until the 1980s, despite conflicts between insurgent groups facing a larger and better armed opponent (such as in Afghanistan, Angola, Vietnam, Northern Ireland and Nicaragua).

Suicide bombings became a feature of guerrilla warfare and terror tactics in Lebanon in the eighties. In 1994, Palestinian groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad began using suicide bombers against Israeli targets to disrupt peace talks.

The 9/11 attacks were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks by members of the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda on the United States September 11, 2001. Four groups of terrorists, each with a trained pilot, hijacked airplanes. Two of them flew into the World Trade Center's twin towers in New York City, and another into the Pentagon. The fourth plane crashed in an empty field in Pennsylvania before it could reach its target in Washington, D.C.

By far the most deadly country for suicide bombings of the 2000s was Iraq. A Lancet study, Casualties In Civilians And Coalition Soldiers From Suicide Bombings In Iraq, 2003–10: A Descriptive Study, concluded there were no suicide bombings before 2003.
It found that at least 1,003 suicide bombings caused civilian casualties in Iraq between 2004 and 2010, with at least 12,000 civilians killed. 

The number of suicide attacks grew enormously after 2000. By BoogaLouie

Suicide bombings in Iraq killed 60 times as many civilians as it did soldiers during the Iraqi war.

In 2014 a British sniper in Afghanistan killed six insurgents with a single bullet after hitting the trigger switch of a suicide bomber whose device then exploded.

Abdullahi Abdisalam Borleh was a suicide bomber who boarded the Somali owned Daallo Airlines on February 2, 2016 with explosives in his laptop intending to blow the whole aircraft. Twenty minutes after the take-off, the bomb exploded, creating a hole in the plane, and Borleh was sucked out of the aircraft. He was the only fatality as the blast occurred before it reached cruising altitude.

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