Terrorism, over the years, has proven to be almost impossible to tame, a fact that the 10 countries with the most suicide bombers know only too well.
According to the report on global terrorism issued by the Institute for Economics & Peace, the overall Global Terrorism Index of the world worsened by 6% in 2015 as compared to 2014. Global deaths however reduced by 10%. Although that seems like the world is moving towards peace, it really doesn’t make much of a difference as more than 29,000 people still passed away from this world as a direct consequence of terrorist attacks.
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Suicide attacks are a very special form of terrorism. Not only does the perpetrator end up killing the people around him, but blows himself up too. The first question that would arise in any sane person’s mind is this: what could possibly be so momentous that it would drive a man to take his own life in the process of murder? Well, in the past, suicide bombing was something that occurred only during wars as a crime of passionate patriotic soldiers, ready to fight to their death. It was a concept too horrible to be contemplated in other circumstances. The assassination of Russian Emperor Tsar Alexander II in 1881 was the first official suicide bombing and opened the doors for suicide bombing to be used as a weapon. Today, however, the concept of suicide attacks is a completely different story. These attacks are instigated by terrorists to spread fear among the people. They are tied mostly to Islamic extremist groups, people who have manipulated the words of the Quran to fit their disgusting motives. But contrary to popular belief, all suicide bombers do not think alike. Some are recruited to take part in the twisted version of “Jihad” that these terrorists have cooked up. They are told that their sacrifice would be welcomed by God, giving them a guaranteed place in heaven. Some are brainwashed into thinking that even with bombs strapped to their body, they will remain unharmed while their enemies will be destroyed. This type of thinking is usually hammered into innocent children who don’t know any better, like this poor Afghan boy who was saved at the last moment. Some perpetrators of suicide attacks, on the other hand, actually do it for entirely personal reasons. For example, the shooters of the infamous Columbine High School Massacre committed suicide right after rampaging the school with guns and shooting everyone they could find. Such attacks are usually for personal vengeance or due to psychological issues and are far from religious.
While all the types of suicide attackers listed above do the deed with their own consent, some terrorists use “proxies” as well. They threaten ordinary people into doing their dirty work in exchange for the victim’s family’s safety. Needless to say, proxies are not exactly thrilled about committing murder and suicide.
Even though there are a wide variety of suicide attacks out there, the ones motivated by religious extremism are still the most common. They are mostly initiated by the 10 Biggest Terrorist Groups in the World. It’s actually ironic that the religion that declares suicide as forbidden is the religion in whose name terrorists have made suicide bombing the norm. Furthermore, the Quran states that killing a man is tantamount to slaying mankind entirely, which proves that murder is a huge sin for Muslims and also that these terrorists are not at all a manifestation of Islam. Islamophobes, I’m sure, would beg to differ, but it is what it is.
Now let’s get back to listing the 10 countries with the most suicide bombers. We referred to the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST) 2016 Suicide Attack Database, which details the suicide attacks made in each country from 1982 to June 2016. Since it’s safe to assume that the country with the most suicide bombings houses the most bombers, we used the number of attacks as our ranking criterion. However, we filtered the database for attacks between 2010 and 2016 as we wanted to make a list that is representative of recent times. Furthermore, we only considered attacks that used belt bombs, car bombs or other explosive devices as weapons.
