海角大神

The worldwide incidence of suicide bombings , driven largely by worsening conflict in Iraq, according to a new Israeli study. Most were carried out by Sunni聽Muslim聽militants聽in the Middle East,聽but researchers also found a significant uptick in聽other parts of the Muslim world, including Nigeria.

The rise in attacks was driven chiefly by non-state organizations, particularly the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria, amid a backdrop of weakening government and increasingly religious overtones in both fresh and ongoing conflicts.

There were a total of 592 attacks last year, a 94 percent increase over 2013, according to Israel鈥檚 Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). Those attacks killed about 4,400 people, compared with 3,200 the year before.

鈥淚S conquests in Iraq and Syria, followed by the mid-2014 declaration of the Islamic caliphate by IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, led to an escalation in violence, including the widespread use of suicide attacks by the group,鈥� concluded the report.

Indeed, attacks in Iraq accounted for nearly three-quarters of all those carried out in the Middle East 鈥� the worst year for such attacks in Iraq since 2008. The number of attacks in Syria remained steady at 41,聽of which聽IS claimed responsibility for one quarter. As the聽Syrian war increasingly聽spilled over into Lebanon, suicide bombings there quadrupled to 13.聽And聽Libya, torn by rival armed factions, saw 11 such attacks.

While self-annihilation as a tactic of war has a long history, Sri Lanka鈥檚 Tamil Tigers is , including the use of suicide vests and female bombers to assassinate leaders and sow sectarian fear among civilians.聽The group was defeated in 2009 by Sri Lanka鈥檚 military.

Today the tactic is more readily associated with militancy in the Middle East and other non-Arab Muslim countries, including Afghanistan and Nigeria. The INSS study identified a doubling in聽such attacks in聽Afghanistan and聽a tenfold spike聽in Nigeria, which saw 32 attacks. The number of suicide bombings perpetrated by women tripled to 15, all but one of which were carried out in Africa.

The study said no confirmed suicide bombings were carried out during last summer鈥檚 conflict in Gaza, contrary to Israeli media reports. A 2014 Pew study聽found that Palestinians in Gaza were the most supportive among more than a dozen countries or territories surveyed of . According to the Pew study, nearly two-thirds of respondents in Gaza agreed that suicide bombings could often or sometimes be 鈥渏ustified against civilian targets in order to defend Islam from its enemies.鈥�

The INSS study聽notes that the perpetrators of suicide attacks, praised by many Muslims as martyrs and聽resistance聽heroes,聽rarely succeed in killing foreign occupiers: only 3 percent of such attacks in 2014 targeted foreign forces.聽Indeed, the vast majority of victims were Muslims, many of them members of security forces.聽

Some academics, including University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, have argued that the tactic has become popular over the past decade or more among militant groups because of its effectiveness against foreign militaries and elected governments.聽

Of the 188 suicide attacks carried out by 1980 and 2001, Prof. Pape found that all but nine occurred within the context of a campaign to secure political or territorial concessions. He links these suicide bombings with the withdrawal of French and American troops from Lebanon in the 1980s, the withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon, Gaza, and parts of the West Bank, and the release of a jailed Kurdish leader in Turkey, among other successes.