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This article is about suicide attacks for political and/or military reasons.

For criminal, personal, and/or non-political killings ending in suicide, see Mass murder or List of massacres

A suicide attack is an attack on a military or civilian target, in which an attacker intends to kill others, knowing that he or she will either certainly or most likely die in the process (see suicide). The means of attack have included vehicles filled with explosives, passenger planes carrying large amounts of fuel, and individuals wearing vests filled with explosives. Synonyms include suicide-homicide bombing, martyrdom operations, predatory martyrdom. Strictly speaking, an attack may not be considered a suicide attack if the attacker is not killed (although they might hope and plan to be), or if there is some question as to whether their intention is to be killed (even if the attack is certain to kill them).

Although use of suicide attacks has occurred throughout history — particularly with the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II — its main notoriety as a specific kind of attack began in the 1980s and involved explosives deliberately carried to the target either on the person or in a civilian vehicle and delivered by surprise. (Older examples are historically questionable or misplaced. Historical doubt surrounds the actions of legendary 14th century Swiss hero Arnold von Winkelried, which was in any case an act in the heat of battle. Some have cited Samson's destruction of a Philistine temple (as recounted in the Book of Judges) as an ancient example of mass murder-suicide. But it cannot qualify as such because Samson was directly dependent on God for the use of his enormous strength, as his temporary loss of it a short time earlier shows.) Following the success of a 1983 truck bombing of two barracks buildings in Beirut that killed 300 and helped drive American and French Multinational Force troops from Lebanon, the tactic spread to insurgent groups like the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, Palestinian groups like Hamas, and Al-Qaeda.

During this time the number of suicide attacks has grown rapidly, from an average of 4.7/year in the 1980s to 180/year in the first half of the 00s, and from 81 suicide attacks in 2001 to 460 in 2005. Particularly hard-hit by attacks have been military and civilian targets in Sri Lanka during Sri Lankan Civil War, Israeli targets in Israel since 1994, and Iraqis since the US-led invasion of that country in 2003.

Observers believe suicide attacks have become popular because of their effectiveness in killing, but the motivation of recent attack campaigns is a matter of some controversy. One scholar, Robert Pape, attributes over 90% of attacks prior to the Iraq Civil War to the same strategic goal: the withdrawal of the occupying forces from a disputed territory; while another, Scott Atran, argues that since then the overwhelming majority of bombers have been motivated by the ideology of Islamist martyrdom,

1. Boris Johnson, suggested in a 'Spectator' editorial on 23 July 2005 that, “As far as we can make out, there would be little to prevent the police leading the Archbishop of Canterbury off in chains for preaching on Samson’s bringing-down of the temple” if proposed laws against “indirect incitement of terrorist activities” were enacted, which the “Home Office Minister Hazel Blears has suggested … could be used to prosecute anyone who described a suicide-attacker as a ‘martyr’.”
2. The Moral Logic and Growth of Suicide Terrorism Figure 1, p.128
3. The Moral Logic and Growth of Suicide Terrorism Figure 2, p.129
4. Pape's tabulation of suicide attacks runs from 1980 to early 2004. (Pape, Dying to Win (2005))