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Throughout the 1990s, use of the suicide vest spread to militants around the world, and was frequently deployed in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
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Not only did it allow for precise targeting, but also instilled an increased sense of horror and terror among the wider population that anyone-man or woman-might be the next bomber,” Joshua Roose, senior research fellow at the Institute for Religion, Politics and Society at the Australian Catholic University, told TIME. “The LTTE are widely credited with mainstreaming the use of the suicide vest as a force multiplier. The Tamil Tigers “perfected” the use of suicide bombers, invented the suicide belt, and pioneered the use of women in suicide attacks, according to the FBI, which listed the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. These Are Some of the Victims of the Sri Lanka Easter Bombings How did terrorists refine suicide bombings as a weapon? Read More: A 5th Grader and a ‘Big-Hearted’ American. “There had been 273 that we can verify who have actually killed themselves in suicide attacks for the Tamil Tigers.” They were “actually the world leader in suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2003,” Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, told NPR. Perversely, the group characterized the act as one of “giving yourself” rather than killing.īy the time the civil war officially ended in 2009, experts estimated that the Black Tigers, the group’s suicide squad, had carried out most of the suicide attacks recorded around the world up until that point. “Tamil Tigers were mainly responsible for developing suicide bombings as a terrorist weapon and it was emulated by terrorist groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries,” Riaz Hassan, emeritus professor of sociology at Flinders University in Australia, and an expert on suicide missions, told TIME.įoreshadowing the strategy of jihadis to come, Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers’ founder and leader, created a culture that glorified martyrdom and encouraged suicide bombings. But according to experts, the Tiger’s frequent attacks thereafter may have marked a turning point, after which suicide attacks became a widespread weapon used by extremists around the globe. That explosion echoed the 1983 bombing of the U.S. The Tigers, seeking an autonomous state for an ethnic group that makes up about 15% of the population, first used suicide tactics in an attack on the Sri Lankan army in 1987. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE), more commonly known as the Tamil Tigers, didn’t create the phenomenon of suicide bombing, but they did institutionalize the tactic during their guerrilla warfare against the Sri Lankan government forces from 1983 to 2009. What is the history of suicide bombings in Sri Lanka?
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Here’s what to know about the scourge of bombings that has afflicted the country of 22.5 million where the suicide vest was invented.