Report on Suicide Attacks in 2017: Fewer Attacks, More Women Bombers

Suicide attacks remain one of the most effective tools available to terrorist organizations to achieve their objectives. Suicide attacks are for the most part particularly lethal and create a profound feeling of helplessness among the affected public, given that there presumably is no way to deter a person who is prepared to kill him or herself in order to harm his/her enemies. Therefore, suicide attacks help the organizations and groups that deploy the suicide bombers build an image of power that is far greater than their actual power. Every year the Terrorism and Low Intensity Conflict research program at the Institute of National Securities Studies (INSS) compiles data on the suicide attacks that were carried out during the calendar year and the emerging trends related to this phenomenon. In recent years, it has become increasingly difficult to monitor the data, particularly in areas of intense activity such as Iraq and Syria, where the Islamic State used suicide bombers in the ongoing fighting. For example, Islamic State spokesmen published data in their propaganda that quote a very high number of suicide bombers. For example, the official Islamic State's media outlets proclaimed it was responsible for 771 suicide attacks in 2017 in Syria and Iraq alone. However, these figures were not verified by external sources, and therefore were not included in the summary that follows. Attacks counted here were verified by at least two different independent sources, and a coordinated suicide attack on multiple adjacent targets is counted as a single attack.

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