Suicide terrorism, like 'terrorism' in general, is difficult to define. The act of committing suicide towards a particular objective is nothing new, and we have seen it done by the Bible's Samson and by the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II. The recent global phenomenon of the suicide attack started in the early 1980s, with groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and al-Dawa in Iraq. The former's 1983-85 suicide campaign against Israeli troops in southern Lebanon not only caught international attention, but was also considered an unmitigated success – unable to cope with the assault, Israel eventually retreated from Lebanon almost entirely for decades.
In Sri Lanka, the LTTE has been active since the 1970s, and has played a significant role in bringing suicide attacks to Southasia. The LTTE studied the success of Hezbollah's suicide attacks, but modified the technique to its own requirements. In her 2005 book Dying to Kill, Mia Bloom writes that Tamil Tiger head Velupillai Prabhakaran "saw the potential benefits of this method specifically in carrying out targeted assassination attacks in situations where it was difficult or impossible to attack a certain public figure or group of people using other methods."
The LTTE has thus been held responsible for the assassinations of several political leaders, including Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa. The LTTE is also unique in that it was one of the first groups to use women as suicide attackers, and to date 30 to 40 percent of the group's attacks have been carried out by women. If the tactic of suicide terrorism has brought attention to the Tamil Tigers' cause, the organisation has also contributed to the tactic by perfecting it on land, air and sea. The elite Sea Tigers, for instance, is well known for its ability to inflict serious casualties through suicide attacks on Sri Lankan Navy vessels.
Because of its effectiveness, by the mid-1990s the strategy of suicide attacking had caught the eye of al-Qaeda, which proceeded to conduct, coordinate and synchronise suicide assaults using multiple bombers. This led, of course, not only to the 1998 synchronised bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, but also to the attacks on the US of 11 September 2001. Al-Qaeda's greatest impact has been to inspire other groups to adopt its modus operandi. Besides the massive spread of global jihadi ideology to areas with disparate local grievances, al-Qaeda's influence has also manifested itself in the worldwide increase in suicide bombings. Indeed, out of more than 700 suicide attacks that have been recorded in the course of modern history, over 70 percent have taken place since 9/11.