Suicide bombings at highest numbers in history since Iraq invasion RAW STORY

Published: Friday April 18, 2008



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Print This Email This Surge: 2007 saw double number of bombings of any year ever recorded Suicide bombings have risen to their highest levels in recorded history since the invasion of Iraq, according to a new report buried on page A18 of Friday's Washington Post. Of the 1840 suicide bombings since 1983, the year a suicide bomber attacked the US Embassy in Lebanon, 920 -- or 50 percent -- of suicide bombings have occurred since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. More than 82% of the suicide bombings last year were in Iraq. The number of bombings last year, 658, was more than twice the number of attacks at any point in the last 25 years. The unpublished research was compiled by US government experts and leaked on condition of anonymity. Suicide bombers engaged in 658 strikes across the globe in 2007; 542 were in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. More than four-fifths of the suicide bombings over that period have occurred in the past seven years, the data show. The bombings have spread to dozens of countries on five continents, killed more than 21,350 people and injured about 50,000 since 1983, when a landmark attack blew up the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.



Today is the 25-year anniversary of that attack, the first of a series of large suicide bombings targeting Americans overseas.



"Increasingly, we are seeing the globalization of suicide bombs, no longer confined to conflict zones but happening anywhere," said Mohammed Hafez of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and author of the book "Suicide Bombers in Iraq." He calls the contemporary perpetrators "martyrs without borders."



The unpublished data show that since 1983, bombers in more than 50 groups from Argentina to Algeria, Croatia to China, and India to Indonesia have adapted car bombs to make explosive belts, vests, toys, motorcycles, bikes, boats, backpacks and false-pregnancy stomachs.



Of 1,840 incidents in the past 25 years, more than 86 percent have occurred since 2001, and the highest annual numbers have occurred in the past four years. The sources who provided the data to The Washington Post asked that they not be identified because of the sensitivity of the tallies.

The data show more than 920 suicide bombings in Iraq and more than 260 in Afghanistan, including some that killed scores of U.S. troops. All occurred after the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.



The exact number of U.S. casualties from the bombs in Iraq is classified "because it might show the effectiveness of the enemy's weapon," said Maj. Brad Leighton, a U.S. spokesman in Iraq. "They won't even give the number to me." Get more details here.