A recent book, “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism”, finds that Suicide attacks has nothing to do with Islam as such.
In the writer’s own words (not verbatim):
Hezbollah is neither a political party nor a religious extremist party. It is a resistance of foreign (Israeli) occupation of Lebanon’s land in June 1982. At first, it was a shamll number of Shias supported by Iran. Later, more and more Lebanese came to resent Israel’s occupation. Hezbollah, never tight-knit, expanded into umbrella organisation that tacitly coordinated the whole operation of aloose collection of groups with a variety of religious and secular aims.
He notes, in his book, Hezbollah conducted a broad campaign against US, French, and Israeli targets from 1982 to 1986. Altogether these attacks, which included the infamous bombing or the marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, involved 41 suicide terrorists.
Robert Pape’s book covers all 461 suicide bombings around the globe.
Hezbollah conducted total 41 suicide attack. Pope could trace 38 of the bombers. And he finds, only eight were Muslim fundamentalists; 27 were from leftist political groups such as the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union; three were Christians, including a woman secondary school teacher with a college degree. All were born in Lebanon.
What all these suicide attackers shared was not a religious or political ideologybut simply a commitment to resisting a foreign ccupation. There is not the close connection between suicide terrorism and Islamist fundamentalism that many people think. Rather what nearly all suicide terrorist campaigns have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.
Religion is rarely the root cause. Although it is often used as a tool byu terrorist organisation in recruiting and in other effortsin service of the broader strategic objective. Most often it is a response to foreign occupation.
Relevant articles:
Wikipedia
Nationalism, Not Islam, Motivates Most Suicide Terrorists
Terrorism is nobody’s monopoly
