At least 30 percent of all suicide terrorist attacks conducted by Muslims are committed on behalf of groups with purely secular aims, such as the Kurdistan Workers Party (also known as the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan, or PKK), a Kurdish terrorist group in Turkey. Evidence from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the past two years largely fits within this pattern.
Meanwhile, the world leader in suicide terrorism over the years is a group that many in the West have not heard much about—the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. This group—secular in orientation, adhering to a Marxist political ideology, and whose fighters are predominantly Hindu—has carried out more suicide terrorist a...

At least 30 percent of all suicide terrorist attacks conducted by Muslims are committed on behalf of groups with purely secular aims, such as the Kurdistan Workers Party (also known as the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan, or PKK), a Kurdish terrorist group in Turkey. Evidence from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the past two years largely fits within this pattern.
Meanwhile, the world leader in suicide terrorism over the years is a group that many in the West have not heard much about—the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. This group—secular in orientation, adhering to a Marxist political ideology, and whose fighters are predominantly Hindu—has carried out more suicide terrorist attacks than Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

Three general patterns in the data support the conclusion that suicide terrorism is mainly a strategic phenomenon. As I explained in Dying to Win, these three properties are consistent with the above strategic logic but not with irrational behavior or religious fanaticism:
1. Timing: nearly all suicide attacks occur in organized, coherent campaigns, not as isolated or randomly timed incidents;
2. Territorial goals: suicide terrorist campaigns are directed at gaining control of what the terrorists see as their national homeland territory, and specifically at ejecting foreign forces from that territory; and
3. Target selection: suicide terrorist campaigns in the last two decades have been aimed at democracies, which make more suitable targets from the terrorists’ point of view. Nationalist movements that face nondemocratic opponents have not resorted to suicide attack as a means of coercion.