Suicide-bombers | Just what are they dreaming of?

The list of causes and countries in which people are prepared to turn themselves, and those around them, into bloody piles of bone and gristle is long and growing. In Sri Lanka on February 3rd, a woman on a platform at Colombo's main railway station blew herself up, killing at least 15 people, including seven schoolboys and their sports coach. The next day, Israel saw its first suicide attack for more than a year: at a mall in Dimona, a Palestinian put an abrupt end to his own life, and that of an elderly Israeli woman.

As rescuers tended to an unconscious youth who appeared to be a wounded victim, they noticed—just in time—that he too was wearing an explosives belt. Meanwhile in the Pakistani garrison town of Rawalpindi, where Benazir Bhutto was slain in December, a human bomb on a motorcycle rammed into a military bus, killing at least ten people.

There is almost always something mysterious about suicide: a gap between everything that was ever said by or known about the self-destroyer (even by his family), and the silence that remains.

In the case of politically inspired suicide, the motives are at once more obvious and more elusive. Just why are terrorists, often promising young men (or increasingly, women) with much to live for, willing to kill themselves as well as others? It is exactly eight years since the first international conference on suicide terrorism was convened in Israel; since then, dozens of security pundits have been searching for new answers to the question.

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