The devastating Easter attacks brought suicide bombings back to Sri Lanka, where they had been a common tactic in the nation's civil war.
FILE - In this Oct. 16, 2006, file photo, a Sri Lankan soldier inspects the debris at the site of a suicide explosion by Tamil Tigers near Dambulla, about 150 kilometers northeast of Colombo, Sri Lanka. The April 21, 2019 deadly Easter attacks in Sri Lanka are a bloody echo of decades past in the South Asian island nation, when militants inspired by attacks in the Lebanese civil war helped develop the suicide bomb vest.
Similar bombs would then detonate across Israel, wielded by Palestinian militants, and later across the wider Middle East, Africa and Europe by Islamic extremists in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Experts put the first modern suicide bombing in 1881, when a radical killed Tsar Alexander II of Russia. What may be the first photographs of a suicide bomb vest came in the 1930s when China used them in its war against Imperial Japan around World War II. Japanese kamikaze pilots turned their own planes into weapons.
Over nearly 30 years of civil war, the Tamil Tigers would launch more than 130 suicide bomb attacks, making them the leading militant group in such assaults at the time. They killed a Sri Lankan prime minister and a former Indian prime minister among others, including bystanders. The war ultimately ended in 2009 with the government crushing the Tamil Tigers, with some observers believing that tens of thousands of Tamils died in the last few months of fighting alone.
Today, the number of suicide attacks since 1980 is around 6,000, Pape said, with around half in Iraq and Syria alone.
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