The attacks on Paris on Friday involved an act of violence rare in the Western world: suicide attacks. Data from the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism show how just how unusual suicide attacks - involving bombers or other means - in Western Europe and North America are, with the last one resulting in a fatality being an attack on an IRS building in Austin, Texas, in 2010. Most years have zero.
Deaths from suicide attacks are much more common in the Middle East, the Afghanistan-Pakistan region and Africa, which have seen more than 90 percent of the fatalities in most years.
The Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism maintains a global database of suicide attacks going back to the early 1980s. This particular type of violence really took off in the 2000s, starting with the World Trade Center attack on Sept. 11, 2001. Since 2000, by far the greatest number of suicide attacks have taken place in Iraq, followed by Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria.
Now, this doesn't pick up on some of the other major terrorist attacks that have happened in recent years, such as the Mumbai crisis in 2008 that killed 167 people, the Madrid train bombings in 2004 that killed 191, or the seige of the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi that killed 67. According to the Chicago Project, those didn't qualify as suicide attacks.
