Suicide Bomb Blitz

NYT: All-Day Suicide Bomb Blitz Claims 22 Lives in Baghdad

Using numbers and ratios to understand the effectiveness ofsuicide bombing can be very problematic, because terrorist tactics clearly affect many more than their direct victims. But I was struck by the numbers in this NYT report of Friday’s “suicide bomb blitz.”

A spate of suicide attacks in Baghdad continued on Friday, as insurgents struck at American and Iraqi security forces around the city using at least eight suicide car bombs, killing at least 22 people and wounding scores more, officials said.

…
In the deadliest of the suicide attacks, 8 people were killed and 20 wounded when a suicide bomber driving a maroon Opel blew himself up outside an Iraqi Army base in the Shaab neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad around 1:45 p.m., an Interior Ministry official reported. Most of the casualties were Iraqi soldiers, the official said.

About four hours later, a suicide car bomber attacked police commandos who were patrolling the Shorta neighborhood, killing 5 people, including 3 commandos and 2 civilians, and wounding 41, including 8 commandos and 33 civilians.

So eight suicide bombers killed 22 Iraqi soldiers and civilians. That’s just under three victims per terrorist. Isn’t suicide bombing a tactic of inflicting a lot of casualties, such as blowing up a whole busload of Israeli schoolkids or a barracks full of U.S. Marines? When one suicide bomber blows up a couple dozen people, he has achieved a certain horrid effectiveness. But three victims per suicide mission? Note that 8 were killed in one attack and 5 in another (13 in these two deadliest attacks). That means that the other six terrorists killed nine people. (Maybe my arithmetic or reading of the article is wrong.)

I do not underestimate the size of the pool of willing terrorists, but if I were Zarqawi, I’d prefer more lethal results from these attacks.

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