# Context Pakistan Suicide Bombing Attacks (1995-2016) Suicide bombing is an operational method in which the very act of the attack is dependent upon the death of the perpetrator. Though only 3% of all terrorist attacks around the world can be classified as suicide bombing attacks these account for 48% of the casualties. Explosions and suicide bombings have become the modus operandi of terrorist organizations throughout the world. The world is full of unwanted explosives, brutal bombings, accidents, and violent conflicts, and there is a need to understand the impact of these explosions on one’s surroundings, the environment, and most importantly on human bodies. From 1980 to 2001 (excluding 9/11/01) the average number of deaths per incident for suicide bombing attacks was 13. This number is far above the average of less than one death per incident across all types of terrorist attacks over the same time period. Suicide bombers, unlike any other device or means of destruction, can think and therefore detonate the charge at an optimal location with perfect timing to cause maximum carnage and destruction. Suicide bombers are adaptive and can quickly change targets if forced by security risk or the availability of better targets. Suicide attacks are relatively inexpensive to fund and technologically primitive, as IEDs can be readily constructed. World has seen more than 3,600 suicide bombing attacks in over 40 countries since 1982. Suicide Bombing has wreaked havoc in Pakistan in the last decade or so. From only a couple of attacks before 2000, it kept escalating after the US Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, promiscuously killing hundreds of people each year, towering as one of the most prominent security threats that every single Pakistani faces today. The conundrum of suicide bombing in Pakistan has obliterated 6,982 clean-handed civilians and injured another 17,624 in a total of 475 attacks since 1995. More than 94% of these attacks have taken place after year 2006. From 2007 to 2013 the country witnessed a suicide bombing attack on every 6th day that increased to every 4th day in 2013. Counting the dead and the injured, each attack victimizes 48 people in Pakistan. Pakistan Body Count (www.PakistanBodyCount.org) is the oldest and most accurate running tally of suicide bombings in Pakistan. The given database (PakistanSuicideAttacks.CSV) has been populated by using majority of the data from Pakistan Body Count, and building up on it by canvassing open source newspapers, media reports, think tank analyses, and personal contacts in media and law enforcement agencies. We provide a count of the people killed and injured in suicide attacks, including the ones who died later in hospitals or homes due to injuries caused or aggravated by these attacks (second and tertiary blast injuries), making it the most authentic source for suicide attacks related data in this region. We will keep releasing the updates every quarter at this page. # Content Geography: Pakistan Time period: 1995-2016 Unit of analysis: Attack Dataset: The dataset contains detailed information of 475 suicide bombing attacks in Pakistan that killed an estimated 6,982 and injured 17,624 people. Variables: The dataset contains Serial No, Incident Date, Islamic Date (based on Islamic lunar calendar), approximate Time, Long-Lat, City, Province, Location, Location Sensitivity & Type, Target type and Sect, Open/Close Space (as it will change the impact of blast waves due to reflection), min and max number of people killed and injured, number of suicide bombers, amount of explosive being used and the name of hospitals where victims went for treatment. Sources: Unclassified media articles, hospital reports, think tank analysis and reports, and government official press releases. # Acknowledgements & References Pakistan Body Count has been leveraged extensively in scholarly publications, reports, media articles and books. The website and the dataset has been collected and curated by the founder Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani. Users are allowed to use, copy, distribute and cite the dataset as follows: “Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, Pakistan Body Count, Pakistan Suicide Bombing Attacks Dataset, Kaggle Dataset Repository, Jan 25, 2017.” # Past Work 1. Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani and Daniel Kirk, “[Simulation of Suicide Bombing – Using Computers to Save Lives][1]”, I-Universe, New York, NY, April 2011 2. Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani and Daniel Kirk, “Modeling and Simulation of Explosion Effectiveness as a Function of Blast and Crowd Characteristics”, The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation: Applications, Methodology, Technology, Sage Publications with Society of Simulation, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 79-95, Vista, CA, USA, October 2009 3. Muhammad Irfan and Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, “[Suicide Terrorism and its New Target –Pakistan][2]”, in Wars, Insurgencies and Terrorist Attacks: A Psychosocial Perspective from The Muslim World, by Unaiza Niaz, Oxford University Press, Canada, July 2010 4. Sana Rasheed, [Data Science for Suicide Bombings][3], I-Universe, New York, NY, December 2016 5. Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani and Sana Rasheed, “Terrorism: What Data Sciences Can Do?”, 20th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2014, Data Framework Track) at Bloomberg, New York, NY, USA (August 24-27, 2014) 6. Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, “Suicide Bombing Forecaster – Novel Techniques to Predict Patterns of Suicide Bombing in Pakistan”, 2012 Conference on Homeland Security, part of 2012 Autumn Simulation Multi-Conference, San Diego, CA, USA, October 28 – 31, 2012 7. Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, “BlastSim – Simulation to Save Lives”, IEEE/SIC Winter Simulation Conference, PhD Colloquium, Austin, Texas, December 13-16, 2009 8. Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, Fawzi Alghamdi, and Daniel Kirk, “BlastSim – Multi-agent Simulation of Suicide Bombing“, IEEE Symposium: Computational Intelligence for Security and Defense Applications (CISDA), Ottawa, Canada, July 8-10, 2009 9. Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, Eyosias Imana and Daniel Kirk, “Virtual Iraq – Simulation of Insurgent Attacks”, IEEE Workshop on Computational Intelligence in Virtual Environments (CIVE), March 30-April 2, 2009 10. Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, Eyosias Imana, and Daniel Kirk, “Random Walk in Extreme Conditions – An Agent Based Simulation of Suicide Bombing”, IEEE Symposium on Intelligent Agents, March, 2009 11. Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, Eyosias Imana and Daniel Kirk, “Escaping Death – Geometrical Recommendations for High Value Targets”, IEEE International Joint Conferences on Computer, Information and Systems Sciences and Engineering (CIS2E 08), Bridgeport, CT, December 5–13, 2008 12. Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani and Daniel Kirk, “Extreme Conditions for Intelligent Agents”, IEEE 2008 WI-IAT Doctoral Workshop, Sydney, Australia, December 9-12, 2008 13. Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, Andrew English & Richard Griffith, “The Effects of a Suicide Bombing: Crowd Formations”, Inter-service/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), Orlando, FL, Nov 26-29 2007 # Inspiration Some ideas worth exploring: - How many people got killed and injured per year? - Visualize suicide attacks on timeline - Find out any correlation with number of suicide bombing attacks with drone attacks - Find out any correlation with suicide bombing attacks with influencing events given in the dataset - Can we predict the next suicide bombing attack? - Find the correlation between blast/explosive weight and number of people killed and injured - Find the impact of holiday type on number of blast victims - Find the correlation between Islamic date and blast day/time/size/number of victims - Find the Top 10 locations of blasts - Find the names of hospitals sorted by number of victims # Questions? For detailed visit www.PakistanBodyCount.org Or contact Pakistan Body Count staff at info@pakistanbodycount.org [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Simulation-Suicide-Bombing-Using-Computers/dp/1440194416/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 [2]: http://www.oupcanada.com/catalog/9780199060139.html [3]: https://www.a