^aDepartment of Political Science, University of North Texas, P.O. Box 305340, Denton, TX 76203, U.S.A. E-mail: SAHLIYEH@UNT.EDU

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to investigate empirically the validity of the argument that the religious nature of the terrorist groups accounts for the increase in terrorism's lethality today. In an attempt to explore the relationship between religion and terrorism's newfound lethality, the study utilizes the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism's (ICT) "International Terrorism" database between 1980 and 2002. It employs Ordinary Least Squares regressions to test the hypotheses concerning the effects of religion, suicide bombing, and the intermingling of the two, on the number of terrorist-related deaths and civilian casualties. The study concludes that to understand modern terrorism's increased lethality, one needs to look further than religion as a motive and take into account modern terrorists' willingness to use "suicide terror" as their primary modus operandi.