The female suicide bomber who blew herself up in a raid in northern Paris in Saint Denis came as a shock. However, Hasna Ait Boulahacen was not the first female suicide bomber the world has seen.
There have been female terrorist suicide attackers for decades. They were dispatched by secular, leftist organisations in the 1980s in Lebanon, and by ethno-separatist groups such as the Kurdish PKK and the Tamil LTTE in Sri Lanka in the 1990s.
In May 1991, a Tamil female suicide bomber assassinated former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperumbedur, Tamil Nadu.
In 2000, Chechen groups began launching suicide attacks by women. So-called "black widows" were involved in a series of spectacular terrorist actions, the Guardian reported.
In Pakistan's history of suicide bombings, there have never been any female attackers. However, involvement of children in suicide attacks has been reported frequently.
According to a CNN report, Pakistani and U.S. officials said that a top Taliban leader in Pakistan is buying and selling children for suicide bombings where some of the children are as young as 11.
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The most intensive user of female attackers has been seen in the Nigerian-based group Boko Haram, the leader of which swore allegiance to ISIS earlier this year. Just over two months ago four female suicide bombers killed dozens of people at mosques in north-east Nigeria.
Dozens of women have been used as bombers by the group over the past eight months. Some were children, as young as 10 years old.
While there were few if any successful suicide attacks anywhere in the world from the end of World War II until 1980, between 1981 and June 2015, a total of 4,620 suicide attacks occurred in over 40 countries, killing over 45,000 people.
During this time, the global rate of such attacks grew from an average of three a year in the 1980s, to about one a month in the 1990s, to almost one a week from 2001 to 2003, to approximately one a day from 2003 to 2015.
Suicide attacks tend to be more deadly and destructive than other terror attacks because they give their perpetrators the ability to conceal weapons, make last-minute adjustments, and because they dispense with the need for remote or delayed detonation, escape plans or rescue teams.
They constituted only four percent of all terrorist attacks around the world between 1981 and 2006, but caused 32 percent of all terrorism-related deaths (14,599).
Ninety per cent of those attacks occurred in Iraq, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Sri Lanka.
Overall, as of mid-2015, about three-fourth of all attacks occurred in just three countries-Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
