Spatial analysis of suicide attack incidences in Kabul City

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

In the last two decades, suicide bombings became quite common among some communities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, USA, and a few African and European countries. The modeling of reported suicide bombings has been the subject of a few studies, but the pattern of incidents turned out to be difficult to assess. Nevertheless, to uncover the bombing patterns in past incident locations is of major importance because it can improve social security and save human lives. The Capital city of Afghanistan, Kabul, has experienced on average around one suicide attack in every month since 2001. The overall objective of this study is to characterize the spatial and temporal patterns of suicide attacks in Kabul City. This research primarily used last 5 years descriptive spatial information on suicide attacks in Kabul that brought to public by some local and international news paper to generate geographic point data. Suicide attack location points and potential target group establishment point’s data analyzed separately to explore inherent spatial point pattern in terms of intensity and interaction. Finally it analyzed spatial tendency between suicide attack location points on target group establishment locations. It has been explored that both suicide attack locations that occurred from year 2006 to 2010 within the urban habitat of Kabul and target group’s establishment locations are characterized by inhomogeneous intensity and clustered interaction pattern at 98% level of significance. Moreover, there is a tendency of choosing location for suicide attacks close to target group’s establishment location. Finally some interesting temporal characteristics of suicide attack incidences also presented in this study.