The Heroes of Beslan and Donatists

We need a new word for who maniacs are and what maniacs do.
ISIS "fighters," "terror" and "terrorist," do not explain either the acts or their motives adequately. A man is killed attacking a grade school, but not before he kills a number of children. A man straps bombs to himself, walks into a group of strangers and detonates them. These are not a martyr's act; a martyr is self-absorbed by his personal vision and ideal. He is quite unworldly. Indeed, the original meaning of the word "martyr" is "witness." Animosity is quite distant from it.
This, of course, is not a new question.

Christianity wrestled with the distinction between martyrdom and suicide from its beginning. Martyrdom has always been rife among the devoted. The North African Christian writer Tertullian praised thousands of Carthaginian Christians who supposedly approached the Roman governor en masse to request execution—(the governor is said to have declined.) North Africa grew these people. The Donatists were a branch of Christians in Northern Africa, and within this sect was a fanatical group called the Circumcellions--Berbers and considered heretics--in the fourth and fifth centuries. The Circumcellions were mostly lower-class peasants, many of whom were illiterate. Most kept watch over and took care of the graves of martyrs. It was a growth industry in North Africa.

Members of the sect carried massive clubs that they called Israelites. Those that were completely ready to become martyrs would attack people on the streets while crying out their religious beliefs, with the goal of forcing these random people to fight back and to kill them. Since they were dying as declared Christians, they saw themselves as fulfilling their goal of martyrdom. It was the ultimate way into heaven.

Perhaps we could coin a proper noun out of "atrocity." "Atrociter?"