9/11, depression and suicide attacks - courage or cowardice?

Hey guys,

I am new here and there's a question I've been thinking about for a longer time, precisely since the late Septembre 2001, when a debate started whether the terrorists Atta etc. have had an enormous courage to execute their actions or not, and since I remembered today that the ethical debate I was following back that time didn't give a final answer but more an estimation/ approximation concerning this very particular case, I thought I'd just try my luck and ask people from other specialties - you guys - for their opinion.

Perhaps from an e.g. psychological point of view the matter is a clearer one; so, I'd like to know your perspective and especially a psychologist's perspective regarding this topic (any psychologists here?):

Is committing suicide requiring courage or isn't it?

If it isn't, is it rather a proof of cowardice?

The (one) definition of courage I like most is the following:
"Courage is action in the face of fear."

Basing the argumentation on this premise: Since we can say that action happened (obviously action was taken, a change occured: from the living, to the dead), we would have to check whether the people we are talking about were facing fear or not.

I guess this can vary, right? Somebody sacrificing him/herself hasn't the same mind set like somebody who is suffering from depression. But theoretically both could show fear.

Therefore we would have to evaluate a person's mind set (= fear vs. absence of fear) every time a suicide occurred in order to be able to say whether the person had courage or not?

If so, the answer would rely heavily on the situation and hence there wouldn't be a definite answer, vulgo one couldn't just relate the property "courage" to acts like suicide but would need to take more info into consideration.

In our everyday life we use terms like "agony"; the German language does compared to English an imo better job here: I was told that in German "agony" is called "Todesangst", literally "fear towards death" and that "undaunted by death" would be in German "todesmutig", literally "death courage", which describes a person having so much courage that in a situation even if death was a possible outcome it wouldn't change ones mind, once one had to take decisions.

I am not really sure if referring to language could give useful hints regarding this topic since such terms are describing properties of people with "normal" mind sets only, which would lead to an exclusion of e.g. people suffering from depression, when talking about this issue; but since "courage" should be a property all people should possibly be able to have, this inherent exclusion would eradicate the usefulness of this words in this specific talk. I just added this thought, somebody might have a great idea about this.

To finally summarize: As experts and thinkers you guys certainly are, what would you say, do people with depression and/or suicide bombers show (in general) courage if they kill themselves, or cowardice (or neither)?

By the way, if I remember correctly the final consensus resp. the terrorists was the following: They showed courage but it was pointed out, that in this case it can't be considered being a virtue because it was used for something horrible.

I hope asking such stuff is ok here; even though the topic might be a difficult one I feel like it should be discussed properly and steemit might be the right place for this matter.