Perhaps the aspect of terrorism that has been least well understood by Western commentators is suicide terrorism. The major reason for mis-understandings is the assumption that the best explanation for suicide terrorism focuses on the characteristics of the individual suicide terrorist.
Surely the suicide terrorist must be insane, idiotic, illiterate, psychologi-cally abnormal, and completely different from the rest of us. This focus on individual characteristics, and neglect of context, is utterly mistaken and misleading.
We need to understand suicide terrorism in the larger context of a perceived war, in which a smaller, weaker, ill-equipped army fights a much stronger army. In order to clarify this point, I begin by highlighting the strategic use of suicide terrorism by military forces with few resources and then briefly reviewing the recent history of suicide terrorism.
Suicide terrorism is a rational strategy adopted by fighting groups with relatively few resources at war with a much more powerful adversary.
Suicide terrorists are the guided missiles of poor armies; they are the equivalent of what the U.S. military has in terms of satellite guidance systems and the precision missiles they direct at specific targets. Suicide terrorists can also hit their targets with pinpoint accuracy, using human intelligence and human lives as the main resource.
What makes suicide terrorism strategically so effective is that it is very difficult, in practice perhaps impossible, to guard against. Modern economies rely on mass movements of people, particularly in and around
major urban centers housing tens of millions of people from different eth-nic, religious, and national backgrounds. The diversity of people moving across borders and in and out of major urban centers makes it even more difficult to screen for suicide terrorists. The July 2005 suicide bombings in London illustrate this point: the four “home grown” suicide terrorists were part of immigrant communities settled in England, but had ties to radicals in Pakistan. In essence, these were “terrorists without borders”
putting into effect a rational plan for bringing the London transportation system and economy to a standstill.
Of course, to say that an action is rational is not to justify that action;
it is simply to point out that the action does not arise from irrational forces or some kind of “craziness.” Obviously suicide terrorism breaches the Geneva Conventions, most importantly by targeting civilians (critics of the United States would argue that the administration of President George W. Bush has also willfully set aside the Geneva Conventions during the invasion and occupation of Iraq).
A second point, distinct from the issue of rationality, is that in terms of its history in modern times, suicide terrorism is not necessarily tied to religion, it was first used extensively by secular, nationalist forces. The use of grenade-strapped foot soldiers against machine gun positions in trench warfare during World War I (1914–1918) was an early example of a “suicide mission,” because the attackers were often killed. The Japanese military used so-called “kamikaze pilots” to try to destroy U.S. and allied ships: these were basically missiles guided by suicide pilots into enemy targets (rather like a suicide car bomber directing his vehicle to explode against a U.S.-armored vehicle in occupied Iraq). But the modern history of suicide terrorism really begins with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, who in their fight for independence for the Tamil minority carried out hundreds of suicide attacks against government targets.
The Tamil Tigers represent an ethnic independence movement, not a religious movement. The special group of suicide terrorists they trained, the so-called Black Tigers, were a strategic force against the much larger and better equipped government forces. The motivation of the Black Tigers was to achieve an independent Tamil homeland; they were not motivated by religious zeal. In his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Robert Pape has pointed out that in the 1980s and 1990s, through until 2002 when the Tamil Tigers agreed to a cease-fire with the Sri Lankan government, the Tigers ac-counted for about a quarter of all suicide attacks committed around the world.52
The last decades of the twentieth century saw a rise in Islamic suicide terrorism. These include suicide attacks by Chechen Muslims against Russian interests, and by Al Qaeda mainly against the United States and
Fifth Floor 125 its allies. The largest of these attacks was the tragedy of September 11, and since then the focus has shifted to Iraq. Of course, the reasons why Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic forces attack Russian, U.S., and other majority group interests around the world have religious roots. But the same goal of “freeing Islamic lands” from non-Muslim forces could be attempted through many strategies other than suicide bombings.
There is nothing inherent to Islam that leads radical Muslims to adopt suicide terrorism. However, there is something characteristic of radical Muslims as a minority confronted by overwhelming enemy forces that is shared by some other minorities, such as Tamils in Sri Lanka faced by overwhelming government forces, which leads them to adopt suicide terrorism as a rational strategic choice. For example, in postwar Iraq, approximately 15,000 lightly armed and poorly trained insurgents are fighting a relatively far better equipped and superbly trained force of about 150,000 U.S. soldiers, as well as tens of thousands of U.S. mili-tary contractors and forces from the United Kingdom, Italy, Australia, Poland, and other nations. The insurgents are outnumbered, outgunned, and out-trained, in every way.
Suicide terrorism provides the insurgents with an unpredictable and unstoppable lethal weapon that the other side does not have.
From the terrorists’ point of view, suicide terrorism is highly effec-tive in part because it attracts enormous worldwide media attention.
Estimates of the number of Iraqi civilian deaths since the start of the Iraq invasion in March 2003 vary from around 20,000 (as estimated by the group Iraq Body Count, in July 2005) to 30,000 (as estimated by President G.W. Bush in December 2005), to 100,000 (published in the British medical journal The Lancet, in October 2004). Although American fire is responsible for the largest number of Iraqi civilians killed (even “precision bombing” results in horrendous civilian casual-ties), it is civilian death by suicide terrorism that has attracted by far the highest level of media attention. It is a bizarre accident of war that both terrorist groups and the U.S. government would rather keep the media focus on the (relatively smaller) casualties resulting from suicide bombings.
American generals have declared “we don’t do body counts,” but the world media does do body counts, and it is to the world media that suicide terrorists are speaking.
Much has been made in the media of the money and favorable recog-nition received by the families of some suicide terrorists in some parts of the world, with the implication that suicide terrorism would end if monetary rewards were cut off. For example the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party reportedly sent the families of suicide ter-rorists in the West Bank $15,000 each. But it would be far too simplistic
to suppose that we can end suicide terrorism by rooting out the mon-etary reward system that supposedly feeds the fire of suicide terrorism.
The family of the four suicide bombers who struck London in July 2005 did not receive monetary rewards or mass media adulation—quite the reverse. Similarly, the families of the hundreds of suicide terrorists who have struck in postwar Iraq did not profit momentarily; many of them remain anonymous in death. Although monetary rewards can have an influence on suicide terrorism, they do not play the vitally important causal role often assumed.