القائدہ کےبےقیمت خود کش غنڈے

القائدہ کےبےقیمت خود کش غنڈے

مفہوم:

اپنے آپ کو آگ لگانے والے، پھانسی کا پھندہ گلے میں ڈالنے والے،اپنی کنپٹی پر پستول چلانے والے اور اسی طرح سے اپنے آپ کو ہلاک کرنے والے افراد خود کش حملہ آور یا خود کش غنڈے نہیں کہلاتے۔

کسی خود کشی کرنے والے کو خود کش حملہ آور، خود کش غنڈے یا خود کش قاتل صرف اسی صورت میں کہا جاتا ھے جبکہ اس کی نیّت کسی دوسرے انسان یا کئی انسانوں کی جان لینے کی ھو۔

خود کشی کرنے والے گناہ گار ہیں۔ لیکن خود کش حملہ آور، خود کش غنڈے یا خود کش قاتل نہ صرف یہ کہ گناہ گار ہیں بلکہ انسانیت کے مجرم بھی ہیں۔ اپنے پلید جسم کو عدالت کی سزا سے بچانے کیلئے، ڈر کے مارے یہ ٹکے ٹکے کے ایمان فروش اپنی حرام موت آپ مر جاتے ہیں۔

 

جاری ھے۔۔۔۔۔۔۔

Understanding suicide attacks

 

Four years ago, the late Susan Sontag was excoriated for arguing, in a brief New Yorker piece, that the attacks that brought down the World Trade Center were inspired not by hatred of ”civilization” or ”the free world” but rather by opposition to ”specific American alliances and actions.” Today that argument–seen by hawks in those dark post-Sept. 11 days as treasonously empathetic–has become a commonplace in the latest political science work on terrorism.

No one, for example, is hurling charges of crypto-treason at Robert A. Pape, an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago known for hard-nosed studies of air power in wartime. But Pape’s new book, ”Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” (Random House), which grew out of a much-cited 2003 article in the American Political Science Review, is prime example of the mainstreaming of Sontag’s once-taboo view. ”Suicide terrorism is a response to occupation,” Pape says in a phone interview. ”Islamic fundamentalism has very little to do with it.”

”Dying to Win” draws on a thorough database of all suicide attacks recorded since the contemporary practice was born during the Lebanese civil war in the early 1980s: a total of 315 incidents through 2003, involving 462 suicidal attackers. Of the 384 attackers for whom Pape has data, who committed their deeds in such danger zones as Sri Lanka (where the decidedly non-fundamentalist, quasi-Marxist Tamil Tigers have used suicide attacks since 1987 in their fight for a Tamil homeland), Israel, Chechnya, Iraq, and New York, only 43 percent came from religiously affiliated groups. The balance, 57 percent, came from secular groups. Strikingly, during the Lebanese civil war, he says, some 70 percent of suicide attackers were Christians (though members of secular groups).

The thrust of his argument is that suicide terrorism is an eminently rational strategy. Everywhere it has been used, the countries that face it make concessions: The United States left Lebanon; Israel withdrew from Lebanon and now (much of) the West Bank; and Sri Lanka gave the Tamils a semiautonomous state.

Since occupation spurs terrorism, Pape concludes that America should ”expeditiously” (but not recklessly) withdraw troops from Iraq. It should also reduce its energy dependence on the Middle East, refrain from posting troops in the Gulf States, and return to a strategy of balancing the Middle Eastern countries against one another from afar–policy prescriptions that have inspired criticism apart from his social science. (”Wouldn’t [Pape's recommendations] be the ultimate concession to the suicide strategy?” Martin Kramer, a specialist in Middle Eastern studies, asked after the 2003 article appeared.)

In the views of some critics, Pape’s original article erred by dismissing all talk of religious or cultural factors in suicide bombings. If suicide attacks were a universally rational weapon of the weak, the critics argued, we would see them everywhere–and we don’t. In fact, in a fascinating contribution to the new essay collection ”Making Sense of Suicide Missions” (Oxford), the Yale political scientist Stathis Kalyvas and a Spanish colleague, Ignacio Sanchez Cuenca, point out that FARC, the Columbian rebel group, once hatched a plan to fly a plane into that country’s presidential palace but could find no willing pilot, even after dangling an offer of $2 million for the pilot’s family. In addition, the Basque group ETA has rejected offers from its members to blow themselves up for the cause.

But in the book, Pape reconsiders those cultural factors: Suicide bombing, he now writes, is most likely to happen when the occupying force and the ”occupied” insurgents are from different religious backgrounds. (The Tamil minority in Sri Lanka are mostly Hindu and Christian; the Sinhalese majority are Buddhists.)

Research by other scholars backs up this point. David Laitin, a Stanford University expert on civil wars, and Eli Berman, an economist at the University of California at San Diego, have demonstrated that while only 18 percent of the 114 civil wars since 1945 have pitted members of one religious group against another, fully 90 percent of suicide attacks take place in inter-religious conflicts.

Laitin and Berman, too, view suicide terrorism as following impeccable game-theory logic: When your targets are ”hard” and the enemy is wealthy, well armed, and possessed of good intelligence, they write, suicide bombing begins to make sense as a strategy.

However, Diego Gambetta, an Oxford University sociologist and the editor of ”Making Sense of Suicide Missions,” thinks these claims of rationality among self-immolators go a bit too far. First, do the attacks achieve as much as Pape contends? Israel had already committed to pulling out of the West Bank under the Oslo accords when a fresh wave of attacks came in 1994 and 1995. Far from causing the withdrawal, he argues, the attacks may in fact have heightened Israeli resistance to it.

Then there’s the question of Islam. There may be non-Islamic suicide bombers, Gambetta writes. But ”we do not have even a single case of a non-Islamic faith justifying” suicide missions.

Gambetta makes a tentative cultural-historical argument, tracing the suicidal impulse in the Middle East back to the Iran-Iraq war, when thousands of fundamentalist Iranian soldiers marched into certain death against Iraqi tank formations. That strain of self-sacrifice then spread into Lebanon and Palestine and now Iraq, through a badly understood dynamic.

Conflicting theories aside, social scientists have made strides in understanding suicide bombers. Once considered the dregs of the earth (poor, uneducated, sexually starved), they have been shown–by Claude Berrebi, of the RAND Institute, among others–to be, on average, better educated and better off than their countrymen. Nevertheless, all the work on suicide terrorism has one major, merciful shortcoming: sample size. ”No matter how you count terrorist attacks, we are still well short of 1,000 of these episodes” since 1980, Gambetta says. Hard as it is to believe amid the grim daily dispatches from Iraq, suicide bombing remains, among the infinite numbers of ways humans cause bloodshed, exceedingly rare.

Who are the suicide bombers? Pakistan’s answer.

Once unheard of in Pakistan before 9/11, a recent spate of suicide attacks has rocked the country.

By Owais Tohid | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

KARACHI, PAKISTAN – In four years, 28-year-old Gul Hasan went from laying bricks to recruiting suicide bombers. An antiterrorism court convicted Mr. Hasan this month of planning suicide attacks on Shiite mosques in Karachi that killed dozens of worshipers. Now he faces the gallows.

How people like Hasan get involved with militant Islam, and what they do to recruit others, are questions of increasing urgency in Pakistan, which has seen a spate of suicide bombings in recent weeks.

RECRUITER: Convicted jihadi leader Gul Hasan. ATHAR HUSSAIN/REUTERS

The attacks were carried out by splinter groups formed in the wake of a Pakistani crackdown on militant Islamic organizations after Sept. 11, 2001. Smaller and more isolated than their parent organizations, these splinter groups receive financial backing from Al Qaeda and draw their recruits from the ranks of the poor and enraged, say Pakistani investigators.

“This is a new breed [of militants], as suicide bombings are a post 9/11 phenomenon here,” says Fateh Mohammad Burfat, head of the Criminology Department at the University of Karachi. The bombers are “unemployed, illiterate, and belong to poor social strata. [They also] perceive the US military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan as hostile acts against the Muslim world…. By suicide attacks, they get a sense of victory in the world and hereafter.”

Hasan entered the world of militant Islam when his brother, a member of the splinter group Lashkar-e Jhangvi, was arrested. Over time, Hasan went from being a simple carrier of weapons to a dangerous militant leader in Karachi responsible for recruiting and transporting suicide bombers, say police officials.

Rising through the ranks

The splinter groups “provide the new entrants with poisonous extremist literature to brainwash them, and then start giving them responsibilities from shifting weapons to providing refuge to wanted militants,” says Gul Hameed Samoo, a Karachi police official. “One rises through the ranks after fulfilling [certain] tasks.”

The leaders recruit them for different purposes, with agendas ranging from killing Shiites to liberating Muslims from “infidels.” The new trend of suicide bombings is packaged as a “ticket to Paradise.”

Many of the splinter groups’ top leadership fought in Afghanistan and Kashmir. They are believed to have made contacts and trained with Arab militants in Afghanistan.

Police investigators describe three layers of organization behind suicide attacks. In most of the cases, the mastermind is Al Qaeda, which gets in touch through a courier with the leader of a jihadi splinter group who plans the attack. The attacker is often a “brainwashed” jihadi.

In the case of the unsuccessful suicide attack against Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on Christmas Day 2003, police say the mastermind was Abu Faraj, an Al Qaeda operative now in custody; the planner was Amjad Farooqi; the slain chief of Lashkar-e Jhangvi; and the bomber was a local jihadi.

In a New York Times opinion piece on Tuesday, Peter Bergen, author of “Holy War, Inc.,” and Swati Pandey argued that the Islamic terrorists behind many of the attacks against the West are well-educated – not brainwashed youth from madrassahs, or Islamic schools. In a sampling of 75 terrorists involved in attacks against Westerners, they found that 53 percent had attended college – a figure slightly higher than US averages. “[ Madrassahs] are not and should not be considered a threat to the United States,” the authors wrote.

In Pakistan, where many of the suicide attacks do not directly target Westerners, the Al Qaeda masterminds are often well- educated, but the planners and the bombers themselves generally are not.

“There are leaders who look out for suicide bombers and usually find the simple, unemployed religious-minded youth with the help of a cleric at a mosque or madrassah,” says a police investigator.

Bomber dropouts

Hasan, the recruiter of suicide bombers, has an eighth-grade education. Mohammad Jamil, one of the two suicide bombers behind the Christmas attack on Mr. Musharraf, was a dropout who studied at a madrassah in Pakistan’s Frontier Province. Neither Mohammad Ali Khatri nor Akbar Niazi, two suicide bombers who killed 40 worshipers at two Shiite mosques last year, completed high school.

Recent interrogations have shed light on how bombers are recruited and groomed. A police investigator quoted a detained sectarian militant, identified as Tehseen, as saying, “We isolate the boy who is willing to sacrifice his life. From then onwards he does not have any contact with his family or friends. We provide him religious books, and he prays all the time before [his] mission.”

Police nabbed Tehseen after he was injured at the scene of an attack on a Shiite mosque in Karachi this month. He was accompanying the suicide bomber as a guard.

“In some cases, the suicide bomber gets terrified after reaching the target and flees. [The leaders] sometimes take the family hostage if the suicide bomber changes his mind,” the police investigator says.

The suicide-bomber cells operate in small groups of five to seven people, never staying at one place for more than two nights, says a police investigator.

Moving in small cells is now a necessity for members of the larger splinter groups, which have been thrown into disarray by a persistent government crackdown, officials say. They add that the isolation of splinter groups, as well as their greater dependence on outside funding, may explain the adoption of the radical tactic of suicide bombing.

“They are on the run, and short of resources. But it is the most dangerous tactic and rather impossible to stop like elsewhere in the world,” says Karachi police chief Tariq Jameel. “We have to create awareness and counter them by eliminating extremism from the society, which is the best antidote to terrorism. Otherwise suicide bombings can give these disarrayed splinter groups a new life.”

Last month, a group of 58 religious scholars issued a fatwa, or religious edict, saying that Islam strictly forbids suicide attacks on Muslims. Further, those committing such acts at public congregations or places of worship cease to be Muslims.

“Killing of any non-Muslim citizen or foreigner visiting the country is also forbidden in Islam since they are under protection of government of Pakistan,” said Mufti Munib-ur Rehman, one of those issuing the edict

The Logic of Suicide Terrorism

It’s the occupation, not the fundamentalism

Last month, Scott McConnell caught up with Associate Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, whose book on suicide terrorism, Dying to Win, is beginning to receive wide notice. Pape has found that the most common American perceptions about who the terrorists are and what motivates them are off by a wide margin. In his office is the world’s largest database of information about suicide terrorists, rows and rows of manila folders containing articles and biographical snippets in dozens of languages compiled by Pape and teams of graduate students, a trove of data that has been sorted and analyzed and which underscores the great need for reappraising the Bush administration’s current strategy. Below are excerpts from a conversation with the man who knows more about suicide terrorists than any other American.

The American Conservative: Your new book, Dying to Win, has a subtitle: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Can you just tell us generally on what the book is based, what kind of research went into it, and what your findings were?

Robert Pape: Over the past two years, I have collected the first complete database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004. This research is conducted not only in English but also in native-language sources—Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and Tamil, and others—so that we can gather information not only from newspapers but also from products from the terrorist community. The terrorists are often quite proud of what they do in their local communities, and they produce albums and all kinds of other information that can be very helpful to understand suicide-terrorist attacks.

This wealth of information creates a new picture about what is motivating suicide terrorism. Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

This is a Marxist group, a completely secular group that draws from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of the country. They invented the famous suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi in May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea of the suicide vest from the Tamil Tigers.

TAC: So if Islamic fundamentalism is not necessarily a key variable behind these groups, what is?

RP: The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

TAC: That would seem to run contrary to a view that one heard during the American election campaign, put forth by people who favor Bush’s policy. That is, we need to fight the terrorists over there, so we don’t have to fight them here.

RP: Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.

Since 1990, the United States has stationed tens of thousands of ground troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and that is the main mobilization appeal of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. People who make the argument that it is a good thing to have them attacking us over there are missing that suicide terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life.

TAC: If we were to back up a little bit before the invasion of Iraq to what happened before 9/11, what was the nature of the agitprop that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were putting out to attract people?

RP: Osama bin Laden’s speeches and sermons run 40 and 50 pages long. They begin by calling tremendous attention to the presence of tens of thousands of American combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula.

In 1996, he went on to say that there was a grand plan by the United States—that the Americans were going to use combat forces to conquer Iraq, break it into three pieces, give a piece of it to Israel so that Israel could enlarge its country, and then do the same thing to Saudi Arabia. As you can see, we are fulfilling his prediction, which is of tremendous help in his mobilization appeals.

TAC: The fact that we had troops stationed on the Arabian Peninsula was not a very live issue in American debate at all. How many Saudis and other people in the Gulf were conscious of it?

RP: We would like to think that if we could keep a low profile with our troops that it would be okay to station them in foreign countries. The truth is, we did keep a fairly low profile. We did try to keep them away from Saudi society in general, but the key issue with American troops is their actual combat power. Tens of thousands of American combat troops, married with air power, is a tremendously powerful tool.

Now, of course, today we have 150,000 troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and we are more in control of the Arabian Peninsula than ever before.

TAC: If you were to break down causal factors, how much weight would you put on a cultural rejection of the West and how much weight on the presence of American troops on Muslim territory?

RP: The evidence shows that the presence of American troops is clearly the pivotal factor driving suicide terrorism.

If Islamic fundamentalism were the pivotal factor, then we should see some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world, like Iran, which has 70 million people—three times the population of Iraq and three times the population of Saudi Arabia—with some of the most active groups in suicide terrorism against the United States. However, there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Iran, and we have no evidence that there are any suicide terrorists in Iraq from Iran.

Sudan is a country of 21 million people. Its government is extremely Islamic fundamentalist. The ideology of Sudan was so congenial to Osama bin Laden that he spent three years in Sudan in the 1990s. Yet there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Sudan.

I have the first complete set of data on every al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from 1995 to early 2004, and they are not from some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world. Two thirds are from the countries where the United States has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990.

Another point in this regard is Iraq itself. Before our invasion, Iraq never had a suicide-terrorist attack in its history. Never. Since our invasion, suicide terrorism has been escalating rapidly with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004, and over 50 in just the first five months of 2005. Every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled.

TAC: So your assessment is that there are more suicide terrorists or potential suicide terrorists today than there were in March 2003?

RP: I have collected demographic data from around the world on the 462 suicide terrorists since 1980 who completed the mission, actually killed themselves. This information tells us that most are walk-in volunteers. Very few are criminals. Few are actually longtime members of a terrorist group. For most suicide terrorists, their first experience with violence is their very own suicide-terrorist attack.

There is no evidence there were any suicide-terrorist organizations lying in wait in Iraq before our invasion. What is happening is that the suicide terrorists have been produced by the invasion.

TAC: Do we know who is committing suicide terrorism in Iraq? Are they primarily Iraqis or walk-ins from other countries in the region?

RP: Our best information at the moment is that the Iraqi suicide terrorists are coming from two groups—Iraqi Sunnis and Saudis—the two populations most vulnerable to transformation by the presence of large American combat troops on the Arabian Peninsula. This is perfectly consistent with the strategic logic of suicide terrorism.

TAC: Does al-Qaeda have the capacity to launch attacks on the United States, or are they too tied down in Iraq? Or have they made a strategic decision not to attack the United States, and if so, why?

RP: Al-Qaeda appears to have made a deliberate decision not to attack the United States in the short term. We know this not only from the pattern of their attacks but because we have an actual al-Qaeda planning document found by Norwegian intelligence. The document says that al-Qaeda should not try to attack the continent of the United States in the short term but instead should focus its energies on hitting America’s allies in order to try to split the coalition.

What the document then goes on to do is analyze whether they should hit Britain, Poland, or Spain. It concludes that they should hit Spain just before the March 2004 elections because, and I am quoting almost verbatim: Spain could not withstand two, maximum three, blows before withdrawing from the coalition, and then others would fall like dominoes.

That is exactly what happened. Six months after the document was produced, al-Qaeda attacked Spain in Madrid. That caused Spain to withdraw from the coalition. Others have followed. So al-Qaeda certainly has demonstrated the capacity to attack and in fact they have done over 15 suicide-terrorist attacks since 2002, more than all the years before 9/11 combined. Al-Qaeda is not weaker now. Al-Qaeda is stronger.

TAC: What would constitute a victory in the War on Terror or at least an improvement in the American situation?

RP: For us, victory means not sacrificing any of our vital interests while also not having Americans vulnerable to suicide-terrorist attacks. In the case of the Persian Gulf, that means we should pursue a strategy that secures our interest in oil but does not encourage the rise of a new generation of suicide terrorists.

In the 1970s and the 1980s, the United States secured its interest in oil without stationing a single combat soldier on the Arabian Peninsula. Instead, we formed an alliance with Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which we can now do again. We relied on numerous aircraft carriers off the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and naval air power now is more effective not less. We also built numerous military bases so that we could move large numbers of ground forces to the region quickly if a crisis emerged.

That strategy, called “offshore balancing,” worked splendidly against Saddam Hussein in 1990 and is again our best strategy to secure our interest in oil while preventing the rise of more suicide terrorists.

TAC: Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders also talked about the “Crusaders-Zionist alliance,” and I wonder if that, even if we weren’t in Iraq, would not foster suicide terrorism. Even if the policy had helped bring about a Palestinian state, I don’t think that would appease the more hardcore opponents of Israel.

RP: I not only study the patterns of where suicide terrorism has occurred but also where it hasn’t occurred. Not every foreign occupation has produced suicide terrorism. Why do some and not others? Here is where religion matters, but not quite in the way most people think. In virtually every instance where an occupation has produced a suicide-terrorist campaign, there has been a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied community. That is true not only in places such as Lebanon and in Iraq today but also in Sri Lanka, where it is the Sinhala Buddhists who are having a dispute with the Hindu Tamils.

When there is a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied, that enables terrorist leaders to demonize the occupier in especially vicious ways. Now, that still requires the occupier to be there. Absent the presence of foreign troops, Osama bin Laden could make his arguments but there wouldn’t be much reality behind them. The reason that it is so difficult for us to dispute those arguments is because we really do have tens of thousands of combat soldiers sitting on the Arabian Peninsula.

TAC: Has the next generation of anti-American suicide terrorists already been created? Is it too late to wind this down, even assuming your analysis is correct and we could de-occupy Iraq?

RP: Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down. The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop—and often on a dime.

In Lebanon, for instance, there were 41 suicide-terrorist attacks from 1982 to 1986, and after the U.S. withdrew its forces, France withdrew its forces, and then Israel withdrew to just that six-mile buffer zone of Lebanon, they virtually ceased. They didn’t completely stop, but there was no campaign of suicide terrorism. Once Israel withdrew from the vast bulk of Lebanese territory, the suicide terrorists did not follow Israel to Tel Aviv.

This is also the pattern of the second Intifada with the Palestinians. As Israel is at least promising to withdraw from Palestinian-controlled territory (in addition to some other factors), there has been a decline of that ferocious suicide-terrorist campaign. This is just more evidence that withdrawal of military forces really does diminish the ability of the terrorist leaders to recruit more suicide terrorists.

That doesn’t mean that the existing suicide terrorists will not want to keep going. I am not saying that Osama bin Laden would turn over a new leaf and suddenly vote for George Bush. There will be a tiny number of people who are still committed to the cause, but the real issue is not whether Osama bin Laden exists. It is whether anybody listens to him. That is what needs to come to an end for Americans to be safe from suicide terrorism.

TAC: There have been many kinds of non-Islamic suicide terrorists, but have there been Christian suicide terrorists?

RP: Not from Christian groups per se, but in Lebanon in the 1980s, of those suicide attackers, only eight were Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were Communists and Socialists. Three were Christians.

TAC: Has the IRA used suicide terrorism?

RP: The IRA did not. There were IRA members willing to commit suicide—the famous hunger strike was in 1981. What is missing in the IRA case is not the willingness to commit suicide, to kill themselves, but the lack of a suicide-terrorist attack where they try to kill others.

If you look at the pattern of violence in the IRA, almost all of the killing is front-loaded to the 1970s and then trails off rather dramatically as you get through the mid-1980s through the 1990s. There is a good reason for that, which is that the British government, starting in the mid-1980s, began to make numerous concessions to the IRA on the basis of its ordinary violence. In fact, there were secret negotiations in the 1980s, which then led to public negotiations, which then led to the Good Friday Accords. If you look at the pattern of the IRA, this is a case where they actually got virtually everything that they wanted through ordinary violence.

The purpose of a suicide-terrorist attack is not to die. It is the kill, to inflict the maximum number of casualties on the target society in order to compel that target society to put pressure on its government to change policy. If the government is already changing policy, then the whole point of suicide terrorism, at least the way it has been used for the last 25 years, doesn’t come up.

TAC: Are you aware of any different strategic decision made by al-Qaeda to change from attacking American troops or ships stationed at or near the Gulf to attacking American civilians in the United States?

RP: I wish I could say yes because that would then make the people reading this a lot more comfortable.

The fact is not only in the case of al-Qaeda, but in suicide-terrorist campaigns in general, we don’t see much evidence that suicide-terrorist groups adhere to a norm of attacking military targets in some circumstances and civilians in others.

In fact, we often see that suicide-terrorist groups routinely attack both civilian and military targets, and often the military targets are off-duty policemen who are unsuspecting. They are not really prepared for battle.

The reasons for the target selection of suicide terrorists appear to be much more based on operational rather than normative criteria. They appear to be looking for the targets where they can maximize the number of casualties.

In the case of the West Bank, for instance, there is a pattern where Hamas and Islamic Jihad use ordinary guerrilla attacks, not suicide attacks, mainly to attack settlers. They use suicide attacks to penetrate into Israel proper. Over 75 percent of all the suicide attacks in the second Intifada were against Israel proper and only 25 percent on the West Bank itself.

TAC: What do you think the chances are of a weapon of mass destruction being used in an American city?

RP: I think it depends not exclusively, but heavily, on how long our combat forces remain in the Persian Gulf. The central motive for anti-American terrorism, suicide terrorism, and catastrophic terrorism is response to foreign occupation, the presence of our troops. The longer our forces stay on the ground in the Arabian Peninsula, the greater the risk of the next 9/11, whether that is a suicide attack, a nuclear attack, or a biological attack. 

Understanding suicide attacks

Olivia Allison

Policy-makers and the mainstream media dangerously oversimplify the motivations and implications of suicide bombings.

21 – 06 – 2007

Overly simplistic questions dominate debates about Islamist suicide attacks in recent years. Should suicide bombings be understood as a pragmatic tactic or a religiously-motivated sacrifice? Are suicide attacks preventable, or not?

These questions have driven policy papers and leading journalists to succumb to hopelessness. One guest on a CNN news broadcast in 1996 remarked, “Look, when you have fanatical young men who are prepared to commit suicide and they’re strapping dynamite to themselves, there’s very little you can do about it”. Member of Parliament Charles Clarke, interviewed on BBC on the day of the 7/7 bombings, alluded to the impossibility of preventing a suicide attack because of the freedom of British “open society”.

In researching our recent book, Understanding and Addressing Suicide Attacks: The Faith and Politics of Martyrdom Operations, David Cook and I found such defeatism counterproductive. Policymakers ignore several fundamental aspects of recruitment and support for Islamist suicide attacks – aspects that could be useful in the prevention and detection of such attacks.

Justifying suicide with religion

Policy discourses tend to de-emphasise the religious justifications for suicide attacks, which range from the fiery invocations of Muslim clerics to the use of Quranic texts in martyrdom videos. Various commentators including Robert Pape have downplayed the religious rhetoric surrounding suicide bombings for several reasons, including that: several secular organisations in western Asia have used suicide attacks; organisations have overtly political goals (especially anti-occupation strategies and territorial goals), and the vast majority of Muslims around the world do not wholeheartedly agree with suicide bombing as a religiously justifiable tactic.

Increasingly after the 9/11 attacks, however, militant Islamist organisations draw upon religious fervour to appeal to recruits, and to justify a seemingly indiscriminate tactic. Leaders use interpretations of Islam to legitimise both the “suicide” aspect of martyrdom operations and the possibility of killing civilians or other Muslims. Both are forbidden in Islamic tradition and law, and require flexible interpretations to appear legitimate. Most fatwas justify the attacks based on the tradition of martyrdom, which requires Allah to judge the attacker’s intentions – if the attacker’s motivations are pure, then the killing of civilians in certain circumstances is permissible, and the attacker is a shahid (martyr).

Many policymakers and liberal Muslim leaders have countered this ideology by claiming that those who plan and support these attacks are not Muslims because they do not follow a true interpretation of Islam. The debate on the authenticity of their Muslim belief continues within the Muslim community itself, but to brand certain radical groups as “not Muslim” is an insufficient response to their religious invocations.

Suicide bombers and jihadist groups situate their actions within the Islamic canon of law and scripture. Therefore, these arguments must be taken seriously, and countered systematically through rigorous interpretation of Islamic tradition.

This emphasis on religion should not be understood as advocating a “clash of civilizations” theory, or for suggesting that Islam as a religion inherently supports suicide attacks (or, indeed, that justifications of this nature are confined to Islam). Suicide bombing – the killing of oneself to kill others (often civilians) – has thus far, however, generally required a bedrock of zealous belief and the acceptance of a community.

The majority of the attacks and attackers that threaten the United States and Europe are justified in Islamist terms. The attackers believe themselves to be serving a god, and these beliefs must be addressed if the attacks are to be stopped.

What motivates whom

On the other hand, there is often a gulf between the motivations of individual attacks and the overarching organisational or ideological goals of the planners. Understanding this disparity, and why the planners’ ideology appeals to attackers, is essential to detecting and preventing suicide attacks.

Our research, complemented by that of Robert Brym and Bader Araj in 2006, found that attack organisers and planners were more likely motivated by grander strategic, ideological and territorial goals. Individual suicide attackers’ goals, however, were far more likely to be personal: revenge, redemption, desperation, and eternal reward.

This distinction is vital for two reasons. First, personal considerations (especially those that are based on being morally compromised, such as divorce or illegitimate pregnancy) can be used to counteract the image of purity that surrounds martyrdom operations among their followers.

Second, clerics have said the main difference between suicide and a martyrdom operation is that, in suicide, a person kills himself out of despair, while a martyr kills himself as a pure act. Yet, so many suicide bombings spring from a well of despair and loss that the supposedly pious nature of the tactic seems dubious.

Nonetheless, one theme unifies much of the Islamist rhetoric supporting militant activity and especially suicide bombing. The global Muslim narrative of western oppression and humiliation is a powerful one. Indeed, thorny symbols like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and the Iraq War have fuelled a very real sense of persecution in western Asia. The sources of such humiliation must be addressed.

Media messages

The current Bush administration has been particularly critical of Arab media and policymakers suggest the attention paid to suicide violence in the media galvanises future suicide bombers. Policymakers still maintain a version of the 1980s truism that media is the lifeblood of terrorism. The version of this truism after the 9/11 attacks is that Arab media is the lifeblood of terrorism, and western media re-broadcasts these terrorist messages.

In a content analysis of mainstream western news channels’ coverage of suicide bombing, we found that TV news reporting in the US and UK generally followed the political priorities in their home countries. And even while western governments’ continue to criticise Arab media coverage of west Asian wars, militant Islamist leaders and religious clerics have expressed disgust at Arab media reporting as well. Al-Jazeera often gets the story wrong, Islamist leaders claim, and other Arab media is an extension of the state. This frustration leads militant leaders to look elsewhere to get their message out. Mainstream news channels – even the often-criticised al-Jazeera – cannot convey the same propaganda or have the same persuasive power of a martyrdom video widely circulated on YouTube or on militant Islamist websites.

Meanwhile, al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya and hundreds of local news stations are addressing a vast Muslim public on a daily basis, largely without any direct statements from US and European governments. Western governments have taken far too long to recognise the powerful broadcasting mechanisms in place in western Asia. Although outreach efforts are improving, western governments are still doing far too little. Furthermore, unless western governments directly speak to the real and perceived grievances mentioned above, such public relations manoeuvres will have little effect.

All attacks are not the same

Media coverage and policymakers tend to simplistically lump all suicide attacks into a monolithic global Islamist threat, often stacked under the “al-Qaida” umbrella. In order to fully understand the spread and appeal of martyrdom operations, local factors must be recognised. Idiosyncratic circumstances are highly important – occupations or perceived occupations, territorial and landholding issues, dissatisfaction with governments, and inter-factional rivalries are primary motivating and justifying factors.

Furthermore, suicide attacks receive passive and active support for a variety of reasons. Support for anti-occupation suicide bombings remains high around the world, but there are further shades of complexity. In interviewing journalists in Yemen and Syria, I found varying degrees of support for suicide attacks even in occupation situations. While most agreed that suicide attackers in Israel are likely to be martyrs, the interviewees were less likely to recognise martyrdom in Chechen suicide attacks, or even those carried out in Iraq or other areas of west Asia.

Clearly, public perceptions of suicide attacks are rooted in understandings of local situations, and not in an overarching belief in the global caliphate. Likewise, bombers and would-be bombers in the UK are heavily influenced by ties to political dynamics in other areas of the world, especially Pakistan. North African attacks stem from both global and local factors. Uzbekistan’s 2004 suicide attacks may have been viewed as legitimate by large segments of the population, but this was not because of a widespread global Islamist agenda – it was due to dissatisfaction with the Uzbek regime.

Suicide attacks are not always motivated by a jihad for a global caliphate, but they are also not always nationalistic. Suicide attacks in Uzbekistan cannot be lumped together with those in Algeria and those in London. These attacks are part politico-military tactic, part complex internationalised religious ideology, and part local grievance. All of these factors converge with varying levels of importance every time a suicide attack occurs.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK
OF SUICIDE TERRORISM

Irwin J. Mansdorf

 

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·         Since 1993, attempts have been made to portray Palestinian-Arab perpetrators of suicide bombings as desperate individuals understandably coping with a difficult situation, in effect, transforming the attackers into victims, and thus diminishing the impact of one’s revulsion at such attacks.·         The use of the “bomber as victim” model has led others to similarly view, and incorrectly justify, the motivations behind Palestinian-Arab suicide bombers. Yet, in fact, individual psychopathology or personal feelings do not appear to play any significant role.·         Unlike other groups that have used suicide as a political or military tool, only in the case of Palestinian-Arab terror has there been an attempt to personalize the perpetrator as a victim of uncontrollable psychological and motivational forces that forced such extreme behavior.·         It is actually group dynamics that reinforces behavior within a Palestinian-Arab culture where suicide bombers are viewed as heroes whose faces are prominently displayed on public posters and where families of bombers are showered with both respect and financial reward.

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A Personal or a Political Act?

Throughout the recent history of violence in the Palestinian Arab-Israeli conflict, suicide bombings have come to be one of the more notorious ways for terrorist groups to strike at Israel. Since 1993, when the current wave of suicide bombings began, attempts have been made to portray the perpetrators of these attacks as desperate individuals, driven by hopelessness created by a brutal occupation. In other words, the individual attacker, faced with unbearable psychological conditions, is personally coping with the situation in a desperate, yet understandable, manner. The suicide bomber, like others driven by emotional distress, is purported to exhibit a predictable clinical response to an intolerable situation.

Palestinian Arab spokespersons have often used the approach that these individuals, most often young, single men (although others have also conducted such attacks), represent the desperation of the occupation. As such, they have attempted to promote the notion of personal psychological suffering as the force behind the group political act of confrontation through suicide attacks. The attack is thus transformed from one of political violence intentionally perpetrated on others, to one where the attacker is also a victim, driven by a combination of psychological variables such as humiliation, depression, and hopelessness. What results is an attempt to present a popularized message that many people can relate to, namely, extreme measures taken in response to extreme provocation.

Typical of the attempts to de-politicize the acts of suicide bombers are statements that ascribe the motivation for such attacks to a deep sense of desperation: “suicide bombers have been driven to desperation by a brutal and humiliating occupation which has deprived them of their humanity and any hope for a brighter future.”¹

In reality, such an approach is not a de-politicization, but in fact represents an attempt to actually politicize the act by erroneously ascribing it to personal and clinical aspects of the behavior. Witness the statements of Palestinian Authority spokesperson Hanan Ashrawi. In March 2001 she stated, “if you push the Palestinians into a corner, if you drive them to desperation, there will be desperate acts.”² A year later, she expanded somewhat by saying, “the people who do it are people who are individuals or small groups who are driven to desperation and anger by the Israeli activities.”³ Thus, the suicide bomber is individually “driven” through a series of emotions similar to clinical symptoms of other suicide victims, rather than acting as a member of a group with a clearly defined political purpose and goal. To Western ears, such an interpretation makes inherent sense, since suicide for political or religious reasons is difficult to fathom, while ending one’s life as a result of other “desperate” reasons is far more common and understandable.

When a Palestinian Arab psychiatrist picks up on this theme, it again seems to provide vindication for those that cast suicide bombers in the role of victims as a result of psychological pressure rather than perpetrators of politically motivated murder. “Suicide bombings and all these forms of violence – I’m talking as a doctor here – are only the symptoms, the reaction to this chronic and systematic process of humiliating people in an effort to destroy their hope and dignity. That is the illness, and unless it is resolved and treated, there will be more and more symptoms of the pathology.”⁴

Portraying the perpetrator as a victim suffering from a clinical pathology not only diminishes the impact of one’s revulsion at such attacks; it also serves to refocus the reason for the attack from a group desire to violently confront one’s enemy to a personal desire to escape from unbearable individual suffering. By defining suicide bombing as an “illness,” the bomber is effectively relieved of any personal responsibility for the behavior. In this case, responsibility for the “illness” is suggested to be with the environment breeding the “symptoms,” namely Israeli policy.

Despite these pronouncements, attempts to represent the suicide bomber as primarily motivated by psychological or sociological (as opposed to political or nationalistic) variables are simply not supported by the evidence. While suicide in the traditional clinical sense is indeed related to an individual’s psychological state at the time of the act, the acts of Palestinian terror organizations, as the acts of other politically motivated groups in recent history, in no way relate to individual clinical psychopathology or conventional suicide.

 

The Use of Political Suicide in Recent History

The use of suicide as a political or military tool did not originate with Palestinian Arab terror groups. Since World War II, there have been several prominent examples of the use of suicide in a political or military context.

 

The Kamikaze Pilot

In World War II, Japanese “Kamikaze” pilots participated in suicide attacks against American ships in the Pacific. Researchers of the Kamikaze point out that these individuals were not suicidal, but rather viewed self-sacrifice as the ultimate weapon against the enemy. The pilots were driven by a desire to sacrifice for their country, and did not display any signs of typical clinically abnormal behavior.

In a study of the letters of Kamikaze pilots, researchers describe the extraordinary calm and peaceful spirit they showed prior to their missions. They explain that the Kamikaze pilot expected something beyond death itself from a mission that unavoidably culminated in death.⁵ Motivation for Kamikaze missions came not from any negativism or a personal desire to end one’s life, but rather from a motivation and group identity related to giving all for the Emperor and one’s country. As described by Taylor and Ryan, “the individual pilots who undertook such missions were far from defeatist.”⁶

 

The Tamil Tigers

The Tamil Tigers, a secular group devoted to establishing an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka, have been responsible for more suicide attacks (over 200) than any other terrorist group in history.⁷ Their fighters are described as fierce, well trained, and totally dedicated to their cause. Before a mission, they are given cyanide pills in order to avoid being captured alive and divulging military secrets.⁸ The Tigers select volunteers from tough combat units according to their combat record. They are known as a highly nationalistic force who select both males and females to serve as “human bombs” to attack selected targets. Nowhere are Tamil fighters described as suffering from any psychological issues that lead to their choice to volunteer for these missions. On the contrary, the suicide bomber is described by a Tamil leader as having “a mind like steel but a heart like the petals of a flower.”⁹

 

Buddhist Monks and Self-Immolation

Another example of politically motivated suicide is the self-immolation of Buddhist monks as practiced in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. While these acts never involved any attacks on others, they nevertheless carried a political message. The earliest of these acts took place in 1963 when Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, set himself on fire in South Vietnam. This act, and similar acts that followed, served to raise political consciousness against what were described as the repressive policies of the Catholic regime in South Vietnam against Buddhists. In describing the motivation of the monks, it again is clear that clinical symptoms that motivate conventional suicide were not at play here. “This is not suicide….The monk who burns himself has lost neither courage nor hope; nor does he desire nonexistence. On the contrary, he is very courageous and hopeful and aspires for something good in the future. He does not think that he is destroying himself; he believes in the good fruition of his act of self-sacrifice for the sake of others.”¹⁰

 

The Common Political Message

In none of the above examples was the political or military purpose of the suicide ever clouded by a message that what was at work was a desperate, hopeless, or clinically driven individual. In all cases, the perpetrators were first and foremost focused on the attack, motivated by nationalism and group identity and not by any personal emotional variables that may have led them to this extreme behavior. In the political or military aftermath of these suicides, no attempt was ever made to frame the behavior in the language of psychopathology or sociological opportunism.

 

Islamic and Palestinian Suicide Terrorism

Despite the contention of some observers, there is actually no evidence to separate the general motivational framework of Islamic terrorists in general, and Palestinian terrorists specifically, from that which has been observed in other politically and nationalistically motivated suicides. As with other such acts, what is primary is a strong identification with the group and a motivation to sacrifice oneself for the cause. Individual psychopathology or personal feelings of desperation or hopelessness do not appear to play any significant role.

In fact, Palestinian terrorists themselves have denied any link between clinical psychological symptoms and their attacks. As stated by one such terrorist, “This is not suicide. Suicide is selfish, reflects mental weakness. This is istishad (martyrdom or self-sacrifice in the service of Allah).”¹¹

 

A Consequence of Group Dynamics

In a series of interviews with would-be suicide bombers, Dr. Jerold Post of George Washington University describes how group pressure and identity motivates terrorists to action: “The group members psychologically manipulated the new recruits, persuading them, psychologically manipulating them, “brainwashing” them to believe that by carrying out a suicide bombing, they would find an honored place in the corridor of martyrs, and their lives would be meaningful; moreover, their families would be financially rewarded. From the time they were recruited, the group members never left their sides, leaving them no opportunity of backing down from their fatal choice.” As stated by Post, “Terrorism is not a consequence of individual psychological abnormality. Rather it is a consequence of group or organizational pathology that provides a sense-making explanation to the youth drawn to these groups.”¹²

Thus, while clinical psychological symptoms may not be a factor in the motivation of the suicide bomber, general psychological techniques do play a role in creating the group psychology that fosters this behavior. With respect to Palestinian groups, these factors include a culture where suicide bombers are viewed as heroes and where families of bombers are showered with both respect and financial reward. Unlike the shame of traditional suicide victims, the faces of suicide attackers are prominently displayed throughout Palestinian areas on public posters heralding their behavior.

 

The Political Function of Popular Explanations

What can be said, therefore, of popular explanations that describe suicide bombers as desperate, hopeless individuals? First, it appears that these explanations are not corroborated by actual experience and findings in the field. Suicide bombers appear to be well motivated to carry out their acts and strongly dedicated to the political message of their cause, whatever that may be. While they may feel oppressed, the stimulus for the act is nationalistic and political, not psychopathological and clinical. In the case of Islamic terror, the additional variable of becoming a shahid (martyr), with all its attendant religious rewards, exists.

When pronouncements are made focusing on individual clinical symptoms and emotional distress as motivations of the bomber, a political message is being created. As with the act of suicide bombing itself, this message is aimed at rallying support against the governmental or institutional target of the attack and fostering sympathy for the political purposes of the suicide bombing. In effect, the focus of attention is moved from the victim to the perpetrator, mitigating the negative effects and terror aspect of the act itself. Despite the distaste that suicide attacks create, the use of the “bomber as victim” model by Palestinian spokespersons has led others to similarly view, and partially although incorrectly justify, the motivations behind Palestinian suicide bombers. As opposed to other groups that have used suicide as a political or military tool, only in the case of Palestinian terror has there been an attempt to personalize the perpetrator as a victim of uncontrollable psychological and motivational forces that forced such extreme behavior.

What results is a cadre of amateur pseudo-psychologists who parrot the approach that the extremism of these acts must mean that some underlying psychological phenomenon is at work. Cherie Blair, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, seemed to endorse this approach when, at a London charity event, she stated: “As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress.”¹³ Former CNN head Ted Turner stated, “The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers, that’s all they have….I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism.”¹⁴ British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw also gave his amateur psychological analysis when he told the London Times: “When young people go to their deaths, we can all feel a degree of compassion for those youngsters….They must be so depressed and misguided to do this.”¹⁵

The attempt to focus the reasons behind suicide attacks on psychological rather than political, nationalistic, or religious factors has also been promoted by individuals considered Middle East scholars. Shibley Telhami thus writes: “The most pervasive psychology in the Arab world today is collective rage and feelings of helplessness and the focus of this psychology is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”¹⁶ Telhami, who is not a psychologist and has no formal training in psychology, goes on to write, “To pretend that this issue is simply one of a choice between good and evil is to know nothing of human psychology.”¹⁷

 

An Attempt at Redefinition

The politicization and popularization of psychological factors has led some to rename these attacks as “homicide attacks.” The term was first used when President George Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer, stated, “Israel, of course, had been attacked in a series of suicide bombings which are really homicide bombings.”¹⁸

The terminology used is not insignificant, as “suicide” raises images of individual distress while “homicide” creates an image of a more insidious, criminal motivation that indeed reflects on basic issues of right and wrong and good versus evil. In the media, some have turned to using the term to describe terror activities that result in the death of the perpetrator as well as the intended targets. For the most part, however, media outlets, including Israeli media sources, continue to use the term “suicide” attack.

A corollary of the use of the term “suicide” attack is the tendency for some media to include the death of the bomber in casualty counts following a bombing. The subtle effect of this type of reporting is to associate the death of the perpetrator with that of the others, making them all “victims” in the eye of the reader or observer. Particularly egregious are media accounts that seek to exploit the superficial similarities between perpetrator and victim, again implying some sort of commonality. In one such account, the Associated Press declared, “Mirror Images: Two Teen-Age Girls, Bomber and Victim.”¹⁹ While this may make for some appealing headlines, these reports tend to obfuscate the actual intended political purpose of the attack with irrelevant pop psychology-like personalization.

As a descriptive term, “suicide” simply indicates that the attacker intended to die in the attack. While the use of the term itself bears no political significance, the “spin” provided often does. Any attempt to imply or infer individual emotional distress as a primary factor in these acts, however, is without any evidentiary support.

Whether or not any individual or media source uses the term “suicide” or “homicide” in describing Palestinian terror attacks, explanations for these attacks that personalize the attacker’s motivation or assumed psychological state deviate from historical and research-based experience that shows these acts to be driven by nationalism and political need. While alternative explanations may have a political purpose, they fail to have any empirically based foundation in reality.  

Suicide Attacks.

There is a lot talk about the suicide attacks on News Networks and by the politicians. The general understanding shared by majority of the people that it is written in Qur’an that anyone who kill innocent people will directly go to heaven and receive 72 virgin female companions as a reward. I don’t have read the huge volumes of Sunnis Shi’ities hadith books (Sunni Shi’ite Talmud) like I did not read the Talmud. I will be glad to analyze this story if someone provide me the reference.

Non religious reason for a person to become a suicide bomber.

• A suicide will only take his own life when death seems to him better than life. This can happen to anyone who has no reason to live. Depression take over with all the negative thoughts coming into mind to take his own life.
• A suicide bomber has no economic social reason to live. No job, no hope for better future.
• All humans live in hope of better tomorrow no matter what troubles they are facing presently there always remain hope that the things will be better tomorrow. A suicide bomber will be willing to take his life for revenge purpose.Keeping in mind two above mentioned reasons the other factor which is very important is to take his own life killing as many as he can to take revenge for the destruction of his house, killing one of all of his loved ones. Revenge takes away the logical reasoning from a person. This is the most important factor when person have no reason to live.

Bush and company which includes Cheney Remsfeld Condoleezza Rice love to called these suicide attacks “terrorism” without looking at their own state run terrorism with their bombing of Afghanistan and Iraqi cities killing tens of thousands innocent civilians which mostly were children, women, elderly unarmed civilians. Israel do the same and try to justify all their civilian bombing of Palestine and Lebanon with fight on terrorism.

The US is facing the fierce resistance from Iraqis who have lost everything their houses, their children, their brothers and sisters, their parents destroyed in the name of “freedom” and “democracy”.

Israel claim that they want peace but they actions does not match their words. They have to give Palestinians hope for better future to achieve peace. There was no suicide attacks when Bill Clinton was engaged with negotiations with Israel and Palestine, the Intifada stared when these negotiations failed.

Bush did nothing to achieve peace between Israel and Palestine. Israel and Palestine peace plan died when Bush took over the White House.