The Suicide Terrorists

Cult of Murderous Self-Destruction 

PIERRE CONESA / Le Monde diplomatique (France) 1jun04

SHEIKH Abdallah al-Shami, the leader of Islamic Jihad in Gaza, told the United States television network ABC in August 2001 why his organisation uses suicide attacks. "It’s our only option," he said. "We have no bombs, tanks, missiles, planes or helicopters." But does this rationale for asymmetric war explain why suicide attacks are increasing as terrorist attacks overall are decreasing? Not necessarily.

In a few years the suicide attack has become the cheap smart bomb of new-generation terrorism, the product of an ideology and of an operational technique that is easy to transpose and export. The suicide attack is a violent operation, indifferent to civilian casualties, the success of which largely depends on the death of the terrorist(s). To understand the novelty of this approach we should not refer to Japanese kamikazes of the second world war, who saw themselves as fighters attacking military targets. The originality of the current phenomenon is more about the way it exacerbates sacrificial ritual in mythicised contexts.

At least 34 countries and crisis zones (1) have so far suffered suicide attacks; 42 countries have had attacks against their foreign interests (2). Between 1982, when this type of action began, and April 2000 the yearly average was 16 attacks; it has since risen to 39.

The suicide attack was used as a weapon of war against the Israeli and UN occupiers in Lebanon in 1982 (3); in Sri Lanka in 1987; in the West Bank in 1994 after the Hebron mosque killings; in Turkey in 1995; in Kashmir in July 1999; in Chechnya in 2000. It then spread to Russia in 2002 and Iraq in 2003. It was used as an indirect terror technique against the US in Kenya and Tanzania in 2001 and against Australia in Indonesia in 2002. In North Africa it was used in April and May 2002. It has been a civil or inter-religious warfare technique in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan for years and in Iraq since 2003. It can even be used to carry out murder contracts, such as the assassination of Commander Massoud in Afghanistan. It has gone global: the World Trade Centre attack involved bombers of six nationalities (and more than 15 nationalities were involved if you count the support team); the 3,052 who were killed came from 100 countries.

Targets are now diverse: UN offices, tourist hotels (Mombasa) or nightclubs (Bali), synagogues (Buenos Aires and Djerba), residential compounds for non-Westerners (in Saudi Arabia), a bank and a consulate (Istanbul), a warship (the USS Cole), an oil tanker (the Limburg). There has been a high toll of collateral casualties. The location for attacks has been extended outside enemy territory (Israel and Sri Lanka), to a despised regime (US) and to Muslim countries (Tunisia, Morocco), even those with Islamically oriented governments such as Turkey or Saudi Arabia.

Suicide attacks are mostly but not exclusively Muslim in origin. On 9 July 1987 the Hindu Tamil Tigers (4) killed 40 Sri Lankan soldiers by a method copied from Lebanon’s Shia Hizbullah. The Tamil Tigers are credited with nearly 200 suicide attacks, far more than the Palestinians. In periods of military weakness the secular and Leninist Kurdish Workers party (PKK) has used the method to remobilise its troops. The process is both mimetic and religious. More than 10 years elapsed between the Lebanese Hizbullah’s first suicide attacks in 1982 and the Palestinian suicide bombs of 1994; such attacks made their debut in Sri Lanka in the intervening years.

The suicide candidate is not always a young, impressionable (and possibly drug-taking) fanatic from a deprived background. The 11 September 2001 attackers were ordinary middle-class graduates with no militant past. Personal motivation may explain some cases, such as that of Hanadi Tayssir Jaradat, a young Palestinian lawyer who sought to avenge her brother and fiancé, killed in Jenin in October 2003. But she did not fit the profile of the suicide bomber from a Pakistan madrasa attacking in Kashmir (5), and is even less like the Indonesian Islamists who killed Australian tourists in Bali.

The rise of these attacks is primarily explained by the failure of other forms of terrorism. Between 2000-2002 about 1% of Palestinian operations were suicide attacks but they accounted for 44% of casualties. Israel suffered 59 attacks in 2002, nearly as many as the 62 attacks over the previous eight years. Although the suicide bomb is the most effective form of terrorist attack, deployable at the best time and place, its military value is not always clear. It is more a matter of convenience: it requires no escape plan and the terrorist sometimes agrees to commit suicide even when it fails (the Tamils use a cyanide capsule). It kills four times as many people as other attacks, according to research by the Rand Corporation (6). And it allows direct strikes against the most sensitive areas in enemy territory (New York, Washington, Tel Aviv, Moscow) and against otherwise inaccessible figures, such as prime ministers and presidents.

It is also cheap: about $150 according to Israeli calculations. The organisation/damage cost ratio of the 11 September attacks was impressive: for less than $1m in terrorist expenses, the US suffered total economic losses put at $40bn. We have moved from solo to group attacks: 14 Tamil suicide bombers attacked Colombo air force base on 24 July 2001, 19 people carried out the 11 September attacks, and 11 bombed Casablanca on 16 May 2003.

Gradually, the suicide attack has become horribly ordinary. There are two types: those linked to enduring local crises and those linked to a global ised enemy ("the West", "the Jews"). The first has spread between crisis zones in response to similar political and cultural contexts. It is the result of a painful past over several generations, as in Palestine, Sri Lanka, Kashmir and Chechnya: Chechnyans were deported by Stalin for acts of collaboration with the Germans in the second world war; Palestinians were victims of the 1948 nakba (catastrophe) (7); Tamils, some of whom had been transported by the British to Sri Lankan plantations, were made stateless at independence, then naturalised as Sinhalese, then renaturalised as Indians. Suicide bombers come from the second or third generation after the original crises and cannot understand why there is still no hope.

The culture of violence and death is rich with meaning. To set the tone, it is essential to construct a martyr model that gradually supplants the fighter model. The deathly atmosphere maintained by the violence of the occupying troops and by the glorification of those who resist occupation prepares for the supreme sacrifice of death, which is assumed to be preferable to life in this world.

Research by Eyad Serraj, the Palestinian psychiatrist who set up the Gaza community mental health programme (8), produced terrible findings: 25% of young people in Gaza aspire to a martyr’s death; some refuse to go to school because they fear not seeing their parents again if their parents are arrested or killed, or not finding their house if it is destroyed.

"In the first intifada, the danger was limited to the places where soldiers and stone-throwers clashed," explains Serraj. "Now death comes from the skies and anyone anywhere can be hit. This has created a state of chronic panic." Some young people have seen their fathers or brothers humiliated, so in games they prefer to play the part of Israeli soldiers.

Jacques Semelin describes genocidal processes as "delirious rationality" (9) but stresses that they are rational. Revenge suicide appears to be altruistic, according to Emile Durkheim’s classification: the suicide donates his life for an identified community with a political structure based on an ethno-nationalist order that lays claim to certain territory. Recruitment is made easier by feelings of betrayal among a young graduate elite who succeed in leaving the land of violence and suffering yet who suddenly return to sacrifice themselves (10). The goal of the struggle is political, though it conceals a religious justification.

Although suicide bombers retreat into isolation while preparing their attacks, they address their families, which the 11 September attackers did not. "I want to avenge Palestinians’ blood, especially the blood of women, children and the old, and most of all the blood of baby Himam Hejjo, whose death shocked me to the bottom of my heart. I dedicate my humble act to the faithful of Islam who admire martyrs and work to further our cause," explained Mahmoud Ahmed Marmash (Netanya suicide attack, May 2001).

After several phases of Israeli-Palestinian negotiation that ended in blind alleys or were seen as deceitful, there has been a sense of complete stalemate. Hamas’s first attacks happened in Israel after the Oslo peace process (which Israel sought to derail) and after the resumed Israeli occupation of land that was supposed to be returned to the Palestinians; the attacks were triggered by settler Baruch Goldstein’s killing of 30 worshippers in Hebron mosque in February 1994.

Many conventional political bodies, whether based on clans (as in Chechnya) or partisans (the Palestine Liberation Organisation or the Kashmir Liberation Front (11)), are in crisis. Overall the inability of elites to change the order of this tainted world is prompting people to choose a solution purified by martyrdom. Rivalry between traditional parties or groups, as among Palestinians or Tamils, harms their credibility. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) eliminated the members of rival outfits: the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation in 1985 and the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front in 1986-87.

Suicide attacks bear witness to lives with no escape, where religious or sacrificial legitimacy is deemed superior to patriarchal legitimacy. Pénélope Larzillière, an Islamic expert, points out that it is "the Koran against the father" or Wahhabism against the Sufi brotherhoods. Religion can be a promotional factor, but a sacrificial atmosphere of death may be enough.

More and more Palestinian attackers are women. The Syrian People’s party has sent five women on 12 suicide attacks and the LTTE has a squad of female volunteers called the Black Tigers. Rape by occupying soldiers is sometimes the reason for a woman to volunteer, since the victim has been doubly dishonoured, by the occupation itself and in relation to her own society. The personal motivations are otherwise a strange blend of resistance to the occupation and a response to the male chauvinism of local society (12). The first Palestinian woman suicide bomber, Wafa Idriss, had been disowned by her husband because she was barren and was forced to return dishonoured to her family home. She felt that her disgrace could only be erased by the ultimate sacrifice, which would overturn the social order. Hers is not an isolated case: Ahlam Araf Tamimi, a Palestinian who died on 9 August 2001, and the Tamil Dhanui who assassinated Rajiv Gandhi, had both had illegitimate children. "It was an act against the occupation," said Fatma al-Said, who was arrested after two Israeli soldiers were killed (13). "But it was also a way of proving to my family that I was as good as my brothers, who were allowed to go to university while I wasn’t."

The idea of showing or failing to show mercy to civilians has provoked debate. President Aslan Maskhadov of Chechnya condemned attacks against civilian targets, as did the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abd al-Aziz al-Sheikh and Mufti Muhammad Sayyid al-Tantawi, sheikh of al-Azhar in Egypt.

Suicide attacks, despite their religious presentation, usually derive from a fundamentally political logic; they can only be stopped by a serious process of negotiation. Counter-terrorist violence based on collective punishment has been proved to fail. "We’re going to take the war to them, so they’ll have to wage war in their houses, not ours. We’re fighting on their land and we have the advantage," says an Israeli army officer (14). But during the second intifada, Palestinian casualties have outnumbered Israel’s by three to one and Ariel Sharon’s tough policy does not protect Israel: its casualty toll is now triple that of 25 years ago. The tough policy produces a mood conducive to recruiting. (Significantly there have been no suicide attacks in Algeria, although this can’t be explained solely by the fact that the civil war only began in 1991 (15).)

The second category of suicide attack, exemplified by the assault on the World Trade Centre, is even more worrying. Here the enemy has become a globalised, imaginary, reified construct: "Jews, crusaders and hypocrites," in the words of Osama bin Laden, grouping targets with no regard for the victims’ religion. On 21 May al-Jazeera broadcast a recording in which al-Qaida’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called on Muslims to "fight the Americans" and urged them to "drive Westerners from the Arab peninsula, the land of Islam" because "crusaders and Jews only understand the language of murder, bloodbaths and burning towers". He added: "Muslims, make your decision and strike the embassies of the United States, Great Britain, Australia and Norway [sic] and their companies and employees."

There are three generations involved in the networks to which these suicide attacks are usually attributed. There are the first generation "Afghan" veterans who fought the Russians, such as Bin Laden, the Turk Adnan Ersoz and Abu Qatada from London. Then come the younger "Bosnian-Chechnyans" such as Azad Ekinci, the Turk behind the attacks in Istanbul in November 2003. The third generation, including shoe bomber Richard Reid, are in their twenties and fascinated by veteran fighters who embrace sacrifice for a mythical cause: the triumph of Islam, the restoration of the caliphate or the reunification of Muslims.

These young people form what the Turkish expert on Islamist movements, Rusen Cakir, calls "nameless splinter groups", cemented by a sacred and ritualistic preparation for death, backed by sectarian, sacrificial ideology. Time is abolished by mythological references to the Salafists’ golden age of Islam. The militants’ warlike ideology has the advantage of designating a reified enemy with no value - a concentration of evils and worries: Americans, Israelis, the French for North Africans. These militants no longer claim a national identity, but a worldwide Muslim identity, the umma (the community of believers). The internet cafe is as important a meeting place for them as the mosque. These suicide candidates, often from uprooted, multicultural and multinational families, have created their own symbolic geography: the land of Islam is wherever they are, where attacks can legitimately be carried out.

This is a surprising effect of "glocalisation": the attackers’ bonds of solidarity are local and ganglike, often deriving from the same neighbourhood or town; while linkmen, such as Djamel Beghal, are global and cross many borders to cover their tracks. The Moroccan Islamist group, Assirat al-Moustaqim (the straight path), which provided eight of the 14-strong Casablanca bomb team, is a sect/local gang from the working-class district of Sidi Moumen; their imam came from France.

Western converts to Islam and second-generation immigrants to the West who rediscover Islam can become target-spotters, like Richard Reid in Israel, or, like Zacarias Moussaoui, suppliers of forged passports that are declared lost and then regularly renewed. They make frequent pilgrimages to Pakistan, Kashmir and Afghanistan. They can easily get money; according to Scotland Yard, a network of some 4,000 Islamic associations and 50 banks annually redistributes $5.35m of zakat al-fitr (alms). Frequent travel and internet communication help erase any territorial dimension to the fight.

The People’s Mojahedin of Iran is an interesting example of the mythicisation that predisposes activists to self-sacrifice, however futile: several members immolated themselves in Europe when one of their leaders, Maryam Radjavi, was held in custody by the French domestic intelligence service. Theirs was a collective suicide, like those of PKK prisoners and of apocalyptic cults that believe themselves under siege in an uncomprehending and aggressive world (for example, the David Koresh cult in Guyana and the Order of the Solar Temple in France). In these, the guru/leader/ emir has an essential role in embodying the promise of a better future, whether on earth because the cause has triumphed or in heaven after death. He is often self-proclaimed, like Frenchman Richard Robert, "the blue-eyed imam", who helped organise the Casablanca bombings. The personality cult induces in suicide candidates a quasi-religious devotion to a leader to whom sacrifice is due - whether Radjavi, Bin Laden, the PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, or the operational leader of the Jemaa Islamiyah in Indonesia, Riduan Isamuddin, alias Hambali.

The targets span many activities (the UN, Red Cross, World Trade Centre, banks), the attacks are now indifferent to the collateral effects and war on other Muslims is not prohibited. Muslim targets are "hypocrites" - Shia, described as half-Jews; or believers who are accused of a debauched Western lifestyle. The attack on the al-Mohaya residential complex in Riyadh on 8 November 2003 killed people from 19 countries, most of them Middle Eastern; no Westerners were involved. The Istanbul synagogue attack killed 19 people, five of them Turkish Jews. The US sees al-Qaida’s hand everywhere: it has become what Richard Labevière calls a "mythological enemy".

The Istanbul attacks symbolised the break with traditional political Islam. The founder of Hizbullah in Turkey is an "Afghan", Adnan Ersoz. The Bosnian-Chechnyan generation produced Azad Ekinci, who recruited and trained the 20-year-old suicide bombers; they hung out in an internet cafe in provincial Bingol. The attacks targeted a country that refused to help the US in the Iraq war and is governed by a party (Justice and Development) that claims roots in political Islam. Prime minister Tayyip Erdogan said: "This is an attack on Turkey through its Jewish citizens."

The attacks exposed the faultline between the constitutional Islamists who chose the electoral route in the 1980s and the small scattered groups from which the new generation of bombers are recruited. The two categories of suicide bombers are linked, since the earlier generation is referred to by the later as symbols in the mythology of martyred Islam. But they have different rationales. The concept of a global war on terror is a political error because it treats two sets of groups and actions as one.

With the religion-driven, ethno-nationalist suicide attacks in Chechnya, Palestine and elsewhere, the only solution is a political negotiating process. The Israeli troops’ pullout from Lebanon bolstered Hizbullah’s decision, taken in the final years of the occupation, to stop its suicide attacks, which had been aimed only at military targets. The brutality of the Indian, Russian, Sri Lankan or Israeli occupying forces generally causes more casualties than do suicide attacks. It legitimises terrorist acts as asymmetric weapons and denies innocent-victim status to civilians - because they are armed (Israeli settlers) or because they pretend ignorance of atrocities (Russians). So the brutality of the occupiers sparks popular support and produces fresh volunteers for suicide.

However, it is the second category of suicide attack, those linked with a globalised enemy, that has struck in the most countries. It continues to spread, to the point where no European nation can think itself safe.

* Pierre Conesa is a senior civil servant in Paris

(1) Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Argentina, Chechnya/ Ingushetia/Ossetia and Russia, Kashmir, India, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Morocco, Afghanistan, United States, Turkey, Iraq (in the Shi’ite south, the Sunni triangle and Iraqi Kurdistan), Yemen, India, Pakistan, Philippines, Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Kuwait, Croatia, Spain, Uzbekistan and two planned attacks on Singapore and Malaysia.

(2) Besides those cited: Britain, Jordan, France, Germany, Italy, Australia and Switzerland (via the Red Cross in Baghdad).

(3) The first suicide attack in 1981 had targeted the Iraqi embassy in Beirut and was carried out by the Islamist group al-Da’wa.

(4) Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

(5) Amélie Blom, "Les kamikazes du Cachemire: martyrs d’une cause perdue", Critique internationale, n° 20, July 2003.

(6) "An alternative strategy for the war on terrorism", 11 December 2002.

(7) In 1948,750,000-850,000 Palestinians left their land, a diaspora that has been known since as al-nakba, the catastrophe.

(8) Cited at the 6th Arab Film Biennial at the Institute of the Arab World in Paris, 2002.

(9) "Les rationalités de la violence extrême", Critique internationale, n° 6, July 2000.

(10) On Kashmir see Amélie Blom, op cit; on Palestinian martyrdom see Penelope Larzillière in Diechkoff and Leveau, Israéliens et Palestiniens; la guerre en partage, Balland, Paris 2003.

(11) Amélie Blom, op cit.

(12) See Barbara Victor, Femmes kamikaze, Flammarion, Paris, 2003.

(13) Quoted by Barbara Victor, op cit.