Suicide bombing attacks have become a weapon of choice among
terrorist groups because of their lethality and ability to cause mayhem
and fear. Though they are depressing, the almost-daily news reports of
deaths caused by suicide attacks rarely explain what motivates the
attackers. Between 1981 and 2006, 1,200 suicide attacks made up 4
percent of all terrorist attacks in the world and killed 14,599 people,
representing 32 percent of all terrorism-related deaths. The question
is, why?
At last, now we have some tangible data to begin addressing the
question. The Suicide Terrorism Database at Flinders University in
Australia, the most comprehensive compendium of such information in the
world, holds details on suicide bombings in Iraq, Palestine-Israel,
Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, which together accounted for 90
percent of all suicide attacks between 1981 and 2006. Analysis of the
information contained therein yields some interesting clues: It is
politics more than religious fanaticism that has led terrorists to blow
themselves up.
The evidence from the database largely discredits the common wisdom
that the personality of suicide bombers and their religion are the
principal cause of their actions. It shows that though religion can play
a vital role in the recruitment and motivation of potential future
suicide bombers, their real driving-force is a cocktail of motivations
including politics, humiliation, revenge, retaliation and altruism. The
configuration of these motivations is related to the specific
circumstances of the political conflict behind the rise of suicide
attacks in different countries.
On October 4, 2003, the 29-year-old Palestinian lawyer Hanadi Jaradat
exploded her suicide belt in the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, killing 20
people and wounding many more. According to her family, her suicide
mission was in revenge for the killing of her brother and her fiancé by
the Israeli security forces, and in revenge for all the crimes Israel
had perpetrated in the occupied West Bank by killing Palestinians and
expropriating their lands. The main motive for many suicide bombings in
Israel is revenge for acts committed by the Israelis.
In September 2007 when American forces raided an Iraqi insurgent camp
in the desert town of Singar near the Syrian border, they discovered
biographies of more than 700 foreign fighters. The Americans were
surprised to find that 137 of them were Libyans and that 52 of these
were from the small Libyan town of Darnah. The reason why so many of
Darnah’s young men had gone to Iraq for suicide missions was not the
global-jihadist ideology, but an explosive mix of desperation, pride,
anger, a sense of powerlessness, local tradition of resistance and
religious fervor. A similar mix of factors is now motivating young
Pashtuns to volunteer for suicide missions in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Apart from one demographic attribute – that the majority of suicide
bombers tend to be young males – the available evidence has failed to
provide researchers with a stable set of demographic, psychological,
socioeconomic and religious variables that can be causally linked to the
suicide bombers’ personality or their socioeconomic origins. With the
exception of a few cases, their life stories show no apparent connection
between violent militant activity and personality disorders.
Typically, most suicide bombers are psychologically normal, deeply
integrated into social networks and emotionally attached to their
national communities. Labels that are randomly attached to the bombers,
such as “mad,” denote an inability to fathom the deeper reasons for
their actions, while also failing to advance our understanding of the
causes of the phenomenon of suicide bombing. Rather, they impede us from
discovering its real nature, purpose and causes.
To explain suicide attacks, understanding the terrorist
organization’s logic is more important than understanding individual
motivations. Suicide bombings have high symbolic value because the
willingness of the perpetrators to die signals their high level of
resolve and dedication to a cause. The bombings serve as symbols of a
just struggle, galvanize popular support, generate financial support for
the organization and become a source of new recruits for future suicide
missions.
Suicide bombings serve the interests of the sponsoring organization
in two ways: by coercing an adversary to make concessions, and by giving
the sponsoring organization an advantage over its rival (or rivals) in
terms of support from constituencies. Contrary to the popular image that
suicide terrorism is an outcome of irrational religious fanaticism,
suicide bombing attacks are resolutely a politically-motivated
phenomenon.
Humiliation, revenge and altruism appear to play a key role at the
organizational and individual levels in shaping the subculture that
promotes suicide bombings. Humiliation is an emotional process that
seeks to discipline the target party’s behavior by attacking and
lowering their own and others’ perceptions of whether they deserve
respect.
The actions of the American guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq
played on what it meant to be an honorable, self-respecting subject in
Iraqi society. The disciplinary practices humiliated the prisoners, but
were also felt and seen as humiliating to all Iraqis.
In the months following the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, daily
suicide bombing attacks in Iraq increased dramatically. Similarly,
counterinsurgency operations involving random house searches,
interrogations, arrests and other violations of human dignity were
followed by an increase in suicide attacks.
People tend to have a strong aversion to what they perceive as
injustice, with the dark side of this manifested as revenge. One
consequence of the desire for vengeance is an individual’s willingness
to endure sacrifice to fulfill the act. Contemplation of revenge can
appear to achieve a range of goals, including righting perceived
injustices, restoring the self-worth of the vengeful individual and
deterring future injustice.
Revenge is also a response to the continuous suffering of an
aggrieved community. At the heart of the whole process are perceptions
of personal harm, unfairness and injustice, and the anger, indignation,
and hatred associated with such perceptions.
Men tend to attach more value to vengeance than women do, while young
people are more prepared to act in a vengeful manner than older
individuals are. It is not surprising, then, to discover that most
suicide bombers happen to be young males.
The meaning and the nature of suicide in a suicide bombing are
strikingly different from ordinary suicides. Suicide bombing falls into
the category of altruistic suicidal actions that involve valuing one’s
life as less worthy than that of the group’s honor, religion, or some
other collective interest.
Religiously and nationalistically coded attitudes toward acceptance
of death, stemming from long periods of collective suffering,
humiliation and powerlessness, enable political organizations to offer
suicide bombings as an outlet for their people’s feelings of
desperation, deprivation, hostility and injustice.
For the individual, participating in a suicide mission is not about
dying and killing alone; it also has a broader significance for
achieving multiple purposes, from the personal to the communal. These
include gaining community approval and political success; liberating the
homeland; achieving personal redemption or honor; using martyrdom to
effect the survival of the community; refusing to accept subjugation;
seeking revenge for personal and collective humiliation; conveying
religious or nationalistic convictions; expressing guilt, shame,
material and religious rewards; escaping from intolerable everyday
degradations of life under occupation, boredom, anxiety and defiance.
The configuration of these purposes varies and is an outcome of
specific circumstances of the political conflict behind the rise of
suicide attacks as a tactic and a weapon.
The causes of suicide bombings lie not in the realm of individual
psychopathology but in that of broader social conditions. An
understanding and knowledge of these conditions are vital for developing
appropriate policies and responses to protect the public.
Suicide bombings are carried out by motivated individuals who are
associated with community-based organizations. Strategies aimed a
finding ways to induce communities to abandon such support would curtail
support for terrorist organizations.
Strategies for eliminating, or at least addressing, collective
grievances in tangible and effective ways would have a significant and
(in many cases) immediate impact on alleviating the conditions that
nurture the subculture of suicide bombings. Support for suicide bombing
attacks is unlikely to diminish without real progress in achieving at
least some of the fundamental goals that suicide bombers and those
sponsoring and supporting them share.
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