SUICIDE TERRORISM: ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE : Death wishes
 

by Robert Pape

A suicide bomber walked into a restaurant in Tel Aviv and blew up - killing himself and nine Israeli civilians. We know the horror. We know not to be surprised, even though this attack came after months of relative calm.

But do we understand what drives seemingly ordinary people to strap explosives to their bodies and deliberately kill themselves while on a mission to kill others? Recently, we have made strides in understanding suicide terrorism.

Just a few years ago, one could listen to a seemingly endless stream of journalists asking, "Why do only Muslims carry out suicide attacks?" The media's approach dovetailed with the popular notion that suicide terrorism is a product of religious extremism - where a poor, desperate (Muslim) soul seeks to escape the troubles of this world for a quick trip to paradise. Today, we know a great deal more. Much challenges the conventional wisdom. Some is a bit disconcerting.

In my own work, I studied every suicide terrorist bombing and attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004, analyzing a total of 462 suicide terrorists who killed themselves to complete their missions. Of these, more than half were secular.

The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group many in the West have not heard much about: the Tamil Tigers, in Sri Lanka. This group - secular, Marxist, Hindu - carried out more suicide terrorist attacks than Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Further, at least 30 per cent of all Muslim suicide terrorist attacks are committed by purely secular groups, such as the Kurdish terrorist group in Turkey called the PKK.

Instead of religion, what more than 95 per cent of all suicide terrorist attacks around the world have in common is a specific political goal: to compel a democratic state to withdraw heavy combat forces from territory the terrorists consider to be their homeland or that they prize greatly. This has been the central goal of every campaign of suicide terrorism since 1980: from Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Kashmir, the West Bank, al-Qaeda and Iraq.

To put today's suicide terrorism into perspective, it is helpful to look at historical precedents. The three best known of these early suicide campaigns were those of the ancient Jewish Zealots; the 11th- and 12th-century Assassins; and the Japanese kamikazes from the Second World War.

Yigael Yadin's Masada: Herod's Fortress and the Zealot's Last Stand (Random House, 1966) offers a fine history of the last days of what were probably the first suicide attackers in history.

Determined to liberate Judea from Roman occupation, two militant Jewish revolutionary groups, the Zealots and the Sicarii, used suicidal violence to provoke popular uprisings from about 4 BC to 70 AD. Typically, they attacked their victims in broad daylight in the heart of Jerusalem and other centres, using small, sickle-like daggers (sicae in Latin) concealed under their cloaks. Many of these attacks were suicide missions, since the killers were often immediately captured and put to death.

The Zealots remain controversial even to this day, in part because historians credit their attacks with precipitating the "Jewish War" of 66 AD, which led to the destruction of the Temple and the fateful events at Masada, in which more than 900 Jews committed suicide rather than accept a return to Roman rule.

The new edition of Bernard Lewis's 1967 The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (Basic Books, 2002) also sheds considerable light on the powerful role resistance to the threat of foreign occupation has long played in the history of suicide terrorism.

The Ismaili Assassins - a Shia Muslim sect based in northwestern Iran in the 11th and 12th centuries - created an effective organization for the planned, systematic and long-term use of political murder which relied on suicide missions for success.

For two centuries, the Assassins' daggers demoralized the mainly Sunni rulers of the region as well as leaders of Christian Crusader states, chalking up more than 50 dramatic murders and inspiring a new word: "assassination." Most of the Assassins' victims were political and military leaders who were so heavily guarded that even successful attackers would almost surely pay for that success with their lives.

What made the Assassins so lethal was that they were willing to die to accomplish their missions and often, rather than attempting to escape, revelled in their impending death.

Territorial control was a key element of the Assassins' program. Living in the remote Elburz mountains of northern Iran, an area with many castles and a sympathetic population, the Assassins succeeded, as Lewis writes, "in creating what was virtually a territorial state." Numerous sultans in Persia and Iraq sought to uproot the Ismaili menace by military force, only to find themselves accepting negotiated settlements. The pattern of suicide assassinations continued until the Mongols invaded Iran and exterminated virtually the entire Ismaili population in 1258.

The Japanese kamikazes during the Second World War were regular military forces, and so are not normally considered terrorists, although they also used suicide attack in an attempt to ward off a foreign occupation.

Their history and motives are superbly recounted by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney's Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms (University of Chicago, 2002). Starting in October, 1944, the Japanese high command organized a variety of "special attack" units called kamikazes, whose pilots agreed to crash their airplanes, gliders and even manned torpedoes into U.S. naval vessels.

Their purpose was to impose such a high cost on the attacking fleet that the United States would settle for a negotiated outcome rather than invade the Japanese home islands. The name "kamikaze" derives from the "divine wind" that was said to have turned back a Mongol invasion fleet in the 13th century.

More than 3,800 pilots gave their lives on these missions, which continued through August, 1945. Through detailed examination of numerous diaries and other narratives written by the kamikazes themselves, Ohnuki-Tierney provides compelling testimony that these suicide attackers were not driven by loyalty to the Japanese Emperor or "peer group pressure."

Instead, "their sense of loyalty was channelled into their sense of patriotism . . . unconditional dedication to a cause greater than their own lives." Of course, understanding the real motives of most suicide terrorists does not mean we should exonerate them.

Suicide terrorism is the murder of innocents and so remains an unacceptable tactic of war. However, knowing more about the logic and circumstances of suicide terrorism can provide a strong foundation for new policies that can achieve vital foreign-policy interests without provoking a new generation of suicide attackers.

Robert Pape is professor of political science at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

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