Suicide: terrorists' ultimate weapon

LONDON -- From Jerusalem to Jakarta and from Bali to Baghdad, the suicide bomber is clearly the weapon of choice for international terrorists. Terrorist groups now rely almost exclusively on this tactic to carry out their attacks.

As the devastating attacks on civilians in Jerusalem and Baghdad last week demonstrated, suicide bombings have become a grimly efficient terrorist industry. The industry is flourishing worldwide; bomb-makers are in especially high demand.

Pioneered by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon two decades ago and adopted as a routine tool by Hamas and al-Qaida -- most notably in the attacks in New York and Washington two years ago -- the suicide bombing campaign was adopted in recent months in Iraq, where a truck bombing at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad last Tuesday may turn out to be terrorism sponsored by the sympathizers of a deposed state.

Of the terrorism industry's two raw materials -- bombs and people - - people are far easier to come by. In the militant corners of the Muslim world, signing up for such a mission infuses the volunteer with an urgent purpose and the promise of glory. It seems unlikely that the bombs will ever outnumber the people eager to deliver them.

Ismail Abu Shanab, the prominent Hamas leader who was killed on Thursday by six missiles fired from an Israeli helicopter into his station wagon, was asked in 1999 why so many people were eager to serve as suicide bombers. He said there was only one thing a person needs to qualify: "A moment of courage."

"The person who explodes a bomb does not need a lot of training," Shanab told Jessica Stern, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1999.

A person using a knife, Shanab explained, is usually "nervous." A gun takes intensive training, and too much time. Knife and gun attacks also depend on a degree of luck. Things can go wrong. But a suicide bomber, to be a success, only needs that single moment of courage, Shanab said, which he found was in abundant supply in Gaza. Young men and women who carried out such missions had usually seen what they viewed as "something terrible, some kind of atrocity," he said. "Islam says, 'an eye for an eye.' We believe in retaliation. When someone is killed in jihad, it is a joyful day." His assessment led Stern to conclude that suicide bombers are a terrorist organization's most economically viable way to conduct its bloody business. "It's certainly cost-effective," Stern said, "both financially and in terms of the number of terrorist lives ultimately put at risk."

The Palestinians' suicide bombings -- there have been more than 100 since the intifada began in November 2000 -- have become so systemized that the infrastructure that supports the attacks, like the recruiters, the bomb laboratories and the delivery systems, is typically not just accepted but embraced.

"The fact that they've been able to sustain the tactic suggests that this tactic is applauded in the community, and it reflects a society under considerable stress," said Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert with the RAND Corp. "I think we'd all agree, and it's not just a Western view, that suicide bombing is abnormal. The fact that abnormal behavior is applauded reflects abnormal conditions. If normal conditions are restored, then normal behavior should return -- at least they'd be less tolerant of abnormal behavior." Terrorists may well have embraced the suicide bomb attack because of its devastating psychological effects and because they have become convinced that these attacks command attention and change.

"It's the ultimate asymmetric weapon," explained Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews. "You can assimilate among the people, and then attack with an element of surprise that has an incredible and devastating shock value."

Without weapons of mass destruction, a single terrorist can create a disproportionate impact by detonating a bomb -- whether the result is crumpling the road map to Mideast peace or undermining U.S. efforts to win the peace in Iraq.

Twenty years ago, for example, on April 18, 1983, Americans were stunned by a Shiite Muslim suicide bomber, who attacked the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and killed 63 people. On Oct. 23, 1983, 241 Marines, asleep in their barracks during a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, were killed by another suicide truck bomber. By early the next year, the Marines had left Lebanon.

For al-Qaida and its affiliated groups, whose suicide bombing attacks stretch back a decade, the suicide truck-bomb has been used almost exclusively in recent months, usually against what investigators call "soft targets," like the Western housing compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the tourist enclaves in Casablanca and the J.W. Marriott Hotel in downtown Jakarta, Indonesia.

In the terrorism world, imitation is inevitable, and there is a widespread belief among terrorists that the suicide bombings are working.

As Shanab obviously realized, one appeal for terrorists is an illusion of empowerment.

In the United States, the motives of the suicide bomber are often misunderstood.

"It is the general consensus that martyrs hate democracy, and are crazies -- this is not true," said Scott Atran, a scientist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris and at the University of Michigan. "These people showed no sign of psychopathology. They were from middle- and upper-class families. Poverty is not a factor. The factor is diminishing expectations. No matter how rich or poor, if you have not achieved what you expected, you are more likely to back a radical policy."

In fact, the surge in suicide bombings may be fueled by a more simple motivation.

A suicide attack is a certain way to be honored by your society, while a family is also rewarded monetarily.

"In an instant," said Ranstorp, "you are propelled from being no one to someone who is glorified, and lionized with poems, and you live on in this historical chain of heroic martyrs, being remembered and saluted far longer than if you had not undertaken this kind of operation."

Nearly a millennium before the advent of the suicide bombers, the original terrorists, based in what is now Iran, were known as the Assassins, led by Hasan-i-Sabah, the group's founder. They committed political murder by stabbing the victim at close range; such attacks made it almost certain that the killer would also die. These assassins were among the first killers to be hailed in death as heroes.

Last Tuesday night, for the first time, a suicide bomber was an imam from one of Hebron's largest mosques, a religious 29-year-old man who had memorized the Quran by age 16. He was also a married man, the father of two young children, who climbed aboard a Jerusalem bus crowded with families, some returning from the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site. Strapped to the man's chest was a roughly 12- pound bomb, fortified with ball bearings and nails.

He must have seen the children riding with their parents on the bus before detonating the bomb, which ripped off the vehicle's roof, killing 20 people and injuring more than 100. The man was a lecturer on Islamic law at Hebron's Sharia College, and was studying to become a Muslim magistrate.

He did not fit the profile of a suicide bomber, who is usually an unmarried man between the ages of 18 and 25.

Just a few hours earlier, a suicide bomber detonated a flat-bed truck piled with 1,500 pounds of old munitions outside the U.N. headquarters in downtown Baghdad.

The authorities now believe that loyalists of former President Saddam Hussein were likely responsible for the attack that killed at least 23 people, including the United Nations' highest-ranking official in Iraq.

Both blasts had immediate, and possibly long-lasting, impacts, threatening the ever-fragile peace process between Israel and the Palestinians and the security of U.S. forces and international peacekeepers stationed inside Iraq.

During Hezbollah's attacks in southern Lebanon 20 years ago, the group's members shot film of the attacks, and handed the grisly images to television, so they could be broadcast within hours. Those first films became recruitment videos, aired for free.

"For every suicide bomber," Ranstorp said, "there are five who want to follow their example."

Like some of the Sept. 11 hijackers, the imam left behind a videotape explaining his reasons for becoming a suicide bomber. Other bombers have posed for studio portraits before blowing themselves up.

Ranstorp worries that the next phase of suicide bombings will involve not just bombers posing for posterity but the videotaping of attacks. He worries that satellite channels will air the horrible moments almost instantly to a future generation of suicide bombers.

"They learned from the psychological impact of 9/11, the horrible moment being replayed over and over," he said. "Someday, terrorists will be armed with bombs and cameras."

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