The making of a suicide bomber

What drives someone to kill themselves while killing others? Psychologists and anthropologists have been studying suicide attacks and have come to some startling conclusions.

In any normal circumstances, a 16-year-old schoolboy and a mother of two young children would be symbolic of life and growth. Yet in two cases in the Middle East this year they signified only death and self-destruction.

The mother was Reem Raiyshi, who killed herself and four Israelis in a suicide bombing in Gaza in January, leaving behind a 3-year-old son and 18-monyth-old daughter. The boy was Hussam Abdu, whose failed attempt to blow himself up at an Israeli army checkpoint near Nablus in March was televised around the world. Raiyshi was the first “martyr mother,” but Palestinian terrorist groups insist she will not be the last. And Abdu’s case was not exceptional – dozens of Palestinian teenagers have tried to do the same and some have succeeded.

In the face of such unfathomable contradictions it is comforting to imagine that suicide terrorists – even those who are mothers or teenagers – are different to the rest of us. One popular assumption is that they are homicidal or suicidal maniacs; another that they are poor and ignorant with little prospect of decent future; another that they are driven to act by unbearable political oppression; a fourth that they are religious fanatics, usually Islamic. Those notions are widely affirmed by analysts and politicians. They are also wrong on almost every count.

While suicide terrorists invariably come from oppressed communities, recent research by psychologists, anthropologists and others suggests that they fit none of the other common profiles. They are no less rational or sane, no worse educated, no poorer and no more religious than anyone else. What this amounts to is in many ways more alarming than the ubiquitous misperception of a suicide bomber as fanatical. It means that, in the right circumstances, anyone could be one.

Killing yourself while killing your enemy is not a modern idea. It was practised against the Romans in 1^st-century Judea by Jewish Zealots, and by the Islamic order of Assassins in the Middle East from the 11^th to 14^th centuries. Japanese kamikaze pilots changed the course of the Second World War (though not in the way they would have hoped) by flying their plains into enemy ships.

The modern era of suicide terrorism started in April 1983 when Hezbollah, under the cover name of Islamic Jihad, attacked the US embassy in Beirut with a tuck-bomb, killing 63. The tactic has since been used by dozens of groups around the world. Altogether there have been some 500 suicide attacks around the world since 1980.

All this has given academics studying the psychology of suicide bombers and the environments in which they act a wealth of data to draw on. And they are overturning some persistent myths. Take the idea that terrorism is born of poverty and lack of education.

Yet in a study of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad suicide terrorists from the late 1980s to 2003, Claude Berrebi, an economist at Princeton University, found that only 13 per cent came from a poor background compared with 32 per cent of the Palestinian population in general. In addition, more than half the suicide bombers had entered further education, compared with just 15 per cent of the general population.

What of the idea that suicide terrorists are simply suicidal? Ariel Merari, a psychologist t Tel Aviv University in Israel and perhaps the foremost expert on Middle Eastern terrorism, studied the background and circumstances of every suicide bomber in the Middle East since 1983. He came to an unexpected conclusion. “In the majority you find none of the risk factors normally associated with suicide, such as mood disorders or schizophrenia, history of attempted suicides,” he says.

The link with religion is more complicated since most Islamic terrorist groups use religious propaganda, largely the promise of paradise, to prepare recruits for suicide missions. Yet suicide terrorism is in no way exclusive either to religious groups or to Islamic culture. Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, complied a database of every suicide attack from 1980 to 2001. He found no direct connection between suicide attacks and religious fundamentalism. As he points out, the leading perpetrators of suicide terrorism, the Tamil Tigers, are a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are themselves hostile to religion. 22 of the 31 suicide attacks in Lebanon between 1983 and 1986 were carried out by secular organisations.

What, then, would lead a sane, rational, educated and comfortably-off person to do something so irrational and extreme? The key, many researchers agree, lies with the organisations that recruit them. In the modern history of suicide terrorism it appears that every mission has been authorised and planned by a resistance group. “Suicide terrorism is an organizational phenomenon,” confirms Merari. “An organisation has to decided to embark on it.”

The decision to engage in suicide terrorism is political and strategic, Pape says. What is more, the aim is always the same: to coerce a government, through force of popular opinion (apart from a few isolated cases, modern suicide terrorism has only ever been used against democracies), to withdraw from territory the group considers its homeland. That certainly applies to the 9/11 terrorists, who considers the US as occupying presence in the Middle East because of its military bases there and its backing to Israel. It also holds for groups who attack democracies indirectly, by attacking those who support them. The ongoing attacks on police stations in Iraq are an example.

This raises the question: why do some groups resort to suicide terrorism while others do not? Why, for example, did the IRA not use suicide bombers when all the conditions seemed set for it: an occupation, as the IRA saw it, by a democratic government, and a resistance organisation whose members were already bombing civilians and martyring themselves for their cause through hunger strikes? An IRA commander replied that it was against their culture, that their people would turn against them. Hunger strikes were the furthest they could do.

Bruce Hoffman of the research organisation RAND Corporation in Washington, DC, who specialises in studying political violence, agrees that culture can play a part in deciding an organisation’s strategy. “The western mindset is very materialistic,” he says. “They don’t have the same desire, the same culture, for sacrifice. Maybe it’s because the West has achieved so much materially. If you are materialistic, you will never make a good suicide terrorist.”

Other researchers, however, think it has less to do with culture than with strategy: groups resort to suicide terrorism when conventional terrorist methods are doing little to further their case, or when their enemy’s military strength becomes overwhelming.

Organisations are not just responsible for the decision to embark on suicide terrorism; they are also necessary to make bombers go through with the act, Merari says. How does an organisation do it? First it must win popular support for the tactic, which it does by proclaiming it the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of the community. Where a community is being violently oppressed by an occupying power or suffers severe social deprivation, the message is quickly taken up. On the streets of Gaza and in the Tamil towns of northern Sri Lanka, suicide bombers are celebrated on posters and in songs, their deeds glorified in coffee shops and school playgrounds. “It is like the patriotism you find in any country at war,” Merari says. “In such an atmosphere many people say, sometimes offhandedly, that they too would like to become a martyr, because the society views that as the ultimate form of patriotism.”

But as Merari points out, a person might volunteer in the heat of the moment and change their mind as the day of reckoning approaches. So groups have ways of ensuring that their recruits cannot back out. Almost always they organise them into small bands – or in the case of the Tamil Tigers an academy – and over weeks, months or years put them through intense psychological training to reinforce the idea that they will soon become martyrs for their cause.

With Al-Qaida, Hamas and other Islamic groups, much of this indoctrination is religious. This is how a member of Hamas explained it to UN relief worker Nasra Hassan, who interviewed failed suicide bombers and their families and trainers – 250 people in all – while working in Gaza between 1996 and 1999: “We focus his attention on Paradise, on being in the presence of Allah, on meeting the prophet Muhammad… and on fighting the Israeli occupation and removing it from the Islamic trust that is Palestine.”

The sense of duty to the community but to a brotherhood of peers is, many psychologists agree, the single most important reason why rational people are persuaded to become suicide bombers.

Robert Pape

/from NewScientist, №7, 2005/

 

Leading perpetrators of suicide attacks since 1980

Terrorist group	Country	Number of Attacks
Tamil Tigers (LTTE)	Sri Lanka
Hamas	Israel/Palestinian territories
Iraqi resistance groups	Iraq
Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade	Israel/Palestinian territories
Kashmiri separatists	India
Hezbollah	Lebanon
Al-Qaida	Worldwide
Palestinian Islamic Jihad	Israel/Palestinian territories
Chechen separatists	Chechnya/Russia
Kurdistan Workers’ Party(PKK)	Turkey

Source: Robert Pape, University of Chicago; Scott Atran, University of Michigan; Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.

Set Work