Suicide Bombers This fast spreading phenomenon is deeply rooted in the past, but it has never been as dangerous as it is today.
Savage murderers, religious fanatics, people who are raving mad or martyrs for the Islamic cause – what they are depends on your viewpoint. These are the suicide bombers, wrongly called kamikazes, who have become the protagonists of international terrorism in recent years. Once their sphere of activity was limited to the Middle East and South Asia and their deeds only roused a limited interest in industrialized nations’ public opinion, which deluded itself about its relative safety.

But September 11 changed it all: the New York and Washington attacks proved that suicide bombers can strike anywhere, even in our own courtyard, besides also highlighting how terrorists can take on the non suspect identity of apparently peaceful and respectable people, which makes them much harder to expose before they start acting. When, on January 14 this year, a young middle-class woman of Gaza, mother of two children, blew herself up with 5 kg of trinitrotoluene at the Erez border, we finally realized how this phenomenon is sweeping away precautions and that potential Islamic suicide attackers are not just hundreds, but tens of thousands. In the video she recorded before sacrificing herself to kill four soldiers at the Israeli border, as per the Hamas and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade’s instructions, Reem el Reyashi, aged 22 and well educated, declared: “I have always longed to turn my body into a lethal bomb against Zionist invaders and to knock on the doors of heaven with their skulls in hand to witness my commitment to the cause of my people. God gave me the chance to mother two children (the eldest is three and the younger one is eighteen months old – Editor’s note), who I dearly love. But my desire to meet Allah in heaven is greater. Hence I have decided to become a martyr. I am certain God will take care of my children”. This speech is bloodcurdling, to say the least. It is an expression of fanaticism that must make us think deeply about the origins and motivations behind a phenomenon, which, from monstrous, has almost become a routine. Contrary to what one may think, this is not something new because history, especially Middle Eastern history, is dotted with sects whose members were ready to die for the cause if it meant reaching their goals. These factions number the Zealots and the Sicari, two Jewish organizations that spread terror among Roman invaders during the 1st century BC, murderers who had free reign in the region between Syria and Iran between 1,000 and 1,300, Hindu fanatics who resorted to suicide bombers against British colonialists in the 18th and 19th centuries and Mindanao Muslims, who made use of this tool to resist the Spanish. There is however a world of difference between the past and present based on the means at their disposal. At the time murderers succeeded at most in killing one or two enemies at the cost of their own lives. Instead today they can kill five, ten, one hundred or even thousands at a single stroke by resorting to highly charged human bombs or by crashing a truck full of explosives or an aircraft full of fuel against the target, as occurred when the Twin Towers were destroyed. Professor Robert Pape, expert in terrorism at the University of Chicago, calculated that, even excluding the exceptional events of September 11, suicide attacks performed between 1980 and 2002 caused an average of 13 victims each. The murderers find this ratio encouraging both psychologically and as propaganda. Another American expert, Bruce Hoffman, defined suicide bombers “the intelligent missiles of the poor”, in other words the tool that enables terrorist organizations to strike a sure shot at set targets while running a lower risk than traditional attacks, which require some effort to assist the murderers’ escape.

Another peculiarity of suicide bombers in our age is that their crimes are hardly ever the result of their individual initiative, but crown a collective effort, which is often extremely complex and well structured. In this picture the will of the one who sacrifices himself is generally coerced by a series of outside factors such as appeals to patriotism, brain-washing, education based on fanaticism and even financial incentives. Japanese kamikazes, who inflicted very serious damages to the American fleet in the Pacific during the last stages of World War 2, were prototypes of these ‘organized’ suicide bombers, though in the more noble context of declared war. Many books have analysed this phenomenon in detail, its roots in Japan’s military history and especially the relationship between suicide pilots and their emperor. The result was the mythicised figure of kamikazes, turned by collective imagination virtually into legendary heroes. This fame is justified in a certain sense: they fought for their nation and believed so deeply in the rightness of their cause to the point of sacrificing their lives to reach set objectives. They sank enemy ships and killed enemy soldiers without ever striking civilians, women and children in particular.
Nobody, not even the American victims of their offensive, could ever find fault in the legitimate nature of their actions. If at all, they debate on their expediency and effectiveness as the kamikazes did not succeed in stopping the American war machine and many historians believe that their actions convinced President Truman that Japan would never surrender. Subsequently they lead him to retaliate with the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is hence more appropriate to set the date the suicide attack epidemic began, as we know it today, around 1980, when the phenomenon exploded in rapid succession and with equal virulence in Sri Lanka, where it was organized by the Tamil Tigers, and in Lebanon, organized by the Hizbullahs. The Tigers performed many of these actions while fighting to create an independent Tamil state in the north of the island. They reaped a high number of victims and even killed two heads of State, before the virtually absolute indifference of the rest of the world. They were moved by an ancestral hatred towards the Sinhalese, who form the majority of the population, and obeyed their leader, one Velupillai Prebhakaran, whose determined savageness recalls the leader of the Thugs in Emilio Salgari’s novels. The attackers also number many women, thus anticipating a trend that has established itself in the Islamic world only in recent years and which Al Qaeda still refuses to adopt. It is probably for this reason and the purely internal nature of their struggle that the Tigers have never gained the sinister fame fundamentalist nations have in the West today. They ceased operating when an agreement was reached between the two communities in 2002. The Hizbullahs, a Shiite religious faction protected from the very beginning by the ayatollahs of Teheran, can instead be considered the forerunners of today’s Islamic terrorists. They were the ones who persuaded the West to renounce the UN guided peace mission in Lebanon: “We could not stay there and run the risk of another similar attack. We chose to accept a defeat rather than undergo new losses, which our public opinion would have found hard to tolerate”, President Reagan later wrote in his memoirs. These Hizbullahs ran trucks loaded with bombs, more or less with the same technique used twenty years later for the Nassiryah attack, first against the barracks of marines in Beirut causing 241 deaths and later against the barracks of French soldiers, counting 56 victims.
Suicide attacks conducted both under the very Hizbullah flag and that of other Islamic organizations have become increasingly common following the success met by the first episode. At first they gave rise to fiery theological debates within the very Muslim world because the Koran decidedly condemns suicide, considered the expression of mistrust in Allah. But the theory, which has yet to be accepted by all, that considering a jihad, a holy war proclaimed by some fatwah, those who sacrifice themselves to cause losses in enemy lines are not suicides but warriors of faith, martyrs whose sacrifice wins heaven and related benefits such as forgiveness of all sins, the chance to intercede for their relations on the day of Resurrection and a golden life spent by rivers of honey in the company of seventy-two damsels. Though the Koran does not specify that a woman can become a martyr and hence does not state what will await her in afterlife instead of the uris, the large number of female suicide bombers did not give rise to any particular scandal, not even among the ulemas, who have lately found an excuse for that too. Not even Reem el Reyashi’s case, which opened new issues, lead the leaders of the Muslim community in Italy to maintain an unquestionable distance from the phenomenon, though it would be in their interest to show moderation. Anyhow it is incorrect to mark out the origins of suicide attacks only or even mainly in religious fanaticism, in the wish proclaimed by Osama bin Laden and by other political and religious leaders of Islamic extremist parties to make a relevant contribution to the total war against “crusaders and Jews”. This motivation probably prevails in many Al Qaeda soldiers, especially in those who have left their western homes to join the battle, but it is no doubt only a background feature in the Palestinian case. However here too we must distinguish between those who, moved by an ancestral hatred towards Israelis, willingly face death, those who want to revenge the death of a relation who was killed by the Jewish army and those who decide to escape poverty and guarantee a future to their dear ones (at least till Saddam paid from 10,000 to 25,000 dollars to the family of each shaheed).

There have also been cases that are hard to place in one of these patterns, like the well to do laic lawyer protagonist of one of the bloodiest attacks. Since suicide attacks were adopted as a weapon even by Marxist organizations, like Abdullah Ocalan’s Kurdistan Worker’s Party and the Palestinian Liberation Front, it has become even harder to define a clear analysis of the motivations behind the actions of these “martyrs”. Neither is it very clear what moves the famous “black widows” of the Chechnya resistance, the arrowheads of the most ferocious attacks against Russians, to the supreme sacrifice: the desire to take revenge for the loss of their husbands, religious fanaticism or an extreme love of their nation? Suicide attacks present extensive advantages for organizations that make use of this method. These organizations generally assure a constant flow of action by forming complex structures, which comprise recruiters, the indoctrinated, artificers and those who accompany them (Israel attempts to destroy these with regular incursions in West Bank cities with the famous “targeted killings”, which Europe wrongly condemns as offensive actions). Every attack requires long preparation periods during which a well organized State that can count on an efficient network of spies can stop the infernal machine. Israelis, for example, state that behind every successful attack there are ten others thwarted by their security forces. This is evidence that the number of shaheeds available is very large and neither concessions nor compromises will ever invert the trend. From Palestine to Pakistan, from Iraq to Chechnya, terrorist organizations that use suicide bombers do so for psychological reasons too. They are convinced that the large number of militants ready to sacrifice themselves for the cause place them at an advantage, compared to their enemies, who are instead deeply attached to life. To be precise, leaders of the Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades theorize that just the terror shaheeds strike in Israeli society will alone succeed in leading the Jewish State to grant Palestinian demands, as Tsahal will always be superior on a military plane. Similar reasoning is behind the constant attacks in Iraq, where terrorists make no differences between western soldiers and Iraqi civilians in order to spread Terror with the capital T. The industrialized world’s worst problem is how to defend itself from suicide bombers without resorting to the so-called ‘Mongolian method’, which is in practice mass repression. The only possible solution is prevention based on speedy identification and close surveillance of all cells that could organize terrorist attacks. It is no easy task, especially in nations that count a large Muslim community and hence offer aspiring shaheeds a perfect breeding ground. However measures adopted after September 11 have so far proved effective, considering that – Israel apart – terrorists have had to fall back on targets situated in third party nations like Morocco, Tunisia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and, naturally, Iraq. But as this is a growing phenomenon, we shall never have the certainty that the Twin Tower incident will not be repeated for many years to come.