This morning, 14 June 2005, media headlines tell a series of melancholy and not untypical stories. A suicide-bomber with explosives strapped to his belt killed at least nineteen people outside a bank in Kirkuk, northern Iraq; a suicide-bombing aimed at a United States military convoy in Baghdad killed two civilians and wounded five more; another suicide-bombing killed five Iraqi soldiers when he rammed his car into an Iraqi army checkpoint in Kan’an, north of Baghdad; a suicide-bomber wounded four US troops in an Afghanistan attack.
The stories could be taken from yesterday’s news – or tomorrow’s – and be set in Palestine, Kashmir or Sri Lanka as well as Iraq or Afghanistan. The phenomenon they describe has become part of the daily awareness of people around the world. All the more reason to examine the springs of what seems, to victims and spectators alike, a deed of terrifying intimacy.
A weapon of asymmetric war
On 11 September 2001, nineteen young men carried out a suicide-mission in the United States which, in its audacity and effectiveness, shocked the world. What is less well known is that the United States air force contemplated responding with suicide-missions of its own.
Colonel Robert Marr, commander of the Northeast Air Defense Sector (Neads), admitted that some of the planes under his command that day “would have just gotten in the air possibly without any arms on board … Sometimes the only way to stop an aircraft is with your aircraft if you do not have any weapon. It is very possible they would have been asked to give their lives themselves to prevent further attacks if needed” (italics added).
Suicide-missions are now a part of political warfare. In Palestine, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq they have become an important weapon in what military experts call asymmetric warfare, the warfare of grossly unequal forces. Following the example of the biblical Samson (whose suicidal act of mass killing took place in the Gaza region) we seem to have a postmodern outbreak of committed men and women willing and able to kill dozens if not thousands of enemy-subjects in the name of their particular cause. Yet our understanding of the dynamics of suicide-attacks remains hazy, and much of what we assume we know about them is false.
Often, for example, they are viewed as a phenomenon belonging to particular cultures, yet the evidence of Colonel Marr – and in a way the case of the Old Testament’s Samson – might suggest otherwise. How would modern Americans view a pilot who deliberately flew his plane into one of the hijacked airliners and caused it to crash? What do Jews and Christians think of Samson, who toppled a temple on himself and his Philistine enemies?
The truth is that no culture wholeheartedly supports such methods. Around 3,900 kamikaze – suicide airplane – missions were carried out by Japan’s military towards the end of the 1941-45 Pacific war, when Japan’s strategic position had already become desperate. It is widely believed that behind them lay a Japanese tradition of voluntary death, but that is not the case. Senior officers initially rejected plans for kamikaze missions on the practical grounds that they squandered expensive aircraft and highly-trained personnel without guaranteeing military success. They were only adopted as a last resort, once the high command was forced to pin its hopes on a decisive encounter with the enemy.
The thinking behind suicide-missions usually follows this essentially pragmatic model: they are the result of deliberate decisions made by senior controllers behind the scenes. Military logic is at work – for example, a suicide attack generally can be expected to kill four times as many people as any form of terrorism in which the perpetrator hopes to survive and escape. It can carry substantial propaganda value, and it can generate recruits.
Through a distorting mirror
In the media the suicide-bomber is still typically portrayed as a young, poor, disenfranchised, religiously-obsessed male. But the perpetrators of 9/11 were from well-off families, as were many of the men and women who have carried out suicide-missions in Palestine and Israel. And rather than being the fruit of religious fanaticism, most suicide operations have been organised by secular organisations. Even in the case of 9/11, Osama bin Laden’s public statements tended to be framed in secular rather than religious language – America was attacked because it was “tyrannical”, rather than because it was “godless”.
The chief problem for those who organise suicide-missions is fear, and they usually employ traditional military means to insulate their operatives against it. As in conventional warfare, ideology has limited value, though it may help to get individuals revved up on the day of a mission. Instead, processes of group bonding, the elaboration of a shame-culture, and developing what psychiatrists call “dissociative” states of mind are important. Self-forgetting – either through engaging in displacement activities or simply because the emotion of anger can dull the emotion of fear – is crucial if an individual is not to lose his nerve.
One of the most common ways terrorists frame their suicide-missions is through the lens of conventional warfare: they are “soldiers”, engaged not in “murder” (a soldier who kills in combat is not called a murderer) but in the defence of a vulnerable community. The fact that they are willing to die (as well as kill) in the encounter testifies to their courage and sincerity. Manliness is also important, though of course this is not a purely male business – the explosive belt, after all, was originally invented specifically for the female body.
Where women have not been explicitly excluded, they have also proved willing to carry out murderous attacks in which their own death is inevitable. Examples can be found among Palestinian and Chechen women, although interestingly female terrorists have only engaged in suicide bombings, not suicidal shooting missions.
Perhaps – as a future set of media headlines will no doubt tell us – that is another barrier to be breached.
Suicide terrorism - internet resources
http://www.maxwell.af.mil/au/aul/bibs/terrsuic/suite.htm
Farhad Khosrokhavar, Allah's New Martyrs
http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=136541
PBS feature
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/suicide/briefing.htm
Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing
http://www.granta.com/authors/49
