Since the start of the second intifada in September 2000, dozens of Palestinians have become suicide bombers. With no other weapon than his body and a belt loaded with several kilos of TNT, dynamite, triacetone triperoxide or another explosive, the bomb man circumvents police surveillance and explodes into a thousand pieces before the chosen target, causing a disturbing feeling of helplessness and vulnerability among Israelis. Last year, at least 80 people, most of them civilians, were killed in the 29 attacks with the methodology of immolation perpetrated by members of Hamas , Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
Countermeasures and vindictive reprisals by the Government of Israel have failed to contain the terrorists. Nor have they been able to dissuade the hundreds of boys who regard such actions as their last and best hope in an asymmetric conflict. When on April 16, 1993, Sahar Taman Nabulsi, 22, committed the first suicide attack in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation in the West Bank, radical groups found it difficult to cajole and recruit activists willing to blow themselves up. Today, aspiring shahadah or martyrs come voluntarily to Hamas, without any persuasion or indoctrination, and supported by more than 70 percent of the Palestinian population.
But the Palestinians are not the only ones capable of immolating themselves: the man bomb has taken on a special significance in current international terrorism, especially after the savage attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon, which claimed the lives of more than 3,000 people. In the 1980s, suicide actions were limited to Lebanon, Kuwait and Sri Lanka. In the 1980s, they spread to Israel, India, Panama, Algeria, Pakistan, Argentina, Croatia, Turkey, Tanzania, and Kenya. At present, a dozen terrorist organizations, religious and secular, have fanatical activists with conscience to sacrifice themselves anywhere in the world. Without going any further, thousands of suicide fighters from the Arab world came to the call of the overthrown Saddam Hussein to fight “the enemies of Islam”, which were none other than the American and British soldiers who invaded Iraq in Operation Enduring Freedom.
But how do you explain that someone takes their own life following orders? What powerful convictions lead a person to blow himself into a thousand pieces, disregarding such a basic instinct as that of survival? From a psychological point of view, are they normal or disturbed people? Are they shahadah , as defined by fundamentalists, or mere war criminals, as Human Rights Watch’s Erased in a Moment report states? Why are there more bomb men and women today? Would you give your life for a political, religious or nationalist ideal?
Without a doubt, it is not easy to understand from our parameters the suicide attack which, by the way, is an ancient practice with a modern history . Indeed, it was used in the 1st century by the hitmen, a religious sect that participated in the struggles of the Zealotes, in Palestine; and in the 11th century by the Assasin Shiite secret society, originally called hashashiyún , which revered martyrdom and death as forms of spiritual sublimation. In the middle of the last century, the so-called kamikazes emerged in Japan, suicide pilots who crashed their planes with tanks full of fuel against enemy targets. In the Battle of Okinawa, the kamikazes carried out 1,900 special missions or tokkotai : suicide pilots sank more than 300 ships and killed 5,000 allied soldiers in the costliest naval battle in US history.
In recent times, suicide attacks began in 1983 at the hands of the pro-Iranian Lebanese group Hezbollah, which claimed more than 300 victims in a series of attacks on the US embassy in Beirut, the headquarters of US troops and the French Multinational Force. In 1987, following in the fruitful footsteps of Hezbollah, the Tamil Tigers of the LTTE, a Sri Lankan separatist group, imported suicide tactics to become the most bloodthirsty of terrorist organizations. Its special units, the fearsome Black Tigers, carried out 168 suicide attacks in Sri Lanka and India between July 1987 and February 2000. Their effectiveness in spreading terror has only recently been surpassed by Al Qaeda, the network led by Bin Laden. .
The constant threat of human bombs by those who pull the strings of so-called “global, postmodern and borderless terrorism” constitutes, without fear of misunderstanding, a change as macabre as it is sinister in the practice of horror. In addition, the latest attacks are breaking some of the clichés that existed around the psychosocial profile of those who immolate themselves in defense of a cause.
Those who still keep in their minds the old and imprecise description of the bomb man: male between 17 and 22 years old, of low social class, uneducated, unemployed, maniac, violent, cowardly, fanatically religious, and therefore susceptible to promise of becoming a martyr ( shahid ) and occupying a safe place in Paradise with 70 of his loved ones, as well as enjoying unlimited sex with 72 houris , beautiful celestial virgins with black eyes.
The 19 terrorists of September 11 do not fit this robot portrait, nor do the Palestinian boys and girls who tie themselves to an explosive backpack in the name of Jihad, the Holy War against the infidels. The immolated can be young single men of both sexes or apparently normal and peaceful respectable parents of families who, in addition, have an average culture and even university. Al Aqsa activists, in general, are not religious fanatics, as are the black tigers, and many of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad volunteers come from the University of Al-Najah, in Nablus (West Bank), according to the complaint. the Israeli Secret Service.
Psychiatrists and psychologists are now trying to dive into the mind of the bomb man. This is not a simple undertaking: the self-sacrificing terrorist is impossible to study. However, most experts agree that there is no terrorist personality or that it is a specific factor that motivates individuals to carry out this type of action. And as Professor Jerrold Post, an expert terrorism psychiatrist at George Washington University, argues, “we cannot uniformly verify that members of these terrorist networks suffer from significant disturbances or pathologies.”
For Dr. Ariel Merari, a psychologist at the University of Tel Aviv, in Israel, the suicide determination of the terrorist is not related to an economic pressure that leads him to sell his life in exchange for a better future for the rest of his family, although Iraq and Saudi Arabia are known to have been paying thousands of dollars in compensation to the families of the martyrs. Religious fanaticism as a seed of evil must also be excluded, as LTTE activists are secular and, as Merari points out, two-thirds of the people who committed acts of suicide terrorism in Lebanon came from organizations with no religious ties. Furthermore, in Islam suicide is forbidden and only through a perverse interpretation of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad by fundamentalist clerics, to suit their political interests, does the suicide murderer become a shahid before Allah.
The answer to the special psyche of the bomb man seems to be found in the cult-like indoctrination to which young people are exposed from a very young age. In an article published last March in Science , University of Michigan anthropologist and psychologist Scott Atran argues that “suicide bombers are not crazed cowards who arise out of poverty and ignorance. In fact, the majority of bomb men show no appreciable psychopathology and are at least as educated and financially solvent as the population around them. ” For this researcher, the terrorists of the Middle East who blow themselves up are not born to kill and die for an ideal, but are subjected to brainwashing by recruiters and trainers who know how to activate basic instincts and emotions, such as feelings of hopelessness, humiliation, hatred and revenge.
In their indoctrination tricks, the charismatic trainers create in their pupils “a deep commitment similar to what a mother feels when she sacrifices herself for her children, ” which means that the suicidal fry never question the violent methods of the organization. Atran rules out that suicides are “desperate people” and establishes that they are “individuals who enjoy an average standard of living, sometimes relatively wealthy, and that it is precisely this factor that makes them decide to end their lives for the cause. of the group to which they belong or that has captured them “. Obviously, they have a receptive personality to the messages of the radicals.
In his research, Atran concludes that the best way to combat suicide terrorism is not, as President Bush argues, to improve education, fight illiteracy, and counter the deep and now irreparable anti-American sentiment that the Arab world professes, but rather to isolate and replace extremist leaders with more moderate leaders, among other measures.
Enrique M. Coperías
