The Roots of Fanaticism

A car bomb devastates the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Another car bomb obliterates the Marine barracks outside Beirut Airport. Assassins cut down the president of the American University of Beirut. A car bomb wrecks the American embassy annex in East Beirut. After each of these terrorist attacks, and many others, the phone rings in a news agency somewhere in the Middle East and an anonymous caller claims responsibility for the carnage in the name of Islamic Jihad.

Unseen, unknown, apparently unstoppable, Islamic Jihad may not even exist. It could be merely a cover name for a loose confederation of Muslim Shi'ite fanatics. Or it may be the code name for a carefully coordinated campaign by Iran's Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. The Iranian government has expressed sympathy for the extremists' goals but denies supplying or controlling them. U.S. National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane insists otherwise. Said he last March: "There is sufficient evidence that radical Shi'ite terrorists are responsive to Iranian guidance for us to hold Iran responsible for attacks against U.S. citizens."

Jihad means holy war, and in the Shi'ite credo, to die in a holy war is to achieve martyrdom and guarantee a place in heaven. A seemingly endless supply of young Shi'ite militants seem all too eager to earn their divine reward.

The roots of resentment have been festering ever since the Shi'ites split off from the dominant Sunni Muslims in the 7th century. Of the world's 750 million Muslims, less than 20% are Shi'ites. Some 42 million of them are in Iran, where they make up 92% of the population. To the long-downtrodden underclass of Shi'ites in Lebanon, some 40% of the population, Khomeini's fundamentalist - revolution was an inspiration to rise up against their perceived oppressors: Western and Arab, Christian and Jewish. "If you develop a psychosis that the whole world is against you," says M. Cherif Bassiouni, professor of international law at Chicago's De Paul University, "then the only way to survive is to become clannish, mystical, fanatic and sometimes to lash out."

Radical Shi'ite factions settled into a virtual viper's nest in Baalbek, an ancient city in the Bekaa Valley 40 miles east of Beirut. There a contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, inspired by the Khomeini revolution, sent young Lebanese fanatics out on bottle-smashing sprees in the bars of Beirut, taught them how to rig cars with powerful bombs and prepared them to die for their cause. "Like Khomeini," says Gary Sick, a former National Security Council staffer and an expert on Islamic fundamentalism, "these Shi'ite fundamentalists are rejecting the entire Western system."

Fragments of evidence -- secret payments, cryptic cables, visits from high Iranian officials -- indicate that Khomeini's regime may be in close touch with the terrorists, if not managing them. The camps enjoy at least the tacit support of Syria as well, since the Bekaa Valley is controlled by Damascus. In a remarkably candid speech last week, Syrian President Hafez Assad conceded that Syria was in contact with extremist groups who are holding seven Americans, four Frenchmen and one Briton, seized over the past 18 months. Assad mildly rebuked the kidnapers for violating a "code of honor between combatants," but praised them for "steadfastness."

For the Shi'ite extremists, political violence has become a dangerous vogue. "Committing terrorism is like achieving manhood for a Shi'ite," says William Quandt, a Middle East specialist at Washington's Brookings Institution. "Everybody is scrambling to be the most militant."