Why Suicide Bombing... ...Is Now All The Rage
By Amanda Ripley
On Tuesday, April 16, it will be nine years--ages, it seems--since the first suicide bomb in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ripped through the parking lot of a roadside West Bank cafe. That day Sahar Tamam Nabulsi, 22, filled a white Mitsubishi van with cooking-gas canisters, placed a copy of the Koran on the passenger seat and, acting on behalf of the militant group Hamas, barreled into two buses, killing himself and another Palestinian and wounding eight Israelis. Days later, the Jerusalem Post was still, almost quaintly, calling the attack an "apparent suicide," noting that the investigation was ongoing.
These days, of course, there would be no such head scratching. But back then no one could imagine that 105 more suicide bombers would go on to claim 339 more lives.
The Palestinian suicide bomber has evolved since Nabulsi made his debut in the role. Today he is deadlier and requires less coercion. He used to be easy to describe: male, 17 to 22 years of age, unmarried, unformed, facing a bleak future, fanatically religious and thus susceptible to Islam's promise of a martyr's place in paradise, complete with the affections of heaven's black-eyed virgins. Today's bomber no longer fits the profile.
Today he is Izzadin Masri, the 23-year-old son of a prosperous restaurant owner, who killed himself and 15 people at a Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria last August. He is Daoud Abu Sway, 47, a father of eight not known to be unusually political or religious, who detonated a bomb outside a luxury hotel in Jerusalem in December, killing himself and injuring two others. He is even a she. Ayat Akhras, 18, was a straight-A student, just months away from graduation and then marriage. On March 29, she killed herself and two others outside a Jerusalem supermarket. Volunteers such as these are coming forward faster than militant leaders can strap an explosive belt around their waist and send them off to kill and die.
Among Palestinians, it has become normal--noble, even--for promising men and women to slaughter themselves in pursuit of revenge and the dignity it is thought to bring. "What was once more of an individual decision by a small group is becoming much more mainstream," says Jerrold Post, an American psychiatrist who has studied suicide bombings in the West Bank. The suicide-homicides have come to be seen by most Palestinians as their last, best hope. In June a poll taken in the Gaza Strip found that 78% of the population approved of suicide bombings, considerably more than supported peace talks (60%).
These days Palestinians celebrate the suicides in newspaper announcements that read, perversely, like wedding invitations. "The Abdel Jawad and Assad families and their relatives inside the West Bank and in the Diaspora declare the martyrdom of their son, the martyr Ahmen Hafez Sa'adat," reads a March 30 notice for the 22-year-old killer of four Israelis in a shooting attack. Palestinian children play a game called "Being a Martyr," in which the "martyr" buries himself in a shallow grave. And the job of bomber comes with established cash bonuses and health benefits for the surviving family. How else could the Palestinian boy or girl next door hope to be pictured on key chains and T shirts? "The suicide factory is in full tilt now," says Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, based in Philadelphia. "These are the rewards of having built an infrastructure."
Once upon a time, in the years immediately following that first bombing in 1993, it was a challenge to recruit suicide bombers. Field leaders for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the radical groups that until lately monopolized the bombings, would seek out promising young men from the mosques or the crowds of rioters at Israeli checkpoints. The leaders would then submit the candidates to intense spiritual indoctrination and terrorist training, watching all the time for signs of fear or doubt. Those who wavered would be quickly dropped.
Until recently most Palestinians believed they had alternatives to the kind of militancy practiced by Hamas. For years after the 1993 Oslo peace accord, which brought limited self-rule to the Palestinians and the prospect of an independent state, polls showed a strong majority of Palestinians supporting the peace process with Israel and only a minority endorsing suicide bombings. Thus, in their headhunting, the fundamentalists were limited to stalwart followers of their doctrine, which holds that any kind of peace with Israel is anathema. Even then, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had to cajole--some might say brainwash--young men into believing that the rewards of paradise outweighed the prospects of life on earth.
But with the breakdown of the peace process in the summer of 2000 and the start of the latest intifadeh that September, the martyr wannabes started coming to Hamas--and they didn't require persuading. "We don't need to make a big effort, as we used to do in the past," Abdel Aziz Rantisi, one of Hamas' senior leaders, told TIME last week. The TV news does that work for them. "When you see the funerals, the killing of Palestinian civilians, the feelings inside the Palestinians become very strong," he explained.
And not just among fundamentalists. Last December the mainstream Fatah movement of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the nationalist group that forms the backbone of the Palestine Liberation Organization, entered the suicide-bombing business. Since then, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a Fatah offshoot, has taken part in at least 10 such attacks, some of them in collaboration with Hamas or Islamic Jihad. The Brigades activists are generally not religious fanatics. "Within Palestinian society, in the past year, a very broad mechanism of social approval has been created that makes it possible for even less religious people to commit suicide," says Ehud Sprinzak, a political scientist at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "There's enormous despair. There's no meaning to life."
Officially, at least, members of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades part from the fundamentalists in their goals: they support the idea of a free Palestine living in peace beside Israel and say they want only to force Israel to allow that state to rise up. But for now, nationalists and fundamentalists are united in their strategy, which is to kill and maim as many Israelis as possible and to horrify and demoralize those who go unscathed.
Executing a successful attack has grown easier in the past 1 1/2 years. Since bomber candidates are now volunteering, they are self-selected for commitment and do not require indoctrination. Each mission involves five or six layers of support and planning operatives--who do not commit suicide--including scouts, guards, drivers, explosives technicians, electricians and metalsmiths. Arafat's Palestinian Authority has at times worked to keep the militants in check, sporadically shutting down bombing networks to appease the Israelis. But during the recent violence, Arafat has got out of the way, so cells have greater freedom to operate.
Most bombs are currently made out of triacetone-triperoxide (a substance also found in shoe-bomber suspect Richard Reid's sneakers). The explosive is simple to produce, although volatile. Several dozen Palestinians have died preparing the bombs. Hamas, which sometimes builds devices for the other groups, has four or five master bombmakers who prepare the explosives, according to Israeli estimates, and about 25 additional activists who make other parts of the bombs--often tinkering in rented apartments and garages to avoid capture. The total cost of each explosive belt is $1,500 to $4,300 depending on quality, according to Hamas activists. The bombmakers combine acetone and phosphate with water in a large bowl and put the mixture out to dry on roofs or balconies. Then they use a coffee grinder to break it down into powder. At this point, the material is packed into small bags, or preferably pipes, which break apart and become shrapnel in a blast. The 22-year-old who detonated a bomb outside the Dolphinarium disco in Tel Aviv last June lifted his hands as he blew himself up, eyewitnesses reported, apparently so that his arms wouldn't obstruct shrapnel flying off the belt around his waist. One bombmaker on Israel's wanted list has started lacing bombs with rat poison, presumably to multiply the number of casualties, although the technique has yet to succeed, according to Israeli intelligence officials.
After a bombing, the sponsoring organization usually distributes to the media a video documenting the bomber's last, triumphant words. The organization pays for the funeral, which includes a tent outside the family's home where neighbors can come to offer condolences and drink coffee. Hamas pays its bombers' survivors a permanent pension of $300 to $600 a month in addition to bankrolling the family's health care and the education of the bomber's children. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein also funds a one-time $20,000 payment for the families--increased from $10,000 about six months ago in a show of solidarity.
The Middle East did not invent the suicide attack. In modern times the most notorious practitioners were the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II. Today the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, who are fighting their government for a separate Tamil state, are the unmatched leaders in the field. They have launched some 200 suicide attacks that have killed hundreds. "Any ideology can spur this action," says Pipes of the Middle East Forum. In 1987 Iranian teenagers were dispatched by the thousands to act as human minesweepers during the Iran-Iraq war. They wore keys around their necks that were said to open the doors of paradise. This probably inspired the first suicide bombings in the Middle East--in Lebanon by the Hizballah militia during the early 1980s.
But the Palestinian practice is alarming for its sheer momentum. Says Bruce Hoffman, terrorism specialist at the Rand Corp.: "Groups there succeeded in what terrorist organizations have rarely been able to do, and that's transform their campaigns into almost mass movements, not dependent on a hard-core cadre of fighters but rather with people from the population readily stepping forward to replenish the terrorist ranks." In the Middle East the notion of the suicide bomber has a particularly toxic appeal. Other regions struggle with warfare and rage, but Islam offers potent rationales and rewards for "martyrdom." In Islam martyrdom washes away all past sins and guarantees the bomber places for 70 relatives in heaven.
Hamas, especially, has bolstered popular acceptance of the suicide killing by crafting justifications for both parts of the act. Some moderate Islamic clerics insist that the bombings are contrary to the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, who condemned suicide. But if death comes through an act of self-defense, others argue, that is another matter. "The person who commits suicide is a person fleeing life. This is prohibited by Islam," Mousa Abu Marzouk, the Damascus-based No. 2 leader of Hamas, told TIME. "The martyr is not running away from life. He is making the future for his children."
Killing Israelis, goes this argument, is an act of national self-defense, since the Israelis occupy Palestinian territory, deny the Palestinians their national rights and, in enforcing their rule, frequently kill Palestinian civilians. This logic was sufficiently compelling for the 57 Islamic countries at this month's Organization of the Islamic Conference in Kuala Lumpur to exempt Palestinian bombers from their definition of terrorism. Says Marzouk: "The term terrorism should not be applied to people whose land is occupied." And if the victims of those fighting occupation are civilians? "There shouldn't be any distinction between an occupier in uniform or civilian dress," Marzouk argues. "If a man dressed as a civilian carried a gun and took my house, my land and my right, how can I say that he is a civilian and has nothing to do with it?"
To Palestinians, perhaps the most persuasive defense of suicide bombings today is that they are working. If the goal is to empower the powerless and shake the foundation of Israeli society, the bombings have proved highly effective. Presumably the Palestinians would be happy to fight the Israelis conventionally, army against army, but they have no real military. They have no tanks, no air force, no artillery--just a bunch of militias armed with machine guns and, if you count Hamas' illicit arsenal, some mortars and rockets. Israel, on the other hand, has one of the most powerful and modern militaries in the world. The asymmetry produces a lopsided body count. Since the fighting began in September 2000, some 1,200 Palestinians have been killed, compared with some 400 Israelis. That disparity feeds the drive to frighten and punish the enemy with bombings. "As they have war jets and missiles, we have human bombs that can inflict losses on the enemy and achieve some balance," says Marzouk.
Certainly, the bombing networks have learned that their actions, together with Israel's retaliatory measures, bring enormous attention to the Palestinian cause. "You have heard the U.N.--after these operations began--speaking about a Palestinian state, Israeli withdrawal and the right of repatriation for refugees," says Marzouk. The value of suicide bombings is reinforced by the seeming futility of every other option. Samir Rantissi, a coordinator of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Coalition, condemns attacks on civilians but believes they result from escalating frustration. "For 35 years, Palestinians have tried every, every, every means to deal with this intolerable occupation," he says. "We tried to coexist with it. It didn't work. We tried demonstrating against it. It didn't work. We tried secret negotiating channels that led to Oslo and assumed it would lead to a Palestinian state. It didn't work."
There is disagreement over how to stanch suicide bombings: Should one remove the infrastructure that supports them or give the volunteers more reasons for living than for dying? For now, Israel is targeting the supply side of the attacks--the militant leaders and weapons makers who organize the missions. But as the pool of suicide bombers grows, the need for infrastructure diminishes. Recruiters are not much needed when volunteers are abundant. And bomb builders have proved to be replaceable. For example, Israeli forces managed to assassinate a Hamas master bombmaker on Jan. 22. The disruption led to a slight dip in attacks. But the organization's bombmaking expertise bounced back within a couple of months, Israeli security officials concede. "These operations cannot, absolutely cannot, be stopped," says Marzouk. "Nothing, neither policies nor military barricades, can prevent a person who chooses to be a martyr from carrying out his action." That has certainly been the experience with crackdowns by the Israelis.
Meanwhile, Israelis will continue to live in perpetual fear of bodily harm and grievous loss from bombers while Palestinians suffer the consequences of Israel's vengeful reprisals. And mothers like Ibtisam Daragmeh will stare at images of children they thought they knew. Children who, in their "martyrdom videos," hold Kalashnikovs and wear fatigues. Ibtisam's son Mohammed, 19, blew himself up in Jerusalem on March 2, after positioning himself next to a group of women with baby carriages waiting for their husbands to leave a bar mitzvah ceremony. He killed nine other people and injured more than 50 in the name of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Two weeks ago, a neighbor came by to pay a condolence call. She mentioned that she wished she were Mohammed's mother so her son could be a martyr. Ibtisam began crying uncontrollably, and another one of her sons showed the woman out the door. Says Ibtisam: "Palestinian mothers share the sadness of Israeli mothers. A mother is a mother. We are helpless. We can only cry tears."
--Reported by Matt Rees/Dehaisha, Melissa August/Washington, George Baghdadi/Damascus, Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem, Aharon Klein/Jerusalem, Scott MacLeod/Cairo and Nadia Mustafa/New York
With reporting by Matt Rees/Dehaisha, Melissa August/Washington, George Baghdadi/Damascus, Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem, Aharon Klein/Jerusalem, Scott MacLeod/Cairo and Nadia Mustafa/New York