The weapon of martyrdom is the main and pivotal weapon
on which we can rely, one that has proven its effectiveness and
that prompts the enemy to reconsider its objectives.1
On December 15, 1981, a suicide bomber drove a car packed with explosives into the compound of Iraq’s embassy in Beirut. The driver detonated the explosives, causing a massive blast that leveled the building, killed sixty-one people, and injured more than one hundred. Among the dead was Abdul Razzak Lafta, Iraq’s ambassador to Lebanon.2 Several groups claimed responsibility for the attack, but it is now usually attributed to al-Dawa (The Mission, or The Calling). Al-Dawa, a Shiite organization originally formed in the late 1950s in Iraq, had by the late 1970s turned to militancy after being systematically repressed by the Baathist government. In response to al-Dawa operations targeting public officials, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein brutally attacked Shiite clergy in 1980. During the crackdown, the revered Ayatollah Bakr al-Sadr, an influential figure in the founding of al-Dawa, was murdered by Iraqi security forces.3 Much of al-Dawa’s leadership fled the country, primarily settling in Iran and in Lebanon. The 1981 attack was presumably an effort by the remnants of al-Dawa to strike back at the Iraqi government. In any case, in contrast to the sporadic, individual suicide attacks of Imperial Russia, the Beirut bombing signaled the evolution of suicide bombing into a refined, more effective organizational phenomenon, using technology uniquely appropriate for the environment. Within the next two years, five more high-profile suicide bombings in Lebanon would kill hundreds and make Hizballah, a coalition of militant Shiite groups, internationally notorious.
The use of human beings for bomb guidance systems remained unique to the Russian context for years after the decline of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries there. Then, during World War II, the government of Imperial Japan made the most thorough and systematic use of suicide attackers yet seen, deploying thousands of human bombs between late 1944 and the end of the war in August 1945. During much of the post–World War II era, suicide attacks such as those carried out by the Japanese Kamikaze were rare.4 It was not until the 1980s and 1990s in revolutionary Iran and later in war-torn Lebanon that factors analogous to those prevailing in wartime Japan created an environment conducive to the manufacture of human bombs. These factors included a grave disparity in military force between combatants, a civilian population under siege, and a culture that had been led to devalue individual lives relative to society as a whole. The leadership of Iran was the most important sponsor of this new technology, and although the Iranian government’s role in the use of human bombs was often covert, it nonetheless contributed to their spectacular impact, which in turn facilitated the diffusion of suicide bombing to groups with little or no state support.
Measured in sheer numbers, the most extensive use of suicide bombers to date was made by the government of Imperial Japan in the last year of World War II. The attackers are usually referred to as the Kamikaze, but Tokkotai, short for Tokubetsu Kogekitai, which means special attack units, is more accurate.5 In autumn 1944, as the United States established the uncontested superiority of its armed forces over those of Japan, the leadership of Japan decided to unleash a new weapon—explosives-laden aircraft (and to a lesser extent submarines and boats) piloted by humans on one-way missions to inflict as much damage as possible on U.S. naval vessels. The Japanese began sustained use of the Tokkotai in October 1944. More than three thousands pilots would kill themselves in suicide missions before the cessation of hostilities between the United States and Japan in August 1945. The Tokkotai had a powerful psychological impact on U.S. forces, but their operational record was mixed. They could be devastating when they penetrated the Navy’s outer defenses, sinking a number of ships, but on the whole, they did not inflict the level of damage envisioned by the Japanese leadership.
The motivating factor in creating these special attack units was the overwhelming disparity between the armed forces of Japan and those of the United States. By mid-1944 the Japanese empire was in full retreat and the civilian population under a state of siege. The Japanese had lost air and naval superiority at the battle of Midway in 1942, and their ability to carry out offensive operations steadily declined thereafter, a process finalized by the destruction of the Japanese navy as an offensive force in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. Earlier in 1944 the United States had begun large-scale aerial bombardment of the Japanese mainland. Most important, by that point U.S. submarines had imposed a complete naval blockade on the Japanese islands. Given this disparity in power, the Japanese leadership hoped that relatively small numbers of Tokkotai would be able to sink a disproportionate number of U.S. ships and thus degrade the capacity of the Navy to operate. Japan’s military leadership intended for the Tokkotai to have a psychological impact as well, by projecting an image of fanaticism, which, coupled with the tenacity exhibited by Japanese fighters in defending island after island in the Pacific, would make the Americans reconsider an invasion of the Japanese mainland.
The use of the Tokkotai was in no way preordained, although some historians regard them as the inevitable outcome of Japanese fanaticism and militarism. Their production necessitated sustained effort, requiring the Japanese leadership to innovate in a number of areas to make the Tokkotai a viable weapon system. The first attacks utilized regular aircraft deemed to be of little military value and therefore disposable. As the number of missions increased, more aircraft were required of course, so the military began to design and build cheap, stripped-down planes that were little more than flying bombs powered by rockets carrying a nose cone full of explosives. They also designed and built cheap watercraft specifically for suicide missions.6
Cost was a major factor in training men for Tokkotai missions. For this reason, the training period for pilots was shortened, and young, relatively inexperienced men were sent to die instead of experienced pilots. Japanese leaders made use of a variety of social and cultural mechanisms to compel these young men to die for the emperor. They drew upon the tradition of ritual suicide as a means of securing honor in the Japanese military as well as elements of Buddhism and state Shinto.7 Their efforts at cultural programming did not always work, however. Many pilots were drawn from outside the military, including from universities, where students were graduated early so they could participate in the missions. Often, these young men were among the most open-minded and least militaristic in Japanese society and therefore did not always respond enthusiastically to appeals to patriotism and honor. In response, the government reverted to shame, coercion, and devotion to loved ones to impose control over these men so they would behave in the desired manner.
Ironically, the Tokkotai, who today are remembered as the epitome of fanaticism, were sometimes fatalistic young men who saw no realistic alternative to their own deaths and hoped only that their sacrifice would in some way mitigate the most dreadful effects of the war on their families and loved ones. Hayashi Ichizo, who died at the age of twenty-three on April 12, 1945, wrote to his family, “To be honest, I cannot say that the wish to die for the emperor is genuine, coming from my heart. However, it is decided for me that I die for the emperor.” Men like him did not subscribe whole-heartedly to the ideology of the Empire, but rather “‘volunteered’ to reproduce the ideology in action while defying it in their thoughts.”8
Despite the government’s sustained effort to present the suicide missions of the Tokkotai as noble sacrifices for a worthy cause, the entire phenomenon amounted to little more than a failed research and development program. The attacks were neither large enough in number nor destructive enough in capability to have more than a superficial effect on the U.S. Navy. In addition, unlike Kaliayev, who believed that victory was possible, many of the Tokkotai pilots knew they were being used as a last-ditch effort to salvage a cause that had already been lost. Consequently, the attacks seem to have done little to galvanize the morale of the Japanese population as a whole.
The Japanese government used suicide attackers in a slightly different manner than did the Russian revolutionaries, bringing suicide bombing much closer to the form widely used in recent years. In World War II, the individual’s decision to die during the course of a suicide attack was subordinated to organizational decision making to make the creation of human bombs more reliable. Furthermore, the Tokkotai were completely integrated into their bombs, leaving no possibility of survival. If death was anticipated and probable for the Russians, it was anticipated and necessary for the conclusion of a Tokkotai mission. Taken together, these two elements—constraining the behavior of individuals so that they would take their own lives and then physically fusing them with a warhead—amount to nothing less than the mechanization of human beings.
Some of the Tokkotai could see precisely what was being done to them. They were not really pilots flying aircraft, but material to be consumed during the course of the mission—disposable control elements for disposable vehicles. Hayashi Tadao, a pilot who died on July 28, 1945, at the age of twenty-four, recorded in his diary, “I do not avoid sacrifice. I do not refuse the sacrifice of myself. However, I cannot tolerate the reduction of the self to nothingness in the process. I cannot approve it. Martyrdom or sacrifice must be done at the height of self-realization. Sacrifice at the end of self-annihilation, the dissolving of the self to nothingness, has no meaning whatsoever.” Even more precisely, in a letter written the night before his fatal mission, Uehara Ryoji wrote, “As Special Unit Pilots we turn into machines once we board our airplanes. . . . We become a machine whose function is to manipulate the control-column.”9
The Japanese were not the first to use training and coercion to turn living beings into guidance systems during World War II. This distinction belongs to the Soviet Union. When Nazi Germany invaded in 1941, leaders in the Soviet army wondered if conditioned-response training in dogs could be used for military advantage. They developed a program of behavioral conditioning in which dogs were trained to seek food under machines, such as tanks and trucks, whose engines were running. The trained dogs were then outfitted with an explosive package, denied food to ensure that they were hungry, and released near German forces. The explosives were attached to a vertical stick that would trigger the bomb if pushed over or bent, as would happen when the dogs went underneath a vehicle. Soviet trainers hoped that the dogs would seek food under German machines, detonating the bombs that they were carrying and disabling mechanized forces. Although the Soviet “mine dogs” reportedly destroyed numerous German vehicles, they were far too unreliable for regular use. The dogs were unable to discriminate between Soviet and German vehicles, for example, and because of the noise of combat many chose to remain near their trainers rather than venture over to the German forces.10
During World War II, American researchers also explored the idea of using animals as guidance systems in Project Pigeon, an effort conceived by the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner.11 Prior to the war, Skinner had achieved fame through his research on conditioned response in animals. In 1940, even before the United States became involved in the war, Skinner was imagining ways in which his research could be put to military ends. According to Skinner, he had been observing the collective behavior of a flock of birds when he was struck by a thought: “Suddenly I saw them as ‘devices’ with excellent vision and extraordinary maneuverability. Could they not guide a missile?”12
Over the next few years, Skinner received government funding to try to put this idea into practice. His plan was to familiarize birds with a potential target site and to condition them to peck at an image of it. The trained bird would then be suspended in an air-dropped bomb with a window to allow the bird to see the target. In theory, the bird would then peck its way toward the appropriate area on the viewfinder, and a mechanical apparatus attached to the bird would register the animal’s movements and use them to direct the bomb toward the target. Skinner selected pigeons as the guidance systems and began the project on an experimental scale.
Trainers used aerial photographs and food rewards to condition the pigeons to peck toward a specific feature on the New Jersey coast, but the challenges of mechanically linking the animal to the bomb ultimately doomed the effort. Project Pigeon never made it beyond the experimental stage. Skinner was frustrated by what he deemed to be a lack of vision on the part of the U.S. military and by the end of the war admitted that the project had nothing to show for it except some useless apparatus and “a few dozen pigeons with a strange interest in a feature of the New Jersey coast.” Efforts by the Army Air Force to use bats as guidance systems for incendiary bombs were similarly unsuccessful and were suspended after the bats accidentally burned down a theater and officers’ club at the Carlsbad Army Air Field.13
Project Pigeon, like the Tokkotai, deliberately blurred the line between life and machine. Toward the end of the war, when the Japanese first began to use the Tokkotai, Skinner wrote that it “looks as if the Japs are using men rather than birds. Perhaps we can get American morale up that high, but if not, I can provide perfectly competent substitutes.” A technical report produced by the American Office of Scientific Research and Development after the war concurred, devoting four pages to “organic target seeking.” The report concluded, “The experience of the Division, so far as it is conclusive, would point to the general observation that an organic system of control should not be rejected simply because it is organic. . . . Such an attitude is far from scientific, and there is implicit in the success of the Japanese program with organic homing systems the suggestion that further study in this field might well be profitable.”14
On September 22, 1980, Iraqi military forces invaded Iran. The invasion caught the Iranian government by surprise, and its armed forces performed poorly in the war’s opening stages. Only Saddam Hussein’s poor leadership served to slow the Iraqi advance during the early months of the war and gave the Iranians time to regroup. By 1981 the Iran-Iraq War had developed into an existential struggle for the Islamic Republic of Iran, which had been declared in 1979 after the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi by followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. To counter the Iraqis’ conventional military advantage, Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader, turned to the same force that had allowed him to consolidate control of the revolution—articulation of the crisis in religious terms, which mobilized the Iranian citizenry in the name of God.
Khomeini drew upon the martyrdom of Hussein at Karbala in 680—the most powerful symbol and source of ritual in the Shiite tradition—to unify the Iranian people against the Iraqi invasion. Hussein, the foundational figure of the Shiite branch of Islam, was a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad who resisted the transfer of the office of the caliph from the Prophet’s immediate family. In doing so, he challenged the authority of the Umayyad caliph Yazid. Consequently, Hussein and his followers were massacred near the city of Karbala, now in Iraq. Hussein established a Shiite tradition of self-sacrifice, even unto death, rather than submission to tyranny. The martyrdom of Hussein is celebrated each year on the holy day of Ashura.15
Although Hussein’s martyrdom established reverence for self-sacrifice in the Shiite tradition, in revolutionary Iran the propensity for self-sacrificial violence was first demonstrated by groups with a Marxist agenda. In the 1970s members of the Sazeman-e Mojahedin-e Khalq-e Iran (People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran) willingly went to their deaths to oppose the Shah, declaring publicly that “examples of heroism, self-sacrifice, and martyrdom” were necessary for the liberation of the Iranian people. Later, when the group was brutally repressed by the Khomeini government, its members responded by carrying out a wave of assassinations and on at least five occasions in 1981–1982 members of the Mojahedin killed both themselves and their victims by detonating hand grenades.16 These attacks seem to have resulted from individual rather than organizational decision making but nevertheless demonstrated that martyrdom could be an effective weapon. The Khomeini government’s subsequent decision to encourage martyrdom among its supporters therefore stemmed partially from the desire to reclaim martyrdom so that it could be used for the benefit of the Islamic republic.
Khomeini and other Iranian religious leaders immediately called the Iraqi invasion a jihad, or holy war. They emphasized to the Iranian people that the revolution had successfully returned Islamic values to Iran but had since been under attack. They described Saddam Hussein as a heretic and in their sermons regularly referred to him as Saddam-i-Yazid, a tyrant whose threat to Iran (and thus to Islam) was as great as was Yazid’s to the seventh-century Shiite community.17 During this holy war, Khomeini reserved a special place for martyrs—those who would willingly shed their own blood to defend Islam. Using the authority of his position as supreme religious leader, he called upon Iran’s population to emulate the sacrifice of Hussein and drive the modern-day Yazid out of Iran.
Iran’s religious leaders sacralized the war by promising their followers that dying for the cause of their faith was the noblest form of Islamic observance possible. Khomeini went so far as to say that martyrdom in the name of God was the ultimate perfection that a human could achieve and would guarantee prospective martyrs a place in paradise.18 As the Iranian state struggled to field a competent military and organize the Revolutionary Guards, older men and especially boys too young for the military took matters into their own hands. In November 1981 thousands of these untrained, poorly armed irregulars, known as the Basij (the “mobilized”), accompanied Iranian regular forces in a defensive battle, where they were massacred by the Iraqi military.
Khomeini was quick to exploit the passion and fervor that drove these irregulars and to institutionalize the Basij as auxiliaries to the Iranian army. He reinforced the enthusiasm of the first Basij by declaring that the kind of sacrifice that Hussein had made voluntarily was now an obligation of the Iranian people. “We should sacrifice all of our loved ones for the sake of Islam,” he said. “If we are killed, we shall have performed our duty.”19 In February 1984 President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani declared that “all Iranians from twelve to seventy-two should volunteer for the Holy War.”20 The Iranian state recruited thousands of young boys, some no older than nine, for service. Unsurprisingly, many were not particularly religious and had no real sense of what martyrdom truly meant. One former child soldier who survived and was interned in an Iraqi POW camp later recalled, “We didn’t understand the words ‘patriotism’ or ‘martyrdom,’ or at least I didn’t. It was just an exciting game and a chance to prove to your friends that you’d grown up and were no longer a child.”21
Wearing headbands to declare their purity and allegiance to Khomeini and keys around their necks that symbolized the key to paradise, the Basij were deployed to the front, where they were sent in waves to be slaughtered by the Iraqis. The exact number of young men sacrificed in such a manner remains unknown, but it was significant. One Iranian recruiter asserted that he had sent more than 4,000 youths to their deaths in the span of a few months. An Iraqi source testified that at least 23,000 such young men were killed in a single “human wave attack” in 1983.22
Although the Basij did not kill themselves, their dispatch by the Iranian government was an important step toward the development of suicide bombing in the Middle East and a clear case of a leadership group deliberately using religious symbolism to prepare its followers for systematic self-sacrifice. The Basij served strategic and tactical roles, but tactically their impact was limited; even when used offensively, their purpose was more to absorb than to inflict damage. Martyrdom would become a much more flexible and deadly tool when leaders began to use it for offensive operations, a step that represented but a single iteration in the recursive process of technological development.
This iteration involved a young boy named Mohammad Hosein Fahmideh. As one of the Basiji volunteers early in the war, Fahmideh reportedly grabbed a hand grenade, threw himself under an advancing Iraqi tank, and detonated the explosive, destroying himself and the tank. The loss of the tank and the example of Fahmideh are said to have rallied the Iranians. Upon learning of the boy’s death, Khomeini encouraged others to emulate Fahmideh, saying, “Our leader is that 12 year old child who threw himself with his little heart against the enemy” and referring to him as a guide to the Iranian people.23 Fahmideh came to be revered as one of the great Iranian martyrs and is memorialized today in Tehran’s Martyr’s Museum. According to the government of revolutionary Iran, “At the warfront, a miraculous event occurred: An event which must be called a legend, an event which is unbelievable. During the first days of the aggression, a thirteen year old boy, while holding some explosive ammunition, slipped under the enemy’s tank and when the tank passed over him, it exploded. Although the boy himself was martyred, he caused such a fear in the enemy’s heart that all the enemy tanks withdrew back to their own territory.”24 Fahmideh’s death was apparently a spontaneous act. Nevertheless, its effectiveness and the aura of heroism that came to surround it suggest that this accidental, contingent act could serve as the template for a much more systematic form of violence.
All of the factors that led to experimentation with human bombers in previous eras were present to an extraordinary level in Lebanon in the early 1980s. Elements of the Lebanese clerical establishment, particularly those who would come to be affiliated with Hizballah, had strong connections to Iran’s leadership and shared Khomeini’s militant interpretation of the faith. Lebanon had been torn by a multifront civil war for years, and its Shiite community lacked a strong force or body to represent its interests and to defend its people. The invasion of Israel in 1982 heightened this sense of crisis by introducing a force whose military capabilities far exceeded those of any of the indigenous Lebanese factions. Finally, car bombs lacking human guidance systems had already been used extensively in the Middle East as dreadful mass-casualty weapons.
Lebanon is a mosaic of different religious faiths and confessions whose borders and government owe more to the legacy of European colonization than to indigenous factors. Shiite Muslims have been one of the larger confessional groups in Lebanon since the formation of the state by the French but were marginalized by the Lebanese constitution, drafted in 1946 to create an independent Lebanon, which privileged Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims.25 By the 1970s differential population growth among the various Lebanese confessional groups resulted in Shiites becoming the largest single group. The Lebanese constitution, however, was not amended, so the Shiites remained marginalized politically and economically despite their number. In addition, after 1970 the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) became a major actor in Lebanese politics, operating as a state-within-a-state, including carrying out military operations against Israel from southern Lebanon. In 1975 this combination of factors, as well as the desire of neighboring states to advance their own agendas in Lebanon, led to the collapse of the Lebanese government and the emergence of a multifront civil war.
The most important figure in the political mobilization of Lebanese Shiites in the 1970s was the cleric Musa al-Sadr, a highly respected reformist scholar. Al-Sadr was born in the Iranian city of Qom in 1928 and arrived in Lebanon in 1959. Central to his emergence as a political leader was his recognition of the fact that Lebanon’s Shiites had been encouraged by their leadership to adopt an attitude of political submissiveness. He fought this tendency by emphasizing selected elements of Shiite history and tradition to mobilize the population. In particular, he reinterpreted the pivotal figure of Hussein, as Khomeini would do several years later. The message al-Sadr hoped to convey, however, was one of political choice, not fanaticism or recklessness. He stripped Hussein’s martyrdom of sorrow and reinterpreted it as a tale of courage for his followers.26
Al-Sadr worked at the grassroots level to mobilize Lebanese Shiites and helped create a political identity for them. He initiated a small network of schools and clinics to provide Shiites with services that the state neglected to provide. He tried to work with other groups and to utilize nonviolent methods, but was ultimately forced to accept the reality of Lebanon’s civil war and acknowledge that his people needed an armed force of their own. The following year, in 1975, the movement formed a militia, which came to be known as Amal, which means “hope” and is also an acronym for Battalions of the Lebanese Resistance.27
During a trip to Libya in 1978, al-Sadr disappeared. Speculation abounded that he had been killed by the Libyan government, headed by Muammar al-Qaddafi, but his disappearance remains a mystery.28 Al-Sadr’s disappearance, the civil war, and the Iranian Revolution pulled at Lebanon’s Shiite community, revealing deep fissures. A number of Lebanese Shiite clerics had long-standing personal and ideological connections to revolutionary Iran, but Amal’s leadership was reluctant to be subordinate to Khomeini, so from 1979 to 1982 the organization had an ambivalent relationship with Iran.29 Instead, Amal’s leaders turned increasingly toward Syria. Al-Sadr had approached Syria as a last-ditch ally to shore up his precarious position between the Maronites and the PLO, the latter of which followed its own agenda in southern Lebanon regardless of the harm this brought to the Shiites (in the form of Israeli reprisals); he even used his clerical authority to legitimize Syria’s minority Alawite sect, to which Syrian president Hafez al-Asad belonged, as a genuine branch of Shiite Islam.30 Syria, seeking a means to keep the PLO in check in Lebanon, found it in Amal. In 1980 and 1981 Syria trained and armed Amal fighters. As the Amal-Syrian connection strengthened, the relationship between Amal and the Palestinians worsened to the point of hostilities.31
The situation in Lebanon turned catastrophic in summer 1982, when Israel launched a full-scale invasion into southern Lebanon with the intention of wiping out the PLO. The initial stages of the offensive were a triumph for Israel, as its armed forces destroyed the conventional weapons of the PLO, routed the Syrian air force, and within days reached the outskirts of Beirut.32 The Israeli advance was followed by a siege of Beirut that achieved the objective of crushing the PLO’s army as a fighting force, but at great human cost. The PLO had dispersed its fighters among civilian areas and buildings, and Israeli forces pursued them there, neither side taking into consideration the human devastation caused by their actions. Consequently, thousands of Lebanese noncombatants and other civilian residents were killed in the fighting.33 By the end of the summer, southern Lebanon and East Beirut were under Israeli military occupation.
The Israeli invasion ended the caution that had led Iran to limit its role in Lebanon. The Khomeini government began to assert itself aggressively in the aftermath, encouraging and supporting a number of radical Shiite militias, each bound to a particular leader and region, to coalesce as an anti-Israeli force. This aggregation of groups would in several years evolve into Hizballah. Shaped as it was by the chaotic social environment of the early 1980s, Hizballah’s early history is characterized by change, opportunism, and flexibility, and any effort to present it concisely will invariably superimpose the appearance of more order in regard to its emergence than actually existed at the time.
The formal foundation of Hizballah is usually traced to the seizure of an army barracks in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley by Islamic Amal, a Lebanese Shiite faction under the leadership of Abbas al-Musawi, and members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, whom Khomeini had dispatched to mobilize Lebanese Shiites.34 This relationship had begun on a theological level many years earlier, when Musawi and other clerics had studied alongside the future leaders of Iran at Shiite holy places in Iraq. The Israeli occupation provided the impetus for their relationship to turn into a political and military collaboration.
From its base in the Bekaa, Hizballah spread into Beirut and then into southern Lebanon. The organization developed a national leadership structure and formally announced its existence in an open letter in 1985. In these early years, Hizballah served as an integrating force, tying together local groups and leaders and providing an alternative for Shiites who were dissatisfied with Amal. The goals of the organization were twofold: creating a new, authentic form of Shiite identity within the context of Khomeini’s Islamic revolution and combating the Israeli occupation. Suicide bombing proved to be effective for promoting both agendas.
Shiite groups were responsible for six major suicide bombings in Lebanon between 1981 and 1983. The first bombing, in 1981 (noted at the beginning of this chapter), was likely carried out by the remnants of the Iraqi al-Dawa, which had been formed in 1958 in Iraq to serve as an Islamic alternative to the secular Baath Party.35 Over the decades, there grew within al-Dawa a strong connection between Iraqi, Lebanese, and Iranian Shiite clerics and a corresponding opposition to Saddam Hussein’s government.
In 1977 al-Dawa became more aggressive after Iraqi forces attacked pilgrims en route to Karbala; the Iranian Revolution further inspired its militancy.36 Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr (a relative of Musa al-Sadr), at that time the most respected Shiite cleric in Iraq, was particularly moved by Khomeini’s achievement and proceeded to direct Shiite opposition against Hussein’s government. In March 1980 the Iraqi regime outlawed al-Dawa, and the following month the group responded by attempting to assassinate Tariq Aziz, a close aide to Hussein (and later foreign minister and deputy prime minister). On April 9 Hussein’s government executed al-Sadr and his sister in retaliation.37 Afterward, much of al-Dawa’s leadership fled to Tehran, while some remained in Iraq as a clandestine force and carried out several attempts on Hussein’s life in the 1980s. Remnants of al-Dawa also fled to Lebanon, where they were subsumed into Hizballah in the early 1980s. It seems likely, then, that Iran played some role, direct or indirect, in this first Lebanese suicide attack—the Iraqi government blamed Iran for the blast—and the integration of al-Dawa members into Hizballah suggests an element of continuity between the attack at the Iraqi embassy and those that followed.
Possibility and perceived need—the key factors contributing to the emergence of suicide bombing—were both present in Lebanon in the early 1980s. The revival of the martyrdom of Hussein by Musa al-Sadr and the militarization of martyrdom under Ayatollah Khomeini created a culture of death similar to that which existed among the anarchist terrorists of Imperial Russia and the Japanese military. The individuals and groups that would become Hizballah set themselves apart from other religious denominations, and more important, from other parts of the Shiite community (such as Amal) through an uncompromising adherence to what they saw as the most authentic form of Shiite Islam.38 Some of them would testify to the authenticity of their identity and faith through their willingness and desire to sacrifice their own lives. Jihad and martyrdom came to be affirmations of their individual and collective identities and the performance of these rituals a source of pride and even an expectation that these men had for one another. They were actively encouraged to embrace this radical position.
Upon arriving in the Bekaa Valley, members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards began teaching their Lebanese protégés that a willingness to die was a precondition for effective resistance. A notice on the door of an office used by the guards in Baalbek proclaimed them to be “lovers of martyrdom.” By the end of summer 1982, the first significant Shiite resistance to the Israeli occupation had taken place south of Beirut, on the beaches of Khalde. At that time Lebanese Shiites, imitating the Iranians, wore headbands and flung themselves at the Israelis with little regard for their own survival.39
If Iran’s encouragement of a culture of martyrdom created the possibility for suicide attacks, the Israeli invasion created the perceived need. On an ideological level, the Israeli invasion provided an enemy against which jihad and martyrdom could be executed. Furthermore, the overwhelming disparity of force between the sides—and the seeming Israeli indifference toward civilian casualties—facilitated the emergence of suicide bombing on a practical level by necessitating armed struggle and legitimizing any effective form of attack, no matter how extreme. Other than suicide bombing, there seemed to be few options that would allow small groups to project force in Lebanon, especially into fortified areas. The 1981 bombing served as a powerful demonstration of this capability, and in 1982 these factors led to the selection of vehicle-borne suicide bombers as a potential new technology for the members of Hizballah.
By August 1982 the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had achieved its main objective of routing the PLO. International mediation was required to halt the carnage and arrange for the evacuation of the PLO’s armed forces from Lebanon. Under UN auspices, a multinational force (MNF) consisting of U.S., French, and Italian troops quickly deployed to Beirut to oversee the evacuation, in which between six thousand and seven thousand members of the PLO headed for exile in Tunisia. Having carried out its mission, the MNF quickly withdrew, leaving behind a power vacuum in West Beirut. In the meantime, the Lebanese parliament selected a new president, Bashir Gemayel—a Maronite Christian, the requisite confession for holding the office—but because he was the Israeli government’s preferred candidate, large parts of the Lebanese population rejected him, assuming that he would create a government sympathetic to Israeli interests.40 Gemayel was assassinated in a bombing on September 14, less than a month after his election.
In response the IDF moved into West Beirut, which it had previously refrained from occupying. During the next few days, militants from the Christian Phalange committed one of the war’s most notorious atrocities with the tacit complicity of the IDF. Beginning on September 15, Phalangist militia members entered the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila under the pretext that they were rounding up arms caches and purging Beirut of alleged terrorists. In actuality, they carried out a systematic massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, presumably as retaliation for Gemayel’s assassination. The killing lasted until September 17. Figures vary, but it is likely that least eight hundred to a thousand Palestinian civilians were murdered in three days.41 While the IDF was not directly responsible for the massacre, Israeli soldiers were stationed outside the camps, and its leaders undoubtedly knew that a slaughter was taking place. The incident elicted international condemnation for Israel.42
The newly organized forces of Hizballah struck back at the Israelis on November 11, when seventeen-year-old Ahmad Qassir drove a white Mercedes filled with approximately 500 kilograms of explosives into IDF headquarters in Tyre. The explosion destroyed the building, killing seventy-five Israelis and a smaller number of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners. So complete and unexpected was the devastation that for years Israel maintained that the explosion was the result of a natural gas leak rather than an attack. This explanation remained viable because Hizballah did not initially claim responsibility for the attack, and the identity of the assailant remained unknown. Only later did Hizballah acknowledge the attack and in 1985 reveal Qassir’s identity. Apparently Qassir, who wanted to protect his family from Israeli reprisals, had requested a period of anonymity following the attack. After Israel redeployed its forces to a narrow zone of occupation along Lebanon’s southern border Qassir’s name was disclosed. His family has since remembered him as a martyr and hero.43
On the afternoon of April 18, 1983, a suicide bomber drove a Chevrolet pickup truck loaded with approximately four hundred pounds of explosives into the front of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. As in the previous two cases of vehicular suicide attacks, the results were devastating. The front of the building collapsed. Sixty-three people were killed, and more than a hundred were injured. Robert Ames, a former CIA station chief in Lebanon, had been meeting with eight other intelligence operatives in a top-floor room to discuss terrorism at the time of the blast. All nine were crushed when the building collapsed, crippling U.S. human intelligence capabilities in the region for years.
The attack on the U.S. embassy was far more sophisticated than the bombing of the IDF headquarters in Tyre the previous November; the timing in particular was precisely planned. It was no mere coincidence that the CIA’s top intelligence sources in the region were meeting in the building when the attack occurred; rather, it is far more likely that the bombing was planned to coincide with the meeting, suggesting that the bombers had access to extremely high-level intelligence.44 A green Mercedes had served as a spotter vehicle, facilitating the precise timing. The responsible organization also proved to be adept at covering its tracks. Forensic investigations of the explosives and the vehicles used yielded little, and the identity of the bomber remains unknown.45 The attack was initially claimed by several groups, including the previously unknown Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO), which is now generally credited with the operation.
After the Sabra and Shatila massacres, the MNF had returned, but with an open-ended timetable. In this new context, the MNF was to be an impartial, honest broker among the various warring factions, helping to rebuild the Lebanese state. This status, however, was difficult to maintain given the desire of the different groups to manipulate it to their advantage and the tendency of some to see the MNF in the worst possible light. The lack of trust in the force as an honest broker made its members the targets of some groups.
During summer 1983, the perception intensified among many Lebanese that the United States was firmly on the side of Israel and its Lebanese Christian allies. In September, in response to a request from the Lebanese government, U.S. naval forces provided artillery support for Lebanese Christian forces fighting in the mountains outside Beirut. By firing on a coalition of Druze, Syrian, and Palestinian forces, the U.S. military reaffirmed the impression that it had taken sides in the conflict. Many of its members did not recognize this at the time, and those who warned of the danger were ignored. For example, Col. Timothy Geraghty, a Marine commander in the area, protested the partisan use of force, arguing, “This will cost us our neutrality. Do you realize if you do that, we’ll get slaughtered down here?”46 He would soon be proven correct.
At 6:45 a.m. on Sunday, October 23, a young man drove a yellow Mercedes stake bed truck through a Lebanese Army checkpoint on the highway leading to the Beirut airport, where U.S. Marines had established their base.47 As the Marines slept, the truck smashed through a barbed-wire barrier south of the four-story operations building and proceeded northward through an open gate between two sentry posts at a speed of approximately thirty-five miles per hour. According to an eyewitness, the driver smiled as he rammed the vehicle into the operations building, where one-fourth of the more than one thousand Marines of the U.S. contingent slept. The truck smashed through the south entrance to the building, overran a guard post, and came to a halt in the building’s lobby. One or two seconds later, it exploded.
The explosion demolished the first floor and tore a crater approximately 40 feet by 30 feet by 8 feet through reinforced concrete. It sheared through concrete support columns nearly five feet in diameter and lifted the building into the air, after which it completely collapsed. The shape of the building—rectangular with an open courtyard—had intensified the effects of the blast, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) later determined that the blast had also been enhanced through the use of explosive gas and was the equivalent of approximately six tons of TNT. At the time, the FBI’s forensics laboratory described the explosion as the most powerful it had seen. Two hundred forty-one U.S. service personnel, most of them Marines, were killed in the attack.
Approximately twenty seconds later, a second bomber targeted French paratroopers based five miles to the north. His vehicle made it into the interior of the nine-story headquarters of the First Parachute Chasseur Regiment, and when the explosives detonated, the blast separated the building from its foundation, lifted it into the air, and shifted the nine floors twenty feet, at which point they collapsed into rubble next to the massive crater left by the bomb. The attack killed fifty-eight elite paratroopers, France’s first combat fatalities since 1962, during the Algerian war for independence. The near-simultaneity of the two blasts, coupled with the devastation and loss of life, indicated a high level of planning, intelligence, and resources. Islamic Jihad Organization claimed responsibility for both attacks.
The next major attack was directed at Israeli forces in Tyre, in November 1983. In this operation, a suicide bomber driving a truck again managed to penetrate the compound of Israel’s military headquarters and detonate a half-ton of explosives. Sixty people were killed, including twenty-eight Israeli troops.48 The following month, a large car bomb exploded at the U.S. embassy in Kuwait. The driver missed the most populated part of the complex, and only a fourth of his explosives detonated, limiting the human toll to five fatalities. This attack, and five others at approximately the same time, was credited to al-Dawa, the group that had introduced suicide bombing to the Middle East two years earlier.49 In recent years, however, al-Dawa has attempted to distance itself from these attacks, claiming that they were the work of Iranian security agents who had seized control of the al-Dawa cell in Kuwait.50
The embassy bombing in Kuwait may not have been a suicide attack; an eyewitness reported that the driver had fled the vehicle and had managed to get several steps away before it exploded, suggesting remote or timed detonation.51 For this reason, it is doubtful that this attack should be included with the other bombings of 1983, although at the very least it demonstrates the importance of having a human guidance system for vehicular bombs. In all, the four confirmed suicide attacks in 1983 devastated the forces of three states, claimed more than four hundred lives, and defied all efforts at prevention of such actions and retaliation after them.
By any criteria, the wave of suicide bombings in 1983 must be considered a success for Hizballah and its backers. In the short term, the attacks inflicted extraordinary damage on military and political targets, including those, such as the U.S. embassy, with powerful symbolic value. In the medium term, the attacks contributed to the withdrawal of Hizballah’s adversaries from Lebanon within the course of two years. In the long run, the attacks drew global attention to militant Shiite groups. Of importance here, Hizballah established itself as a major player in the Lebanese conflict and differentiated itself from other forces, such as Amal, through its sheer brutality.
The following year, 1984, was relatively quiet in comparison to 1983, with only two successful suicide attacks in Lebanon. In April Ali Safiadan, a teenager, demonstrated the operational flexibility of the vehicular-borne suicide bomb. When two Israeli armored personnel carriers passed the green Fiat in which he was sitting, he started the engine, rammed the vehicles, and detonated the bomb his vehicle was carrying. One of the Israeli vehicles was completely destroyed; twelve people died in the attack, which was credited to Hizballah. Safiadan may have had personal motivations for carrying out the attack, as his brother had been a prisoner of the IDF and had been killed in the bombing of the IDF headquarters the previous November. Unlike the smiling bomber who killed so many U.S. Marines, an eyewitness recalls that Safiadan was crying shortly before carrying out his attack.52 The following September, another suicide bomber, utilizing a van, destroyed the new U.S. embassy in East Beirut, killing fourteen people a mere seventeen months after the first embassy bombing.53
In 1985 there were twenty-two suicide attacks in Lebanon, only two of which Shiite organizations carried out. Of these, one is credited to Amal, Hizballah’s rival, whose leader, Nabih Berri, had publicly threatened suicide attacks against Israeli targets in September 1984.54 Furthermore, on April 9, 1985, suicide bombing ceased to be an exclusively male phenomenon. On that day, seventeen-year-old Sanaa Muhaidily drove a white Peugeot laden with explosives into Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, killing herself and two soldiers.55 Less than two weeks later, on April 20, Loula Abboud, a young Christian woman, participated in an attack on Israeli soldiers in the town of Aoun. Abboud and some comrades drew Israeli fire, after which Abboud continued to shoot, enabling her companions to escape. She then allowed the Israelis to close in on her for the purpose of detaining her, at which point she blew herself up, killing several soldiers in the process.
Muhaidily, a Sunni Muslim, had fought for the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), a secular, nationalist organization. The SSNP, which has existed in varying forms since the 1930s, is dedicated to the creation of a greater Syrian state that would include much of the eastern Mediterranean. Muhaidily had volunteered to undertake an attack. She, along with several other bombers deployed by the SSNP, recorded a video prior to the operation, announcing her intentions and asking her loved ones to be happy for her. She described the attack in romantic terms, asking that it be remembered as a wedding—a beginning rather than an end—and asked that she be remembered as the “Bride of the South.”56 The idea of such a beautiful girl volunteering to die for the cause of liberating southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation was profoundly moving to her community. After her death, Muhaidily was remembered in song and poetry, and she even received praise from Syrian president Asad. She is still recognized on the SSNP’s website as one of the organization’s thirteen official martyrs.
Loula Abboud’s death differed from those of previous suicide bombers in that it began with a military ambush. Nevertheless, her death had an element of premeditation, and she clearly used her own life in a tactical manner. Her motivation seems to have been primarily one of nationalism, like Sanaa Muhaidily’s. It is noteworthy that she left her family to fight the Israelis on the day after Easter, and her family considers her to be a martyr in the Christian tradition.57
The Muhaidily and Abboud attacks reveal a great deal about the way in which suicide bombing was diversifying and diffusing. While both women died for secular causes, both seem to have conceived of their deaths within a romantic framework of martyrdom that gave meaning to the act of dying while killing others. They shared this framing of suicide bombing as a transcendent act with the earlier suicide attackers, but otherwise there was much to differentiate their attacks. The inclusion of women as suicide bombers was an important difference, but so too was the spread of the desire to participate in suicide bombing among adherents of faiths other than Shiite Islam. The scale of the attacks was also different. These were both smaller-scale attacks, necessitating less preparation and resources than the massive bombs of 1983. The smaller scale of the operations allowed state sponsors (Iran and Syria) to play a lesser role, supporting and encouraging the violence but not being as directly involved in preparations as they had been in the 1983 attacks.
Following the 1983 bombings, the initial response among many observers was to postulate an intrinsic connection between Shiite Islam and suicide attacks. The centrality of Hussein’s martyrdom to Shiite ritual facilitated this misinterpretation. Such thinking is problematic not only because it equates the worship of hundreds of millions of people with the extreme practices of a relatively small minority, but more generally it can lead to a dangerous underestimation of the power and mutability of suicide bombing by equating it with a particular culture.
To begin with, the path from Karbala to Beirut is not as clear as it might initially appear. Throughout the twentieth century, there was little evidence of a wholesale reverence for martyrdom on the part of Shiites. Musa al-Sadr and Khomeini deliberately revived this tradition for their own political purposes.58 Furthermore, as promoted by al-Sadr, the example of Hussein was not one of violent fanaticism, but of choice and courage. Only later did the particular historical circumstances of Lebanon’s war push his followers toward the use of force. Shiites, after all, were among the last to use deadly force systematically in the Lebanese civil war.
That al-Sadr and Khomeini had different understandings of how the martyrdom of Hussein should be understood underscores an essential fact: the Shiite community, even the relatively small community in Lebanon, was far from homogeneous. In particular, many Shiites objected to Khomeini’s doctrine of the vilayat-i faqih, which translates loosely as “rule of the jurisprudent.”59 This doctrine called for political and religious authority of the Shiite community to be consolidated in the hands of the most learned cleric, the jurist-theologian, who serves as supreme leader. This dispute over acceptance of a vilayat-i faqih was at the heart of the split between Amal and the clerics who formed Hizballah. The use of suicide bombers quickly became a means of competition between the two groups for credibility, signaling a deep division within the Shiite community.60 The disagreement erupted into an Amal-Hizballah war in the late 1980s, claiming the lives of approximately three thousand Lebanese.61 Thus at the social/cultural level, it is impossible to speak of one definitive Shiite Islam in Lebanon when the suicide bombings began.
Suicide bombing became possible when organizations began using the symbols and rituals of Shiite Islam to legitimize themselves to the broader community and to exert control over their members. The leaders of Hizballah, like Musa al-Sadr before them, used public ritual and practice to win support for their interpretation of Islam. The dedication of Hizballah’s individual fighters, demonstrated by their willingness to die for the cause, provided convincing evidence that Hizballah’s was indeed the most authentic form of worship.62 Then, the legitimacy that the organization gained from social acceptance allowed it to serve more effectively as a mediator between individual followers and the divine.
For the organization, martyrdom served as a two-way conduit for social and cultural support and also as a managerial tool for influencing the behavior of individual followers. As already noted, martyrdom held different meanings for individual members, forming a vital part of individuals’ identities. Naim Qassem, a founding member of Hizballah and the organization’s acting deputy secretary-general since the early 1980s, sums up the situation as follows: “[T]here are two fruits to the act of jihad: martyrdom and victory. The martyr wins martyrdom, while the nation and its freedom fighters win victory.”63 All three levels of technology practice—the social/cultural level (the Shiite community), the organizational level (Hizballah and its freedom fighters), and the technical level (the martyr)—are acknowledged in Naim’s succinct statement, illustrating that even from the perspective of Hizballah officials, suicide bombing is a socially sanctioned process that transforms individuals into weapons. In this Hizballah established a model for organizing and managing a brutally effective form of attack that has been copied, modified, and used time and time again since the early 1980s.
The need for an effective means to counter U.S. and Israeli military superiority must also be considered as a driving factor in the introduction of suicide bombing. During the Israeli invasion of 1982, the PLO possessed vastly greater conventional arms than did Hizballah, as did the Syrian air force, which was routed by Israel that summer. Of the three, however, Hizballah proved to be much more effective at resisting against the Israelis over the long run. The PLO and the Syrians failed because they engaged the Israelis on Israeli terms—that is, in open combat, force on force, system on system. The Israeli weapon systems had been designed to locate, target, and destroy exactly the kind of weapons that the PLO and the Syrians deployed. Thus their weapons were not just ineffective, they were counterproductive, indicating to the Israelis where they were located and providing the kind of targets that Israeli weapons were designed to seek out and destroy.
Hizballah’s leaders recognized that they needed light, portable, easily concealable weapon systems.64 Suicide bombers fulfilled all of these requirements. They became a uniquely effective and portable weapon guidance and control system that offered some of the benefits of the U.S. and Israeli high-tech systems but at the same time were undetectable by these systems. Hizballah therefore proved adept in its selection of appropriate technology.
Effectiveness rather than religious obligation drove the use of suicide bombing at the organizational level. In fact, the use of suicide attackers was theologically problematic as a means of resistance since Islamic law forbids suicide. Overcoming this prohibition required clerical authority as well as some substantial after-the-fact rationalization. A central figure in the “legalization” of suicide bombing was Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, perhaps the most respected senior Shiite cleric in Lebanon in the early 1980s. Although not a member of Hizballah, after some hesitation he endorsed the group’s agenda, making him a key spiritual leader, or “oracle,” of the organization.65 In a series of interviews in summer 1985, Fadlallah sanctioned suicide attacks as being consistent with Shiite practice despite the prohibition on suicide. Rather than viewing “self-martyring operations” as intrinsic to the Shiite experience, Fadlallah legitimized them on practical grounds: “The self-martyring operation is not permitted unless it can convulse the enemy. The believer cannot blow himself up unless the results will equal or exceed the [loss of the] soul of [the] believer. Self-martyring operations are not fatal accidents but legal obligations governed by rules, and the believers cannot transgress the rules of God.”66 In short, Fadlallah asserted that the legitimacy of suicide bombing derived from its effectiveness. Thus it was a tool to be used in resisting the enemy and establishing Islamic rule, not an element of Islam itself.67
In 2005 Hizballah deputy secretary-general Qassem reiterated this rational, utilitarian justification for suicide missions. To him, martyrdom itself is not a sufficient goal. His understanding appears to differ significantly from that of individual believers for whom martyrdom is an affirmation of identity. He wrote, “Martyrdom alone does not achieve victory or tip the existing balance, and all other possible means should be used in the conflict. However, martyr operations fill a significant gap in the imbalance of powers.”68 Qassem insists that such operations should be used sparingly and only when necessary. They are to be well planned in advance so that they have a high probability of inflicting enemy casualties and therefore justifying the loss of the martyr.
No other technology available to militant groups has been able to solve the problems of guidance and detonation (and minimal detectability) in a single package with the elegance and simplicity of the suicide attacker. The vehicular-borne bombs of the early 1980s eliminated the challenges of planting or dropping off a concealed bomb and then safely withdrawing the operatives. In addition, the inertia of the moving vehicle made stopping the attack in its final stages nearly impossible. Marine Commandant Paul X. Kelley came under criticism from Congress after the Marine barracks bombing for the level of security at the base given that suicide bombers had already been used against the U.S. embassy in April. In particular, he was criticized because Marine guards’ M-16s were kept unloaded while on sentry patrol. He responded with the pragmatic observation that an M-16 cannot stop a five-ton truck moving at thirty-five miles per hour, and regardless, at that point killing the driver would be insufficient.69
The suicide bombers of the early 1980s succeeded because they attacked the assumptions built into their adversaries’ defenses as much as they attacked the physical defenses themselves. For example, the Marines in Beirut had been concentrated in the operations building because their commanders worried that dispersing them would make them more vulnerable to the sporadic, indirect fire that the base experienced on a regular basis. Concentrating the troops in one location may have solved this problem, but it made the operations building a perfect target for an alternative form of attack. The Department of Defense report that analyzed the attack of October 23 concluded, “From a terrorist perspective, the true genius of this attack is that the objective and the means of attack were beyond the imagination of those responsible for Marine security.”70
In addition to invalidating the defensive assumptions of the enemy and providing tactical mission capabilities, suicide bombers also expanded the mental horizon of what was possible for groups such as Hizballah. Eliminating fear of death meant that suicide attackers and their organizations could not be deterred or intimidated by the superior firepower of their adversaries, no matter how overwhelming. They thus undermined another assumption of their adversaries—that modern weapon technologies would confer a psychological as well as a physical advantage upon their users. According to Fadlallah, this transformation was a “rebellion against fear” that allowed Hizballah’s members to regard with contempt the high-tech weaponry brought to bear by Israel and the United States and to dismiss American and Israeli soldiers as cowards who hid in their machines.71
Examining only Hizballah is insufficient for understanding the dramatic suicide attacks of the early 1980s. The roles of Syria and especially Iran must be analyzed as well. The latter was so crucial to the emergence of suicide bombing that some directly credit Iran, rather than Hizballah, for the bombing of the U.S. embassy and the French and American contingents of the MNF. Hizballah has never directly claimed credit for the attacks, and it would be uncharacteristic of it not to venerate its suicide bombers if they had carried out such missions.72 Former government and intelligence officials in particular assert that even at the time of the attacks, there was solid intelligence connecting the blasts to the Iranian government.73 Although the fluidity and complexity of the relationship between Iran and the various Shiite groups in Lebanon makes discerning an unambiguous chain of responsibility problematic at best, there is circumstantial evidence favoring such an interpretation.
The three attacks are readily distinguishable from the other suicide bombings that occurred from 1981 to 1985: they required extraordinary intelligence and timing; they were larger scale than the other vehicular bombings; they were all claimed by a mysterious group, Islamic Jihad Organization; and the identities of the bombers were never publicly revealed.74 Imad Mugniyah, one of the most shadowy and notorious figures to emerge during this time and the individual most responsible for planning IJO bombings, was a member of both Hizballah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. He later lived in Tehran and Damascus.75
Based on the still incomplete empirical and circumstantial evidence it seems likely that the IJO-claimed bombings of 1983 were carried out by Iran, aided by Syrian intelligence and some assistance from Hizballah, and that the Iranian government wished to convey its responsibility, albeit obliquely. Had Iran’s leaders wished to distance themselves from the attacks completely, they could certainly have recruited Lebanese drivers to deliver the bombs, revealed their identities, and credited the attacks to any of the various militant Shiite groups active at the time. Such a strategy, however, would not have allowed the United States to interpret the attacks as an Iranian challenge to U.S. power in the Middle East. On the other hand, revealing too direct a connection would have risked inviting military retaliation by the United States. It is likely, then, that Iran created the IJO as a front organization to differentiate these attacks from others carried out by Hizballah more directly and make Iran’s role an open secret. In this way, Iran was able to send a clear message to the United States while avoiding retaliation.
These many years later, it is still difficult to say anything definitive about the Islamic Jihad Organization’s role in the bombings.76 Whatever assumptions one makes, however, Iran played a large role. Iran organized Lebanon’s most militant Shiites, introduced them to suicide bombing, and supported these operations financially and logistically. Iranian leaders provided the legitimacy that many young Lebanese clerics sought and helped create the corporate body that integrated the very different Shiite groups of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley into a formidable fighting force. Regardless of whether IJO was Iranian, Lebanese, or a mix of both, the attacks claimed by it could not have taken place without Iranian complicity.
Syria’s President Asad was, at the time, Iran’s primary ally in the Middle East owing to mutual need rather than ideological kinship. Asad’s long-term agenda was to counter Israeli power in the Middle East. Asad therefore shared political goals with Iran despite the secular nature of his dictatorship and despite an ambivalent, and sometimes antagonistic, relationship with Hizballah. It is likely that Syria provided the intelligence that permitted the bombing of the U.S. embassy in April 1983 to be so devastating to the U.S. intelligence community. Syrian leaders had probably been tipped off by their Soviet allies about the CIA meeting and had provided this information to the Iranians.77 Syria was also important in that all the secular militant groups that copied Hizballah’s use of suicide bombing in the mid-1980s were under its influence.78
The systematic use of suicide attackers by Shiite groups and their imitators in Lebanon in the early 1980s is significant in that it marks the organizational appropriation of the type of violence with which Russian militants had unsystematically experimented a century earlier. It is clear from the post-hoc rationalizations of clerics associated with Hizballah and related groups that suicide bombing was not inherent in the Shiite tradition, but was introduced based on a sense of need and justified in terms of effectiveness. In 1985 Israeli forces withdrew to a narrow, fortified zone of occupation in southern Lebanon, making suicide missions against them more challenging. Since suicide missions could no longer be counted on to inflict significant casualties, Hizballah shifted away from their use and concentrated instead on becoming an effective guerrilla force.79
Declining effectiveness is only part of the explanation for Hizballah’s reluctance to continue making use of the weapon that had brought it international notoriety. Its shift toward a more conventional guerrilla strategy is also consistent with a general trend toward moderation that since the early 1990s has transformed Hizballah into a dominant actor in Lebanese politics and a reliable provider of social services to many of Lebanon’s Shiites.80 Its shift is also indicative of the challenge that subordinating individual self-sacrifice to organizational needs poses to a group that seeks the authenticity of martyrdom but does not wish to be seen as being coercive or manipulative of its followers.
Hizballah’s efforts in this regard were only partially successful. Fadlallah, in particular, justified suicide attacks by arguing that the Shiite community had no choice but to resort to extraordinary means to defend itself from the weapons of the United States and Israel. He was able to clear suicide attackers of the stigma of suicide, however, only by taking the opposite position—that the attacks were not exceptional and that the deaths of the bombers were not different from ordinary battlefield deaths, which of course clashed with the imagery of heroism and martyrdom through which suicide bombers were commemorated.81 Hizballah leaders, therefore, were never able to reconcile fully the altruism of self-sacrifice—the strategic dimension of martyrdom—with the organizational self-interest that drove the tactical use of suicide bombers. The group has used them only sparingly, and not at all since 1999. Nevertheless, martyrdom and the implied threat of resumed suicide attacks have continued to characterize Hizballah’s rhetoric, perhaps because the organization has been prudent in the use of its “martyrs” and has not diluted their demonstrative power or their prestige within the organization’s history.