The Jihadi Movement and Suicide Bombing after 9/11
On August 19, 2003, an orange flatbed truck driven by a suicide bomber pulled up to the new security wall defending the United Nations’ central administration building in Baghdad. The bomber detonated the truck’s payload, approximately one ton of explosives, devastating the building, killing seventeen people immediately, and injuring more than one hundred. Eventually twenty-two people would die of injuries sustained in the blast. Among the dead was the UN coordinator for Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. The positioning of the truck suggested that the blast had been directed at his office. Within months, the number of UN personnel in Iraq dropped from 650 to approximately 40, leaving American administrators and their allies the challenge of rebuilding the country essentially on their own, after the U.S.-led invasion to overthrow the Baathist regime earlier in the year.1
Suicide bombing, in the form that came to plague Iraq and much of the rest of the world in the new millennium, differed significantly from previous iterations of the technology. In the previous instances of suicide bombing, militant groups manipulated their histories, faiths, and symbols to build the cults of martyrdom that would allow them to produce suicide attackers on a regular basis. Despite similarities between the groups, the process was always local. In contrast, for the past fifteen years this process has been carried out on a global scale, as descendents of the various resistance groups that fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan sought to continue their war by promoting a radical religious agenda around the globe. They developed an elaborate culture of martyrdom without national roots, instead creating one based on defending the Muslim umma (community) and the broad expanse of territory where Islam predominates. The 9/11 al Qaeda attacks lent legitimacy to this movement and placed suicide bombing firmly at its center, establishing al Qaeda in particular as a global brand and suicide bombers as its trademark.
Understanding violent Islamist extremism is a challenging endeavor. Even knowledgeable analysts are split over basic issues, such as what to call the phenomenon. I refer to it as the “global jihadi movement.” There are two parts to this designation that warrant explanation. First, “global jihadi” designates a member of an extremely small minority of Sunni Muslims that uses violence to promote a religious agenda dedicated to combating the influence of Western political and economic structures in the Muslim world. The neologism “jihadism” is preferred here rather than the more common “Islamism,” which denotes an ideology in which Islam plays a political role and is therefore a much broader term than is jihadism. Jihadism, and the individuals who pursue it, jihadis, have deviated so significantly from political Islam as most commonly practiced that it is appropriate to consider them as different phenomena.2
Second, examining global jihadism as a movement rather than as an organization helps convey the complexity of a phenomenon that cannot be understood in terms of normal organizational models. Global jihadism is composed of loosely coupled, amorphous social groups, tightly coupled, rigidly ordered paramilitary organizations, and everything in between.3 In terms of ideology and practice, it is individualistic nearly to the point of anarchy, further complicating analysis in terms of fixed organizational patterns. Seeing jihadism as a movement allows one to understand it as a conglomerate of individuals and organizations characterized by fluid relationships and structures.4 Within this movement, suicide bombers have become the technology of choice, not only because of their effectiveness, but also because they reinforce individual and group identities.
The ideology of the global jihadi movement originated in the 1950s and 1960s with the ideas of radical members of the Muslim Brotherhood, particularly Sayyid Qutb. In 1952 Gamal Abdel Nasser rose to power through a military coup in Egypt. He soon embarked upon an ambitious project of secular, pan-Arab leadership. Nasser sought initially to co-opt Egypt’s Islamists and use them for his own ends, but when this failed, the Muslim Brotherhood and his government became bitter enemies. In early 1954 the government arrested more than 450 of the Brotherhood’s members. Qutb, a respected scholar and author who had only recently joined the Muslim Brotherhood, was one of those imprisoned. Radicalized by the abuse that he and his comrades suffered during nine years in jail, Qutb articulated his rage in his well-known tract Milestones. He presented a vision of the Islamic world challenged by external enemies and internal threats, including the ignorance of God demonstrated by Nasser’s secular dictatorship. He called on devout Muslims to defend their faith, even if it meant open defiance of the state.5 As the Muslim Brotherhood accommodated itself to Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, its leaders rejected violence and the most radical of Qutb’s beliefs in the 1970s. Violent jihadism—such as that carried out by al-Jihad, the Egyptian group that assassinated Sadat in 1981—was the product of splinter groups that rejected the more moderate approach adopted by the Muslim Brotherhood.6
Radical Islamists inspired by Qutb to carry out revolutionary violence against repressive regimes usually did so on a local level. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, however, had the powerful transformative effect on political Islam of providing an external focal point against which grievances from within the entire Islamist community were directed. The Soviet invasion was perceived by many in the Arab world as an attack on Islam, a view encouraged in particular by the government of Saudi Arabia. Saudi state-run media presented the invasion as a threat to the entire Muslim community regardless of nationality, inadvertently laying the groundwork for a broader form of pan-Islamist ideology. Pan-Islamism came to emphasize an uncompromising fight against external (non-Islamic) enemies and for internal unity within the Islamic community.
Abdullah Azzam, a founding member of Hamas and one of the founders of al Qaeda, was among the first to envision and begin working toward the transformation of pan-Islamism into a globalized struggle, or jihad, as the path the Islamic community should take.7 Azzam stressed that it was the duty of individual Muslims everywhere to take up jihad and was explicit in insisting that martyrdom was part of this duty, mentioning it repeatedly before his death in 1989.8 The most significant manifestation of this first wave of global jihadism was the influx in the 1980s of thousands of young Muslim men from dozens of countries into Afghanistan to answer Azzam’s call.9
After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, completed in early 1989, a minority within the pan-Islamist community underwent further radicalization. Believing they had beaten a superpower, they imagined themselves as a global vanguard defending the Islamic world from the political and economic challenges of modernization and globalization.10 This worldview led these militants to perceive the United States as their primary adversary, but true to their global perspective they also launched jihads in Bosnia, Kashmir, and Chechnya before the end of the decade.
The Office of Services (Maktab e-Khamidat), founded by Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden, was the primary network for soliciting funds for and recruiting volunteers to the Afghan jihad in the 1980s prior to its becoming the organizational core of al Qaeda in August 1988.11 On August 23, 1996, in Afghanistan, bin Laden issued his Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries. In it, he repeated Azzam’s theme that the lands of Islam were under threat and added the presence of U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia to the roll call of affronts against Islam. He emphasized that jihad was an individual duty required of all Muslims, regardless of nationality. In a taunt aimed at William Cohen, the U.S. secretary of defense, bin Laden alluded to self-sacrifice being a defining characteristic of the struggle. “I’m telling you, William,” bin Laden wrote, “these young men love death as much as you love life. They have inherited honor, pride, bravery, generosity, sincerity, courage, and a spirit of sacrifice.”12
To reach a broad audience, the form of Islam preached by bin Laden jettisoned much of the faith’s cultural context and turned struggles rooted in practical grievances against specific governments into a generalized struggle against modernity. This radical Islam, described by Olivier Roy as neo-fundamentalism, is characterized, as are other fundamentalist movements, by efforts to define the faith as abstract, free of individual cultures—that is, a “pure” faith existing beyond time and space. The proponents of this form of Islam view religious practices with local peculiarities or characteristics as polluting their idealized form of Islam.13 In theory, this globalized Islam functions above and beyond local cultures and is therefore capable of mobilizing recruits on a global scale based on universal grievances.14
Martyrdom was at the heart of this neo-fundamentalist Islamic ideology. During the campaign against the Soviet Union, the Arab jihadis recruited by Osama bin Laden demonstrated a veneration for self-sacrifice in combat that surprised their Afghan hosts. State-run media outlets in Saudi Arabia provided extensive coverage of the fighting, emphasizing miracles and martyrdom.15 When these fighters left Afghanistan, their identities became even more wrapped up in a shared willingness to sacrifice their lives for Islam. This emphasis on martyrdom came to distinguish this group of men from those in such organizations as the Muslim Brotherhood, and in their eyes elevated their moral stature above all others as well. A shared willingness to die for Islam allowed alienated individuals to feel as though they were part of a collective whole. This mutual purpose facilitated bonds of camaraderie, which helped draw young men to the movement. The prospect of a glorious death also promised individual self-fulfillment to prospective members of the jihadi community.
Many of the young men attracted by the jihadi mindset suffered from the dilemma of being “torn between a profound sense of personal and social belonging to the Muslim world and an awareness of the backward aspects of Muslim societies and the inferior political status of Islam.” This dissonance fueled the acute sense of anxiety instilled in these men by rampant globalization and political impositions of the Western world; it also led them to search for a way out. Religiously sanctioned jihad emphasizing altruistic self-sacrifice became their escape route.16 As a result, suicide attacks came to dominate al Qaeda and the global jihadi movement to a much greater extent than has been the case with other groups. Other militant groups have cults of martyrdom as “subsets” of their primary identities, whereas al Qaeda and its affiliates are a cult of martyrdom, stripped of the local history and social relationships that connect such groups as Hizballah, the Tamil Tigers, and Hamas to their constituencies.
It is suspected that in the early 1990s bin Laden and other al Qaeda members met with elements of Hizballah, including Imad Mugniyah, and received practical instruction on the use of suicide bombing.17 They were probably motivated by the use of suicide bombing by Palestinian Islamists as well. In November 1995 radical Islamists utilizing a truck bomb attacked a U.S.-run training center for the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh. Seven people, including five Americans, were killed in the blast. Although the blast was not a suicide attack, it marked a dramatic escalation of tension between the Saudi state and its Islamist critics. The attack was inspired by Osama bin Laden, then exiled in Sudan, but was not organized or directed by him or his immediate network.18 Two days later, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri and not yet a formal element of al Qaeda, carried out a suicide truck bombing against the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan, killing sixteen people.19 Three years later, in 1998, bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization demonstrated its suicide-bombing capabilities in simultaneous attacks against U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The attacks, and the U.S. response—a counterproductive cruise missile strike directed against militant training camps in Afghanistan—solidified bin Laden’s alliance with the Taliban, ensuring that they would not hand him over to the West and elevating his prestige above the numerous other militants in the area.
The suicide operation against the USS Cole two years later, in 2000, confirmed bin Laden’s symbolic leadership of the jihadi movement, which the 9/11 attacks then revealed to the world. Bin Laden later told a colleague that the 9/11 attacks were speeches in the form of action. Lawrence Wright has described bin Laden’s self-declared war on the United States as a “dazzling advertisement” for bin Laden and his cause.20 The scale of the 9/11 attacks was meant to impart an “attractive” quality to young militants seeking empowerment. From that point on, prospective jihadis who joined the movement and desired to become suicide attackers would be associating themselves with that spectacle, making their decision one of empowerment. The 9/11 attacks thus legitimized the jihadi movement more generally and suicide bombing more specifically.
Violence and repression by state governments have contributed to the spread of suicide bombing by creating the perceived need for extreme forms of resistance and increasing the odds that the suicidal ideology of the jihadis will resonate with a broader audience. Harsh state repression, as seen in the case of the Palestinians, can contribute to narratives of brutality and injustice that help break down individual mental barriers toward murder and even suicide. Albert Bandura, in his analysis of the mental mechanisms that enable killing, notes, “The task of making violence morally defensible is facilitated when nonviolent options are judged to have been ineffective and utilitarian justifications portray the suffering caused by violent counterattacks as greatly outweighed by the human suffering inflicted by the foe.”21 The transformation of the conflict in Chechnya in the 1990s illustrates how the use of force helped align a local conflict with the global militant Islamist strategy, altering its ideological character and in doing so facilitating the introduction of suicide bombing.
The conflict between the Chechen people and the Russian state is centuries old. At heart, it is a nationalist conflict, with the Chechens seeking territorial independence. The cultural differences between the Chechens, who speak a central Asian language and tend to practice Islam, and the Slavic, Orthodox Christian Russians have hampered acceptance of a Soviet identity in Chechnya and the integration of Chechnya into Russia. Instead, a separate sense of Chechen nationhood remains, with Islam serving to differentiate it and legitimize resistance to Russian conquest. During World War II, Stalin believed that separatist sentiment might lead the Chechens to side with Nazi Germany and destabilize the Soviet Union from within. To prevent this imagined betrayal, Stalin deported the entire Chechen population, as well as the nearby Crimean Tatars, to the deserts of Kazakhstan. Thousands died amidst the tumult of the move and the bleak conditions of their temporary residences. Only in 1957 were they allowed to return to their homes.22
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Chechen nationalists renewed the push for independence. In response, Russian president Boris Yeltsin declared war on the breakaway province in 1994, and over the next two years Russian forces fought the separatists to a standstill, after which Chechnya entered a lawless period in which kidnapping and gangsterism dominated. During this time, Islamist fighters, many of whom had trained in Afghan camps as part of the global jihadi movement, began arriving in the area to make the conflict ideologically their own.23
For the Islamists, the conflict was not one of Chechen nationalism versus Russian imperialism, but Islam against the West. In their minds, Chechnya was another theater of the conflict that had taken place in Afghanistan the preceding decade and required jihad. The Islamists had training, weapons, and funding and were quickly able to integrate into the warring criminal factions that characterized the Chechen political landscape. The Islamists launched an invasion of neighboring Dagestan in 1999 that served to intensify the ongoing antagonism with Russia. When newly elected president Vladimir Putin renewed the war in 2000 in response to a number of terrorist attacks in Russia that he blamed on Chechens, he used the full power of the Russian military to devastate Chechnya.
The Russians conducted a massive bombing campaign focused particularly on Grozny, the capital, but other towns and villages were affected as well. Some were literally wiped off the map. By 2005 between 40,000 and 100,000 of Chechnya’s prewar population of approximately 1,000,000 had been killed in the various phases of the fighting. More than one-third had become refugees.24 In addition to state-ordered violence, Chechen citizens were subject to abuse by Russian soldiers, including beatings, murders, abductions, and rapes. Malnutrition and disease became the norm for Chechen children. After years of living under these conditions, many young Chechens had all but given up on life, leading the journalist Anna Politkovskaya to describe war-torn Chechnya as “a small corner of Hell.”25 The Russian state thus created the need among Chechens for an extreme form of resistance. The jihadis who entered Chechnya brought with them the ideology and organizational experience to make such resistance possible.
Dzokhar Dudaev, who had led and radicalized the Chechen nationalist movement in the 1990s, warned the Russians in November 1994 that the Chechens would have no choice but to form suicide battalions because “we do not have armaments, military vehicles, military equipment, a military-industrial complex. We were left naked, and therefore we have been forced to establish suicide battalions.”26 Clearly a desperate, self-sacrificing mindset had already taken hold among elements of the Chechen resistance before the Islamists co-opted the struggle. By framing the conflict as part of a larger global conflict to defend Islam, the Islamists were able to bring religious meaning to a struggle that for many had become meaningless. Using well-established techniques for mobilizing suicide attackers, they easily found susceptible recruits among Chechnya’s brutalized population and were thus able to turn trauma and grief into tools for manufacturing bombers.27
In mid-2000 Chechen groups began conducting suicide attacks, including numerous operations by female suicide bombers. In fact, the first Chechen suicide attack was carried out by two women, Khava Barayeva and Luisa Magomodova, who on June 7, 2000, drove an explosive-laden truck into the headquarters of a Russian Special Forces unit, killing two and injuring five. In summer 2002 jihadis took over the Chechen resistance at the highest level by creating a new governing body called the Madzhlisul Shura and declaring the source of all decisions to be the Quran and the Sunna. Under its leadership, Chechen suicide bombing came to be characterized by high-profile, mass-casualty missions.28
Between 2000 and late 2005, twenty-eight acts of suicidal terrorism, most of them bombings, were attributed to Chechen groups. Two attacks—the 2002 siege of the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow and the Beslan school takeover in 2004—were dramatic hostage-taking operations in which Chechen operatives with explosives strapped to their bodies made it clear that they were prepared to die during the course of the mission. By the end of 2005, 939 people had been killed and 2,913 injured in the violence. Of the 112 perpetrators of these attacks, 48 (or 43 percent) had been women.29 In one of the most daring operations, female suicide bombers simultaneously brought down two Russian airliners on August 24, 2004, killing ninety people.30 A group called the Islambouli Brigades of al Qaeda claimed responsibility in a web posting.31 Although the authenticity of this claim is impossible to verify, it suggests the desire of al Qaeda leaders to link themselves to suicide attacks in Chechnya.
In July 2006 Shamil Basaev, military commander of the Chechen resistance since the 2002 jihadi takeover, was killed in an explosion, the cause of which is still disputed, weakening the resistance as a whole. Its remaining members drew upon small militant groups in Chechnya and the surrounding republics to carry on the struggle, which had the effect of further radicalization. On October 31, 2007, Dokka Umarov, who had been involved in the struggle since 1994, proclaimed that the resistance had been replaced by a new Islamic state, which he declared to be the “Caucasus Emirate,” with himself at the head.32
The new, self-proclaimed emirate laid claim to all Muslim populations in the Russian Caucasus. Umarov made use of militants throughout the region to escalate the violence, beginning in 2008. The Islamists resumed suicide attacks, launching four in 2008 and fifteen in 2009. Most of them were in Chechnya, but several took place in neighboring areas. On the whole, militant violence led to the deaths of 586 people in 2008 and more than 900 in 2009.33 The violence did little to mobilize the support of the population, however, and on the whole the Caucasus Emirate enjoyed little backing.
Suicide bombing also failed to generate popular support within Chechnya. Observers saw no graffiti or posters celebrating suicide attackers; rather, suicide attacks, especially those by women, seem often to have been greeted with disbelief.34 Instead of creating a positive culture of martyrdom that connected individuals and the population to their groups, the militants depended on a combination of fatalism among locals stemming from Russian brutality and the fanaticism of Islamists who sought to recast the nationalist struggle according to their worldview. Chechnya is therefore a striking example of how a globalized jihadi ideology managed to exacerbate and escalate a local conflict in an attempt to turn it into a global jihad, complete with suicide attackers, even when local participants in the conflict tended not to believe in the same radical version of Islam as they did.
After the September 11 attacks, the next high-profile suicide attack directed against Western targets took place on October 12, 2002, at two nightclubs on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people, including 88 Australian tourists. The attacks were the work of a radical splinter of Jemaat Islamiya (JI), an independent jihadi organization with strong local ties that had existed since 1996. JI had previously demonstrated its competence in bomb manufacturing in a wave of attacks across Indonesia on Christmas Eve 2000 that killed nineteen people and injured one hundred twenty. Their decision to use suicide attackers in the 2002 operation was undoubtedly influenced by the 9/11 bombings, but from an operational perspective, it seems any role played by al Qaeda’s leadership was extremely limited.35
JI remained active throughout the decade, combining conventional attacks with at least two more attention-grabbing suicide bombings. On October 1, 2005, a JI operative carried out another attack in Bali, killing 26 people and injuring 129. On July 17, 2009, multiple suicide attacks directed against hotels in Jakarta resulted in the deaths of seven people and injuries to fifty-three more.36 The group’s connections to the local population eroded over this period, however, since most were unwilling to sanction the indiscriminate murder of civilians. Successful counterterrorism operations isolated and weakened the organization as well. By the 2009 attacks, JI’s operational core consisted of small groups of alienated individuals with preexisting social ties whose actions did not represent the wishes of the Indonesian people.37
In 2003 a wave of deadly suicide blasts hit Turkey. On November 15 two suicide truck bombs killed twenty-seven people outside two synagogues in Istanbul. Five days later, two more bombers targeted a bank and the British consulate, killing thirty people and wounding four hundred. The planning for these attacks dated to at least 2000. The mission leader, a Turk named Habib Aktas, had met with Osama bin Laden and received approximately $10,000 from al Qaeda to finance multiple suicide operations. The Turkish cell received general direction from al Qaeda, along with the cash, but determined for itself how best to carry out the missions with little involvement from al Qaeda central regarding the planning and execution.38
Over the next several years, local cells assumed greater responsibility for the planning and execution of suicide bombings. This pattern had begun to emerge months before the Istanbul blasts in the form of a devastating multiple-bomber operation against targets in Morocco. On May 16, 2003, fourteen bombers staged simultaneous attacks against several targets in Casablanca. Two bombers aborted their mission and were apprehended by the authorities, but the remaining twelve killed thirty-three civilians in addition to themselves in five attacks. Despite the high number of fatalities, in a number of ways the attack was fairly amateurish in its execution. The weapons used—homemade explosives carried in backpacks—were relatively crude. Furthermore, the targets were poorly chosen. By including a Jewish community center and a Jewish cemetery among the targets, the planners clearly intended to send a message across the Arab world that they thought would resonate because of anger toward Israel. The bombers did not, however, manage to kill any Jews. Twenty-eight of the thirty-three dead were Muslims.39
The attackers were men of low income and poor education who had been recruited from a Casablanca slum, which is also where much of the planning for the mission took place. Socioeconomic factors therefore go a long way in explaining the willingness of these men to be led toward carrying out what they were told would be a redemptive act.40 The leadership that manipulated these men consisted of local religious authorities angry at the Moroccan government for its efforts to modernize the state.41 In 2007 another wave of attacks began in Morocco when three bombers blew themselves up in Casablanca after a confrontation with police on April 10. A few days later, on April 14, two suicide bombers attacked American targets, including the U.S. consulate in Casablanca. (In March a militant had blown himself up, probably accidentally, in a cybercafe, but did not kill anyone else.)42
Moroccan radicals were a significant contingent of the foreign fighters who traveled to Iraq to become suicide bombers after the U.S.-led invasion.43 The Moroccan attacks of 2003 and 2007 bore hallmarks of al Qaeda operations, in particular staging simultaneous attacks using several bombers. The execution of the attacks, however, was far less professional than al Qaeda’s, and after initial investigations, authorities suggested that the operations—along with the simultaneous bombings of four commuter trains in Madrid in 2004 that killed nearly two hundred people—were entirely local affairs.44 It now seems, however, that established members of al Qaeda played some role in guiding the attacks, perhaps by providing the technical knowledge necessary for the manufacture of the homemade explosives used in the attacks.45
The men who carried out these attacks were recruited locally and had never attended terrorist training camps or participated in violent jihad abroad. In many ways, they were completely apolitical and seem to have been attracted to the idea of martyrdom as a way to transform their identities and escape personal situations that had become intolerable. An analysis of the Madrid bombers suggests that the men involved had only superficially integrated into the surrounding culture; several had criminal backgrounds. Association with one another in a jihadi cell provided them an oasis of communal identity through which to combat the troubling social and economic trends they saw taking place around them.46
In the immediate aftermath of the destruction of al Qaeda’s central command in Afghanistan in late 2001, suicide attacks by al Qaeda and its affiliates became sporadic and geographically dispersed. A few years later, in 2003, a sustained campaign of militancy in which suicide bombings played a prominent role took shape in Saudi Arabia. A well-established Sunni movement had been critical of the Saudi government throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but the kingdom had been relatively free of militant attacks since the siege of the Grand Mosque, in Mecca, in 1979. After that event, the Saudi government had pursued a successful mix of policies that included cracking down on known radicals, encouraging potential militants to go to Afghanistan to fight, and enforcing the public elements of religious observance. As a consequence, the only major militant attack carried out by Sunni extremists on Saudi soil in the 1990s was the previously mentioned bombing of a U.S. training center in Riyadh in November 1995. (The bombing of the Khobar Towers housing complex that killed nineteen U.S. servicemen in 1996 was carried out by the Hizballah al-Hijaz and was not a suicide mission.)47
In 2002, in the aftermath of the dispersal of al Qaeda’s centralized command, veterans of its Afghan network began to return to Saudi Arabia, where, as ordered by bin Laden, they were to carry out attacks. They received additional ideological legitimacy and self-justification from conservative clerics displeased by the Saudi state’s deviations from the traditional practice of Islam. These returning fighters were undoubtedly further antagonized by Israel’s violent suppression of the second intifada, which had begun in late 2001, and by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In mid-2003 a preemptive effort on the part of the Saudi security forces to crack down on the militants provoked a dramatic escalation of hostilities by the newly formed al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula.48
On May 6, 2003, Saudi police raided a suspected al Qaeda safe house in Riyadh, resulting in a gun battle with militants.49 The police failed to arrest the suspected members of al Qaeda they had been targeting, and six days later the militants struck with a bold operation. On May 12 nine suicide attackers driving three bomb-laden trucks targeted a residential complex near Riyadh that housed American and other foreign workers. The attacks killed twenty-five people and wounded dozens of others. Saudi officials definitively linked several of the dead bombers to the al Qaeda cell they had been investigating.50 For the next eighteen months, ongoing battles between security forces and al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula were pitched enough to lead observers to question the stability of the Saudi government. In a particularly audacious attack, on April 21, 2004, a massive car bomb devastated a police office in downtown Riyadh, killing four people. In the days preceding the operation, gun battles with militants had resulted in the deaths of six police officers. Officials estimated that they arrested between four hundred and five hundred militants.51 These figures are probably not indicative of the true scale of the challenge by the militants because of the Saudi state’s penchant for secrecy and its desire to downplay threats to its stability and legitimacy.52
The attacks of al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula were organized and executed locally, but the influence of bin Laden and the al Qaeda hierarchy regrouping in Pakistan was undeniable. Most of the fighters were citizens of Saudi Arabia, had experience fighting on behalf of al Qaeda elsewhere, and still considered themselves to be part of bin Laden’s movement.53 For purposes of ideology and inspiration, the group can be considered a branch of al Qaeda central.
By late 2004 Saudi security forces had successfully quelled the budding insurgency through an energetic and large-scale police effort and an innovative prisoner reeducation and rehabilitation program. In the latter, implemented in 2004, respected clerics who had grown disillusioned with the destructive nihilism of bin Laden’s movement used formal instruction in Islamic history, practice, and jurisprudence to de-radicalize terrorist sympathizers.54 In addition, the militants had been unable to win the support of religious officials or fellow Saudi citizens. Instead, Saudis viewed them as misguided at best, terrorists at worst. Either way, their actions created an environment hostile to them in the kingdom.55 The decline in violence in Saudi Arabia can also be attributed to the draw of the growing insurgency in neighboring Iraq, as hundreds of young Saudis decided to fight and die there rather than in the streets of their homeland.
A number of the militants who eluded capture crossed into neighboring Yemen, where they allied themselves with Yemeni militants, including al Qaeda in Yemen. In 2009 al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) announced that it had reestablished itself in Yemen.56 The group attracted international attention in late 2009 when it claimed responsibility for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s unsuccessful attempt to destroy an American passenger jet as it flew into Detroit on Christmas by detonating explosives he had concealed in his undergarments. Abdulmutallab claimed that he had been trained and equipped in Yemen.57
On August 19, 2009, exactly six years after the suicide attack directed against UN headquarters in Baghdad, two suicide blasts in the Iraqi capital killed nearly one hundred people and injured more than six hundred. Only weeks earlier, the United States had formally handed control for internal security to the government of Iraq.58 Between the 2003 blast and the one in 2009, Iraq experienced at least 1,286 suicide bombings, more such attacks than any other country, resulting in 12,144 deaths and nearly 29,000 people injured. According to the National Counterterrorism Center’s database, in June 2005 in Iraq there had been fifty-one suicide attacks; in comparison, in every year of the intifada, except for one, there were fewer than fifty-one attacks.59 The casualty figures were 277 dead and 751 injured.
Prior to the U.S.-led invasion, there had been no suicide attacks in Iraq, and despite speculation that suicide attackers would be used to defend the Iraqi state, few took place in the early stages of the invasion. From March through September 2003, suicide attacks averaged one to three per month, but increased in the last quarter of the year, with nine attacks in December alone, bringing the total for 2003 to thirty-three.60 The number of attacks doubled in 2004 and then increased five-fold the following year, for a total of 348 suicide attacks in 2005. The number of operations declined in 2006 (but remained high), spiked in 2007, and then declined significantly in 2008, 2009, and 2010 (see Figure 7.1).
Practice led militant groups to become more creative and sophisticated in their use of human bombers. Many of the most brutal suicide attacks of the entire occupation occurred in 2007. Sectarian hatred—stemming from a deliberate effort by Sunni militants to draw Iraq’s majority Shiite population into a civil war the previous year—contributed to the savagery. On March 6, 2007, two suicide bombers simultaneously targeted a Shiite religious procession, killing at least 106 people.61 By June there had already been more than a dozen suicide attacks, averaging 50 deaths each.62 Later that summer, a truck bombing in Amerli, in northern Iraq, killed at least 150 people, and on August 14, a series of suicide truck bombings in a rural area near the Syrian border killed as many as 500 people and injured perhaps 1,500.63
As of December 31, 2010, there had been 1,396 suicide attacks in Iraq, causing 13,601 deaths, for an average of 9.7 fatalities per attack. According to Mohammed Hafez, Iraqi security forces were the most common targets, suffering 44 percent of total suicide attacks between 2003 and August 2006. Civilian targets accounted for 23 percent of attacks, while coalition forces were targeted only 15 percent of the time. Government and political party figures, tourists, and international organizations were also targeted with regularity.64
FIGURE 7.1Suicide Attacks in Iraq, 2003–2010
Sources: For 2003, Mohammed M. Hafez, Suicide Bombers in Iraq: The Strategy and Ideology of Martyrdom (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007), 94; for 2004 through 2010, Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, National Counterterrorism Center, wits.nctc.gov (accessed November 12, 2009; April 1, 2010; and April 1, 2011).
Militants were able to establish and then escalate suicide bombing rapidly in Iraq because all of the elements necessary for a sustainable suicide-bombing complex emerged quickly in the breakdown of order following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government. Within a year, there had evolved an angry, alienated population fragmented into antagonistic communities traumatized by violence and desperate for means of defense. The organizational element was present outside Iraq’s borders and was able to move in at once, bringing with it an ideology, a culture of martyrdom, and experience in training and managing suicide attackers. Young Iraqi males were vulnerable to the lure of martyrdom, and hundreds of foreign fighters entered the country already having been indoctrinated, ensuring that militant groups in Iraq would have a reliable supply of recruits once they set up shop.
A suicide attack requires a human guidance system as well as a warhead, so it is important to note that prospective militants in Iraq had a wealth of conventional explosives at their disposal that they could use for the latter. In particular, the misguided American preoccupation with Iraqi “WMDs” prohibited troops from detonating bunkers containing artillery shells and ammunition for fear of dispersing chemical or biological agents that might be nearby. U.S. forces lacked sufficient numbers to guard the many sites where such weapons were stored, and many tons of this material soon made their way to the insurgency.65
The failure of the United States and its coalition partners to have devised an appropriate plan for administering Iraq to maintain peace and order quickly proved to be catastrophic. The Iraqi state had always been an artificial construct, owing more to British colonial ambitions after World War I than to any underlying logic taking into consideration social or ethnic realities. After the overthrown of Hussein’s government, Iraqi society was no longer held together by force, and thus fragmented along ethnic, tribal, and religious lines.66 Tensions quickly rose between Iraq’s Sunni and Shiite populations while the Kurdish minority set about consolidating power in the region where it had been able to establish autonomy years prior.67 The decisions to dissolve the Iraqi army and to purge members of the Baath Party from government left tens of thousands of men outside the political and economic life of the country and with little reason to support the occupation or the newly created government. Many of these men remained armed, with government-issued guns, and had formal military training. The use of force by the U.S. military contributed to this alienation, and by 2004 an indigenous insurgency had emerged, composed of former Baathists and nationalists who opposed the occupation and the subsequent political empowerment of Iraq’s Shiite and Kurdish communities at the expense of the Sunnis.68 In polls conducted during 2004–2005, support for attacks on American forces was as high as 85 percent in some Sunni areas.69
The global jihadis from outside Iraq, ready to exploit the situation, quickly began to integrate into local Iraqi forces, creating a second insurgency dedicated to creating a Sunni-led Islamic state in Iraq. Once these experienced militants had arrived, stoked the fears of the Sunni population, and availed themselves of the permissive environment afforded by the lack of troops and the abundance of weapons and alienated young men, Iraq had all the ingredients necessary for producing suicide attackers.
The fundamental difference between the suicide-bombing complex as it emerged in Iraq and the other instances of localized suicide bombing examined here was the presence of imported organizational elements that trained and marketed suicide attackers to the local audiences that the jihadis were supposedly defending. In other instances of suicide bombing, a shared ideology in the form of common, realizable political goals connected the three facets of the suicide-bombing complex. In Iraq, these connections were much weaker. Many Iraqis were secular in their overall outlook, making ideological reconciliation with the global jihadis and their movement impossible.70 Many Iraqis who collaborated with the foreign fighters did so out of a sense of desperation borne of a need to protect their communities.
Thus much of the insurgency, and especially the intensive use of suicide attackers imported from other areas, was a problem of the United States’ own making. According to David Kilcullen, many of the insurgents who fought the U.S. and Iraqi security forces were what he calls “accidental guerrillas.”71 Global jihadis moved into an area to exploit a local conflict and join it to their transnational agenda. Through high-visibility attacks, such as suicide bombings, the jihadis provoked a violent reaction from the United States. U.S. forces were unable to differentiate between the local and the global and attacked both, unintentionally creating solidarity between the foreign fighters and their local hosts.
Martyrdom was Hizballah’s defining weapon in its war against the mechanized forces of its adversaries in its formative years. Not only was this weapon effective, but from the group’s perspective it embodied the values for which the organization claimed to be fighting—faith and the willingness to sacrifice for the community. Suicide bombing continues to play a similar cultural role for the jihadi movement, providing it with an effective counterpart to the electronic firepower of its foes and allowing the movement to affirm individual and group identities.
The use of modern tools of war, particularly airpower, against such groups reinforced the cultural dimensions of the struggle and lent legitimacy to the anti-modern narrative that bin Laden was selling and others continue to peddle. From the perspective of states, the use of airpower represents technological sophistication and a desire to prevent indiscriminate casualties. It is also used as a means of communication and intimidation to convince adversaries of the futility of ongoing resistance.72 From the receiving end, however, airpower appears neither advanced nor humane, but brutal—because it is used against foes who have no symmetrical means of response—and hypocritical because even precision weapons cannot help but cause unintended civilian casualties, giving the appearance that they are used exclusively to shield their users from risk regardless of the cost to noncombatants. From a historical perspective of those on the receiving end, the use of a weapon that is extremely effective and exposes its users to minimal risk has rarely been viewed with awe, but more typically as being unfair precisely because of its efficiency or the overwhelming advantage it offers one side.73
The use of force, particularly airpower, in the Iraqi theater (and elsewhere) contributed to the production of accidental guerillas in two ways. First, on a practical level, it created fear and anxiety in those communities it was supposed to protect and therefore caused their leaders to seek help from elsewhere. Second, on a more abstract level, it undermined faith in the value systems of the countries employing it, particularly these countries’ respect for human life. This in turn lent credibility, at least temporarily, to the alternative agenda of the jihadi movement, facilitating jihadis’ integration with people who wanted security and stability rather than jihad.
The situation in Iraq worsened throughout 2005 and 2006, as the jihadis escalated sectarian tensions leading to a civil war between Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites. As early as August 2003, global jihadis had begun using suicide attackers to murder Shiite public figures, attempting to provoke a violent response from the Shiite community and the occupation forces.74 Their effort was largely successful, and by 2006 the Iraqi government of Nuri al-Maliki had chosen sides in the struggle, acting as a sectarian (Shiite) combatant instead of an honest broker.75 The imported insurgents, however, had started a civil war that they were not capable of winning, and mass executions of Sunnis by Shiite death squads and widespread ethnic cleansing became commonplace.76 This sectarian bloodshed in turn set the stage for the rejection of the foreign fighters by their Iraqi hosts, an event that was encouraged by U.S. forces and, once it occurred, contributed to a reduction in overall attacks and suicide bombings, in particular in 2008 and 2009. The escalation of suicide missions by foreign fighters and their eventual isolation from their hosts is best illustrated via the experience of al Qaeda’s Iraqi franchise from 2003 through 2010.
From 2003 until 2006, al Qaeda’s presence in Iraq was dominated by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi, a Jordanian, had traveled to Afghanistan in 1989 to take part in the fight against the Soviets. Upon his return to Jordan in 1992, he became involved with Islamist groups challenging the state and was imprisoned in 1994. He was released as part of a general amnesty in 1999 and returned to Afghanistan, swearing allegiance to Osama bin Laden in 2001. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, Zarqawi fled via Iran to Iraq, where he hid in the autonomous Kurdish region until after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.77 By early 2004 Zarqawi had become the leader of a coalition of jihadi movements called Tawid wal Jihad (Unity and Struggle) and began to wage war against the American occupiers.
On October 17, 2004, Zarqawi formally pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden for a second time and in doing so transformed his coalition into al Qaeda’s Iraq-based franchise. This oath of allegiance demonstrated the symbolic importance of bin Laden: By officially sanctioning the Zarqawi coalition, he reinforced al Qaeda’s commitment to Iraq and legitimized Zarqawi’s group globally. The relationship had something to offer bin Laden as well; by allowing him to “share” in the carnage that Zarqawi unleashed in Iraq, it looked as though al Qaeda central was actually doing something for the global jihad.78 During the first two years of the U.S. occupation, Zarqawi’s network was responsible for 14 percent of attacks on coalition forces but 42 percent of suicide bombings. Another estimate has the Zarqawi network being responsible for 30 percent of all the suicide bombings in the first three years of the occupation.79
The formal connection to al Qaeda allowed Zarqawi’s Iraq group to make use of a globally recognized name and well-established recruitment network to attract hundreds of fighters from throughout the Islamic world to escalate the conflict in Iraq. In the first years of the occupation, foreign fighters constituted a significant percentage of suicide attackers, but the exact extent of their role was at the time unclear. In 2007, however, the U.S. Army seized hundreds of documents in the town of Sinjar, near the Syrian border, that exposed the workings of part of the recruitment network. The documents included records on nearly seven hundred foreign fighters recruited to Iraq. Although the records do not offer a complete picture of the insurgency or use of foreign fighters, they are nonetheless extensive enough to be revealing of the entire movement.80
Of the foreign fighters gleaned from the documents, the greatest number, 244 (41 percent), were from Saudi Arabia, with Libya second, with 112 fighters (18.2 percent). For the most part, they were young and were not veterans of previous conflicts. Rather, they seem to have been recruited and radicalized far from arenas of conflict. Most of the fighters designated a desired “work” category, with more than half (217 of 389, or 56.3 percent) selecting suicide attacker or seeker of martyrdom. According to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center’s database, there were 394 suicide attacks in Iraq from August 2006 to August 2007, inflicting more than 16,000 casualties. Foreign fighters coming through Sinjar may have represented as much as 75 percent of these attackers.81
Zarqawi’s reliance on al Qaeda’s global network gave him the freedom to indulge himself in the Iraqi environment because he was not constrained by the need to justify his group’s attacks to the local populace, and its approval was not necessary to sustain the flow of recruits. The resulting dynamic therefore differed from other instances of suicide bombing examined: Instead of unifying the Iraqi population and militant organizations in a common cause, Zarqawi’s brutality widened the rift between the two. Foreign fighters on the whole tended to look down on the Iraqis because they were not ideologically committed. Zarqawi himself expressed contempt for the Iraqi population: “The Iraqi brothers still prefer safety and returning to the arms of their wives, where nothing frightens them,” he wrote, frustrated with those who could not see that “safety and victory are incompatible.” He continued, “People cannot awaken from their stupor unless talk of martyrdom and martyrs fills their days and nights.”82
Zarqawi’s cavalier attitude came to undermine al Qaeda’s efforts to promote itself as a legitimate defender of Iraq’s Sunni community. As early as July 2005, bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had written a letter to Zarqawi in which he urged him to be mindful of the legitimacy of the struggle on a global level and therefore to limit violence toward civilians.83 Zarqawi responded with a lecture in autumn 2005 entitled “It Is Allah Whom Ye Should More Justly Fear,” in which he criticized jihadi scholars who tried to advise fighters while living in areas of relative security.84
In November 2005 Zarqawi claimed credit for several suicide attacks in Amman, Jordan, that killed dozens of Muslims. One of the attacks had targeted a wedding party. Tens of thousands of Jordanians responded by taking to the streets and calling for Zarqawi to “Burn in Hell.”85 As the image of the global jihad deteriorated internationally, the connection to the Iraqi population began to break down as well. In early 2006 al Qaeda replaced Zarqawi with an Iraqi and changed the name of their Iraqi franchise to the Mujahidin Shura Council in an effort to distance it from the Amman bombings and to make it seem more like a legitimate local movement.86 After Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. air strike in summer 2006, the name of the organization changed again, becoming the Islamic State of Iraq in October, officially putting an end to the al Qaeda brand name in Iraq.87
By 2007 global jihadis in Iraq had so thoroughly alienated their hosts that the Iraqis began to turn on them. U.S. forces recognized the split and were able to systematically begin using it in 2007 for their own purposes, paying tribal leaders to resist the jihadis and in doing so serve as auxiliary “peacekeeping” forces.88 Collectively known as the Awakening, with the tribal groups referred to as the Sons of Iraq, these movements contributed significantly to the decrease in bloodshed in Iraq after 2007.
The decline of al Qaeda’s Iraq franchise was not caused by the use of suicide bombers. Rather, Zarqawi was indifferent to how suicide attackers were deployed, and their poor use reflected the larger failings of the group that undermined its legitimacy and helped exacerbate its rift with local forces. In his letter to Zarqawi in 2005, Zawahiri cautioned that “we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. And that we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our Umma.” He repeatedly urged Zarqawi to consider the importance of maintaining a connection to the Iraqi people.89 Zarqawi, motivated more by his own sense of divine mission, did the opposite, in the process undermining al Qaeda’s political project. In addition to Zarqawi’s indifference in how suicide attackers were used, by 2007–2008 Iraqi groups had begun to use coerced or involuntary bombers as well, undermining the very legitimacy of suicide missions. Such “remote-control martyrs” included mentally disabled women used as involuntary proxy bombers.90
The decline of al Qaeda’s original Iraqi franchise did not mark the end of the organization or of suicide bombing in Iraq. In late 2009 terrorism experts cautioned that elements of the Baath Party had reconciled with the remnants of al Qaeda’s Iraq franchise.91 The newly reorganized al Qaeda operation was thought to be responsible for some dramatic suicide attacks that damaged the credibility of the Iraqi government, led by Maliki. These included the two blasts in August 2009, discussed at the beginning of this section, in which nearly 100 people died. On October 26, 2009, two nearly simultaneous suicide truck bombs devastated the Iraqi Ministry of Justice and provincial council complexes, killing 155 people and injuring 500. It was the deadliest attack in Iraq in more than two years.92 Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed credit for all of these missions.93 On December 8 five suicide bomb attacks significantly damaged a number of government agencies, including the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs and the Ministry of Finance. Iraqi government officials put the death toll at 77, but foreign journalists estimated it at approximately 127, with 400 injured.94
All three attacks targeted symbolic institutions, directly challenging the legitimacy of the Maliki government and its ability to keep order. They also demonstrated a high level of technical capability and preparation as they were all large, simultaneous vehicular bombings. The October bombers had to pass through checkpoints to get to their targets, suggesting collusion or incompetence on the part of the security forces.95 Nevertheless, the attackers have derived no political benefit from their use of force. Regular suicide attacks continued throughout 2010, but the militants never came close to disrupting national elections, held in March, suggesting that even a reformed al Qaeda that makes better use of suicide attackers will be more a persistent and bloody nuisance than an existential threat to the Iraqi state.
The previous chapters borrow heavily from Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations to provide an explanatory mechanism for the spread of suicide bombing. According to this model, innovations spread relatively slowly at first. After the innovation diffuses to a small number of early adopters, it begins to spread more rapidly as its overall utility and its applicability in different contexts become established. Use begets use, and eventually a large class of relatively late adopters, which Rogers calls the late majority, pick up the innovation in imitation of earlier groups as much as in response to their own needs. Ultimately, previously reluctant laggards begin to make use of the innovation, also motivated by a need to imitate and appropriate a generally accepted innovation as much as by any “objective” necessity of their own. This overall pattern of diffusion takes the form of a bell-shaped curve (see Figure 7.2).
The overall pattern as well as the characteristics attributed to each sector of innovators conform to the global spread of suicide bombing in a general sense. In this case, Hizballah and its Iranian sponsors were the innovators; other Lebanese groups, such as Amal and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, that copied Hizballah’s use of suicide attackers, were the early adopters. The Tamil Tigers, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and to a lesser extent the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan and the Provisional Irish Republican Army comprised the early majority.
Much of this chapter has concerned itself with the two categories on the right side of the bell curve. The late majority consists of al Qaeda central, Chechen rebels, and al Qaeda’s Saudi and Iraqi branches. Palestinian latecomers, for instance, Fatah, also fall into this category. The most significant laggards—those who began to use suicide bombing only recently—are analyzed in the following chapter. As characterized by Rogers, those belonging to the late majority tend to be skeptical and do not embrace an innovation until numerous peers have done so, which seems to be the case here. In comparison with the Tamil Tigers and Hamas, global jihadis were relative latecomers to suicide bombing. Once they began to use suicide attackers, however, the jihadis became enthusiastic change agents, doing their best to export the technology around the world.
FIGURE 7.2Adopter Categorization Based on Innovativeness
Source: Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. (New York: Free Press, 2003), 281.
Throughout the 2000s members of the global jihadi movement, inspired by the al Qaeda core, have traveled to different regions and taken suicide bombing with them. Al Qaeda shrewdly marketed the suicide bomber not only as an alternative, but as an equalizer, as a force that inverts the military superiority of state governments by expanding the possibilities of the individual through self-sacrifice. Demonstrations play an important role in diffusion by proving that a technology can work in a given environment.96 Proving the utility of suicide bombing is clearly why in many of these cases imported global jihadis carried out initial attacks, knowing that the power of the demonstrations would go a long way toward determining whether a skeptical public might be convinced to embrace suicide bombing.97
Al Qaeda therefore encouraged the use of suicide bombing by sometimes skeptical clients in order to serve the movement’s global agenda instead of the local needs of the clients themselves. This effort has yielded mixed results. In the new millennium, the pattern appears to be one of suicide bombing developing relatively slowly, then expanding rapidly—fed by the integration of the enthusiastic global movement with radical locals—after which it declines as the global movement finds that violence alone is insufficient for mobilizing an appreciable percentage of the local population. The suicide bombing of the new millennium may well prove to be less sustainable over time than was the suicide bombing of the 1990s because of the rapid, indiscriminate use of the weapon in areas not predisposed to it.