1. Guided Missiles and Techniques, Summary Technical Report of Division 5, National Defense Research Committee, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1946), 198.
2. Quoted in Hala Jaber, Hezbollah: Born with a Vengeance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 92–93.
3. Timothy Naftali, Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 18–25.
4. Michael Russell Rip and James M. Hasik, The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfare (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2002), 424–27.
5. Data for 2004 and 2005 are from the Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, National Counterterrorism Center, wits.nctc.gov (accessed December 2, 2010); Robin Wright, “Since 2001, a Dramatic Increase in Suicide Bombings,” Washington Post, April 18, 2008, A18. Acquiring consistent quantitative data on suicide attacks worldwide is problematic because many researchers have compiled their own databases, which vary depending on the criteria used to define suicide attacks. This study relies on quantitative data compiled by several researchers. When possible, their figures have been compared and reconciled before discussion of them; these sources are clearly referenced in the text. Data for 2004 onward are according to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center’s Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS). For specifics on how WITS data are generated, see John Wigle, “Introducing the Worldwide Incident Tracking System (WITS),” Perspectives on Terrorism 4, no. 1 (March 2010): 3–23.
6. Bruce Hoffman and Gordon H. McCormick, “Terrorism, Signaling, and Suicide Attack,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 27, no. 4 (2004): 255.
7. Robert J. Brym and Bader Araj, “Suicide Bombing as Strategy and Interaction,” Social Forces 84, no. 4 (June 2006): 1,973; Mohammed M. Hafez, “Rationality, Culture, and Structure in the Making of Suicide Bombers: A Preliminary Theoretical Synthesis and Illustrative Case Study,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29, no. 2 (2006): 166–70.
8. Bruce Hoffman, “The Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” in Homeland Security and Terrorism: Readings and Interpretations, ed. Russell D. Howard, James J. F. Forest, and Joanne C. Moore (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006), 59–70; Mohammed M. Hafez, “Dying To Be Martyrs: The Symbolic Dimensions of Suicide Terrorism,” in Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism: The Globalization of Martyrdom, ed. Ami Pedahzur (New York: Routledge, 2006), 56.
9. Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 83; Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge, U.K., and Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2005), 8–11.
10. Ariel Merari, Driven to Death: Psychological and Social Aspects of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 261–77.
11. Martin Kramer, “Suicide Terrorism: Origins and Response. Martin Kramer on Robert Pape’s Thesis,” www.geocities.com/martinkramerorg/PapeKramer.htm.
12. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, authorized ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2004), 272.
13. Ibid., 339–48.
14. Naftali, Blind Spot, 318; George Friedman suggests that it was the inability of security officials in the United States to understand how terrorists would solve the problem of guidance that prevented them from conceiving of aircraft as cruise missiles prior to September 11. George Friedman, America’s Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle between America and Its Enemies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 95.
15. Timothy D. Hoyt, “Technology and Security,” in Grave New World: Security Challenges in the 21st Century, ed. Michael E. Brown (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003), 26.
16. Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010), 16.
17. Quoted in Peter W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 62.
18. Nasra Hassan, “An Arsenal of Believers: Talking to the ‘Human Bombs,’” New Yorker, November 19, 2001, 38.
19. Reuven Paz, “Programmed Terrorists? Analysis of the Letter of Instructions Found in the September 11th Attack,” PRISM (Project for the Research of Islamist Movements), www.e-prism.org/projectsandproducts.html.
20. Martin van Crevald, Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1991), 232.
21. Understanding technology as the embodiment of progress has characterized the interaction of Western states and the non-Western world since the colonialism of the 1800s. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), esp. 130.
22. Naim Qassem, Hizbullah: The Story from Within, trans. Dalia Khalil (London: Saqi, 2005), 50; Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (New York: Rodale, 2003), 185.
23. Leo Marx, “Technology: The History of a Hazardous Concept,” Technology and Culture 51, no. 3 (July 2010): esp. 576.
24. Eric Schatzberg, “Technik Comes to America: Changing Meanings of Technology before 1930,” Technology and Culture 47, no. 3 (June 2006): 488–90.
25. Harvey Brooks, “Technology, Evolution, and Purpose,” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (1980): 65.
26. Peter F. Drucker, Technology, Management, and Society (New York: Harper Colophon, 1977), 45.
27. Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 2–3.
28. Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Innovation and Technological Enthusiasm (New York: Viking, 1989), 6 (emphasis in the original).
29. Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. (New York: Free Press, 2003), 13 (emphasis in the original).
30. Arnold Pacey, The Culture of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 4–7; also see Arnold Pacey, Meaning in Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 6–11.
31. Pacey, Culture of Technology, 4–7, quote from 6.
32. Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Bombing (New York: Random House, 2005); Robert A. Pape and James K. Feldman, Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
33. Assaf Moghadam, “Suicide Terrorism, Occupation, and the Globalization of Martyrdom: A Critique of Dying to Win,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29, no. 6 (August 2006): 713–16; Assaf Moghadam, The Globalization of Martyrdom: Al Qaeda, Salafi Jihad, and the Diffusion of Suicide Attacks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Also see Robert J. Brym and Bader Araj, “Suicide Bombing as Strategy and Interaction: The Case of the Second Intifada,” Social Forces 84, no. 4 (June 2006): 1973.
34. Thomas Hegghammer, “Apostates vs. Infidels: Explaining Differential Use of Suicide Bombings by Jihadist Groups” (paper presented at the conference “Understanding Jihadism: Origins, Evolution, and Future Perspectives,” Oslo, March 19–21, 2009).
35. John H. Lienhard, How Invention Begins: Echoes of Old Voices in the Rise of New Machines (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 137.
36. W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (New York: Free Press, 2009), 19.
37. Mohammed M. Hafez, Suicide Bombers in Iraq: The Strategy and Ideology of Martyrdom (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007), 18.
38. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, “Introductory Essay: The Social Shaping of Technology,” in The Social Shaping of Technology, ed. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1985), 3–27.
39. Ariel Merari, “The Readiness to Kill and Die: Suicidal Terrorism in the Middle East,” in Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, ed. Walter Reich (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1998), 194–95.
40. Yoram Schweitzer, “Palestinian Istishhadia: A Developing Instrument,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30, no. 8 (2007): 670.
41. Ariel Merari, “Social, Organizational, and Psychological Factors in Suicide Terrorism,” in Root Causes of Terrorism: Myths, Reality, and Ways Forward, ed. Tore Bjørgo (London: Routledge, 2005), 71.
42. Michael Thad Allen and Gabrielle Hecht, “Introduction: Authority, Political Machines, and Technology’s History,” in Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Park Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, ed. Michael Thad Allen and Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 1–24.
43. Alan Beyerchen, “Rational Means and Irrational Ends: Thoughts on the Technology of Racism in the Third Reich,” Central European History 30, no. 3 (1997): 386–402; for a striking example, see Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (New York: Free Press, 1995), 278; also see David Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
44. Van Crevald, Technology and War, 77.
45. Quoted in Donald Cardwell, Wheels, Clocks, and Rockets: A History of Technology (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1995), 18.
46. Beyerchen, “Rational Means and Irrational Ends.”
47. David Alan Grier, When Computers Were Human (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5.
48. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), esp. 390–425.
49. Quoted in David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 283–84.
50. Stephen B. Johnson, Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 125.
51. Slava Gerovitch, “Human-Machine Issues in the Soviet Space Program,” in Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight, ed. Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius (Washington, D.C.: NASA Office of External Relations, 2006), 122.
52. Gregory J. E. Rawlins, Slaves of the Machine: The Quickening of Computer Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 112–13, and Singer, Wired for War, 76–77.
53. Arthur, Nature of Technology, 28.
54. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 16.
1. This account of Alexander’s assassination is drawn from Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, trans. Francis Haskell (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964); Avraham Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism (New York: Collier, 1962), 268–71; and Edvard Radzinsky, Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar, trans. Antonia W. Bouis (New York: Free Press, 2005), 410–17.
2. Quoted in Yarmolinksy, Road to Revolution, 266.
3. Edward Constant, “Recursive Practice and the Evolution of Technological Knowledge,” in Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process, ed. John Ziman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 219–33.
4. W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (New York: Free Press, 2009), 19; George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 45, 135.
5. Constant, “Recursive Practice,” 220; Arthur, Nature of Technology, 38; James Fleck, “Artefact-Activity: The Coevolution of Artifacts, Knowledge, and Organization” in Ziman, Technological Innovation, 248–66.
6. See Paul G. Gillespie, Weapons of Choice: The Development of Precision Guided Munitions (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 6. Gillespie defines precision-guided munitions as “conventional bombs that are interactively guided to terminal impact.”
7. Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 49–57, esp. 53; Conrad C. Crane, Bombs, Cities, and Civilians (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 11–20.
8. Gillespie, Weapons of Choice, 69–72, 87–89, 109–12; Barry D. Watts, Six Decades of Guided Munitions and Battle Networks: Progress and Prospects (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2007), 179–203.
9. Michael Russell Rip and James M. Hasik, The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfare (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2002), 202–21.
10. Ibid., 219.
11. “Martyr,” s.v. Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9, www.newadvent.orgcathen/09736b.htm.
12. Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding (New York: Free Press, 1951), 217–23.
13. Ibid., 225–26.
14. Ibid., 227.
15. David Cook, Martyrdom in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1–2.
16. Eugene Weiner and Anita Weiner, The Martyr’s Conviction (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1990), 25.
17. Jeffrey Sluka, “From Graves to Nations: Political Martyrdom and Irish Nationalism,” in Martyrdom and Political Resistance Movements: Essays on Asia and Europe, ed. Joyce Pettigrew (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1997), 35–60.
18. See David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 66, for a discussion of the way that veneration of the fallen contributes to civil religion in the United States through such holidays as Memorial Day.
19. David Beresford, Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987), 25.
20. Michael Barkun, “Appropriated Martyrs: The Branch Davidians and the Radical Right,” Terrorism and Political Violence 19, no. 1 (2007): 120; also see Cook, Martyrdom in Islam, 3, and Weiner and Weiner, Martyr’s Conviction, 25.
21. Mohammed M. Hafez, “Rationality, Culture, and Structure in the Making of Suicide Bombers: A Preliminary Theoretical Synthesis and Illustrative Case Study,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29, no. 2 (2006): 177 (emphasis in the original).
22. Ehud Sprinzak, “Rational Fanatics,” Foreign Policy, September/October 2000, 68.
23. Farhad Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers: Allah’s New Martyrs, trans. David Macey (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 5–9; Hugh Barlow, Dead for Good: Martyrdom and the Rise of the Suicide Bomber (London: Paradigm, 2007), 45.
24. St. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God / The Tree of Life / The Life of St. Francis, trans. Ewart Cousins (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1978), 266–71.
25. Cook, Martyrdom in Islam, 23–28.
26. Bernard Lewis, The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
27. Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat (New York: Random House, 2006), 26.
28. Ariel Merari, “Social, Organizational, and Psychological Factors in Suicide Terrorism,” in Root Causes of Terrorism: Myths, Reality, and Ways Forward, ed. Tore Bjørgo (London: Routledge, 2005), 72.
29. Richardson, What Terrorists Want, 21–23.
30. Bruce Hoffman, “Terrorist Targeting: Tactics, Trends, and Potentialities,” Terrorism and Political Violence 5, no. 2 (1993), 13.
31. Bruce Hoffman, “Aviation Security and Terrorism: An Analysis of the Potential Threat to Air Cargo Integrators,” Terrorism and Political Violence 10, no. 3 (1998), 66; J. Bowyer Bell, IRA Tactics and Targets (Dublin: Poolberg Press, 1990), 24–25.
32. Richard Bach Jensen, “Daggers, Rifles, and Dynamite: Anarchist Terrorism in Nineteenth Century Europe,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 1 (2004): 116–53; Martin A. Miller, “The Intellectual Origins of Modern Terrorism in Europe,” in Terrorism in Context, ed. Martha Crenshaw (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 27–62.
33. Karl Heinzen, “Murder,” in Voices of Terror, ed. Walter Laqueur (New York: Reed Press, 2004), 57–67; also see the discussion in Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, “From the Dagger to the Bomb: Karl Heinzen and the Evolution of Political Terror,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 1 (2004): 97–115.
34. For a history of the People’s Will, see Venturi, Roots of Revolution, especially chapter 21, “Narodnaya Volya,” 633–708; Philip Pomper, “Russian Revolutionary Terrorism,” in Crenshaw, Terrorism in Context, 63–101; and Norman M. Naimark, “Terrorism and the Fall of Imperial Russia,” Terrorism and Political Violence 2, no. 2 (1990): 171–92. For an eyewitness account, see Vera Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991).
35. Quoted in James Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999), 388.
36. The phrasing here is indebted to Richard Dawkins’ insight: “However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.” Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 232.
37. Hoffman, “Aviation Security and Terrorism,” 66.
38. Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution, 264.
39. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), 242–43.
40. Richard Pipes, The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 27–28.
41. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed, trans. Constance Garnet (New York: Modern Library, 1936); Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 74–77.
42. See discussion in Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution, 123–25, 143–51.
43. Quoted in Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 635; also see Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, 205.
44. Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 276–310; Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 4–8, and chap. 14.
45. Radzinsky, Alexander II, 291–95, quote from 295.
46. Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution, 246, 274–75.
47. Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, app. I, 308.
48. See Norman M. Naimark, Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alexander III (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).
49. Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1904–1917 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 45–83; Naimark, “Terrorism and the Fall of Imperial Russia.”
50. Boris Savinkov, Memoirs of a Terrorist, trans. by Joseph Shaplen (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1931), 75.
51. Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, 48–49.
52. Savinkov, Memoirs of a Terrorist, 48.
53. Ibid., 60–61.
54. Ibid., 104.
55. Ibid., quotes from 110 and 116, respectively.
56. Pomper, “Russian Revolutionary Terrorism,” 91. Kaliayev’s case was fictionalized in Albert Camus’ play Les Justes (The just assassins). Also see the case of Evstiliia Rogozinnikkova, discussed in Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, 168.
57. Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, 57, 69.
58. Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 46.
59. Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, 74.
60. Ibid., 168–72.
1. Naim Qassem, Hizbullah: The Story from Within, trans. Dalia Khalil (London: Saqi, 2005), 49. There is no generally accepted way of transliterating “Party of God” into English. See discussion in Robin Wright, Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (New York: Penguin, 2008), 173.
2. “Bomb Razes Iraqi Embassy; 25 Die,” Chicago Tribune, December 16, 1981, A3. The final tally of sixty-one deaths was reported the following month. “Rescue Efforts End in Beirut,” New York Times, January 12, 1982, A3; Chris Quillen, “Mass Casualty Bombings Chronology,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 25, no. 5 (2002): 295.
3. Rodger Shanahan, “Shi’a Political Development in Iraq: The Case of the Islamic Da’wa Party,” Third World Quarterly 25, no. 5 (2004): 944–46.
4. According to Leonard Weinberg, an undetermined number of suicide attacks and no-escape missions accompanied Viet Cong violence against U.S. forces in Vietnam in the 1960s. Leonard Weinberg, “Suicide Terrorism for Secular Causes,” in Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism: The Globalization of Martyrdom, ed. Ami Pedahzur (New York: Routledge, 2006), 108–22. Also see Adam Dolnik, Understanding Terrorist Innovation: Technology, Tactics and Global Trends (New York: Routledge, 2007), 43.
5. Peter Hill, “Kamikaze, 1943–5,” in Making Sense of Suicide Missions, ed. Diego Gambetta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1–41, and Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
6. Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms, 160; Hill, “Kamikaze,” 6–8.
7. John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 215–16, 231–32. For the contributions of Zen Buddhism to Japanese militarism, see Brian Victoria, Zen at War (New York: Weatherhill, 1997).
8. Translated and quoted in Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 163; Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms, 300 (emphasis in the original).
9. Translated and quoted in Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze Diaries, 84; translated and quoted in Christoph Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, trans. Helena Ragg-Kirkby (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 130–31.
10. Paul Carell, Hitler Moves East, 1941–1943, trans. Ewald Osers (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), 134–36.
11. James H. Capshew, “Engineering Behavior: Project Pigeon, World War II, and the Conditioning of B. F. Skinner,” Technology and Culture 34, no. 4 (1993): 835–57.
12. Quoted in Capshew, “Engineering Behavior,” 840.
13. Ibid., 840–43, quote from 853. The idea was to release the bats, who would then seek to roost in the attics and cellars of Japan’s highly flammable buildings, at which point timers would detonate the bats’ payload, igniting thousands of fires. Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Airpower: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 226.
14. Skinner quoted in Capshew, “Engineering Behavior,” 842; Guided Missiles and Techniques, Summary Technical Report of Division 5, National Defense Research Committee, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1946), 198–201, quote from 201.
15. Barnaby Rogerson, The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad and the Roots of the Sunni-Shia Schism (London: Little, Brown, 2006), 340–43; Mahmoud Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering in Islam: A Study of the Devotional Aspects of Ashura in Twelver Shi’ism (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1978).
16. Ervand Abrahimian, The Iranian Mojehedin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989) 35, 152, 218–22. Quote from 99.
17. Saskia Gieling, Religion and War in Revolutionary Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), 44–45, 82, 115.
18. Ibid., 54–55; Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006), 132–33.
19. Robin Wright, In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 87.
20. Ian Brown, Khomeini’s Forgotten Sons: The Story of Iran’s Boy Soldiers (London: Grey Seal, 1990).
21. Ibid., 88–89.
22. Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon, 35.
23. Joyce M. Davis, Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance, and Despair in the Middle East (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 49; Gieling, Religion and War in Revolutionary Iran, 120.
24. Qods, ed., In Memory of Our Martyrs, trans. M. Ebrahimi (Tehran: Ministry of Islamic Guidance, 1982), 7.
25. Martin Kramer, “Hizbullah: The Calculus of Jihad,” in Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Politics, Economies, and Militance, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 539–56.
26. Fouad Ajami, The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 141–43.
27. For the history of Amal, see Augustus Richard Norton, Amal and the Shi‘a: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), esp. 37–58.
28. Amad Nizar Hamzeh, In the Path of Hizbullah (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 22–23; for details and possible reasons for al-Sadr’s disappearance, see Norton, Amal and the Shi‘a, 52–56.
29. Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr, Shi‘ite Lebanon: Transnational Religion and the Making of National Identities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 101–9.
30. Ajami, Vanished Imam, 174; Patrick Seale, Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 352.
31. Norton, Amal and the Shi’a, 68–69.
32. Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, ed. and trans. Ina Friedman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 81, 157.
33. Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 415.
34. Islamic Amal was a splinter of the Amal group that broke away in the early 1980s. Magnus Ranstorp, Hiz’ballah in Lebanon: The Politics of the Western Hostage Crisis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 30–31.
35. Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 31–32, and Faleh A. Jabar, The Shi‘ite Movement in Iraq (London: Saqi, 2003), 81–98.
36. Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Future of Iraq (New York: Scribner, 2008), 37–39.
37. Jabar, Shi‘ite Movement in Iraq, 227–34.
38. Shaery-Eisenlohr, Shi‘ite Lebanon, 109–13.
39. Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 255–57; 277–78.
40. Schiff and Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 232–33.
41. Thomas L. Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 163; Fisk, Pity the Nation, 390.
42. Schiff and Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 258–59.
43. Qassem, Hizbullah, 89; Hala Jaber, Hezbollah: Born with a Vengeance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 75–76. For biographical details on Qassir, see Martin Kramer, “Sacrifice and ‘Self-Martyrdom’ in Shi’ite Lebanon,” Terrorism and Political Violence 3, no. 3 (1991): 30–47.
44. Robin Wright, Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 15–16.
45. Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), 65–67.
46. Wright, Sacred Rage, 76–79; Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem, 200–201.
47. United States Department of Defense, “Report of the DoD Commission on Beirut International Airport Terrorist Act, October 23, 1983,” chaired by Admiral Robert Long, December 20, 1983, 40–41, 95–100 (hereafter “Long Commission Report”).
48. “Israeli Military HQ Destroyed,” Times (London), November 5, 1983, A1; William E. Smith, “New Bloodshed, New Hope,” Time, November 14, 1983, 48–50.
49. Wright, Sacred Rage, 112–13.
50. Shanahan, “Shi’a Political Development in Iraq,” 949.
51. Ariel Merari, “The Readiness to Kill and Die: Suicide Terrorism in the Middle East,” in Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, ed. Walter Reich (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1998), 194–96.
52. Account from Fisk, Pity the Nation, 561. A misprint in the text has the attack taking place on April 12, 1983, but this is obviously incorrect based on the narrative. Casualty figures are from Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge, U.K., and Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2005), 241–42.
53. David Ignatius and Tewfik Mishlawi, “Terrorist Bombing of U.S. Embassy Annex in Beirut Could Again Suck America into Lebanese Quagmire,” Wall Street Journal, September 21, 1984, 1; also see Baer, See No Evil, 107.
54. “Moslem Chief Threatens Israelis—Suicide Attacks Directed at Invasion Forces,” Chicago Tribune, September 10, 1984, A3; Merari, “The Readiness to Kill and Die,” 204–5. Martin Kramer argues that Amal’s decision to begin using suicide attackers was at least partially motivated by a need to compete with Hizballah for the allegiance of the Shiite community. Kramer, “Sacrifice and ‘Self-Martyrdom,’” 33.
55. “Car Bomb Kills 2 Israelis,” New York Times, April 10, 1985, A10. It is possible that Sanaa Muhaidily was not the first female suicide bomber. Amir Taheri asserts that this distinction belongs to Sumayah Sa’ad, who on March 10, 1985, killed twelve Israeli soldiers and wounded fourteen others. He believes that the Israeli government concealed the details of the attack to hide the fact that the bomber had been a woman. See Amir Taheri, Holy Terror: The Inside Story of Islamic Terrorism (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 116–17.
56. Jaber, Hezbollah, 91–92.
57. Joyce M. Davis, “The Woman as Soldier-Martyr and Suicide Bomber: Loula Abboud,” in Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance, and Despair in the Middle East, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 67–84.
58. Nikki R. Keddie and Farah Monian note that “recent scholarship has indicated that Husayn’s martyrdom was not, until the late 1970s, generally taken as a model for rebellion or assassinations but rather as an occasion to ask for his intervention with God.” “Militancy and Religion in Contemporary Iran,” in Marty and Appleby, Fundamentalisms and the State, 512.
59. Daniel Byman, Deadly Connections: States That Sponsor Terrorism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 93 n. 49; Shaery-Eisenlohr, Shi‘ite Lebanon, 104–10.
60. Kramer, “Sacrifice and ‘Self-Martyrdom,’” 7–8.
61. Shaery-Eisenlohr, Shi‘ite Lebanon, 108–15.
62. Norton, Amal and the Shia, 106.
63. Qassem, Hizbullah, 44 (emphasis in the original).
64. Ibid., 70.
65. Martin Kramer, “The Oracle of Hizbullah: Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah,” in Spokesmen for the Despised: Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East, ed. R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 83–181.
66. Quoted in Kramer, “Hizbullah: The Calculus of Jihad,” 550.
67. Kramer, “The Moral Logic of Hizbullah,” in Reich, Origins of Terrorism, 148.
68. Qassem, Hizbullah, 50.
69. In addition, such was the power of the 1983 blast that the FBI determined that significant casualties would have occurred even if the bomb had detonated outside the perimeter of the base, 330 feet from the operations building. “The Post-Mortem Goes On,” Time, November 14, 1983, 50; “Long Commission Report,” 99.
70. “Long Commission Report,” 86, quote from 123.
71. Qassem, Hizbullah, 50.
72. Qassem, Hizbullah, 93, credits the attacks against the MNF to the Islamic Jihad Organization (but does not mention the embassy).
73. Storer Rowley and Raymond Coffey, “Iran Main Suspect in Bombing, U.S. Says,” Chicago Tribune, December 14, 1983, A13; Baer, See No Evil, 264; Timothy J. Geraghty, “25 Years Later: We Came in Peace,” Proceedings 134, No. 10 (October 2008).
74. As noted above, the identity of the U.S. embassy bomber is still unknown. According to Robin Wright, U.S. authorities eventually identified (though not by name) the bomber of the Marine barracks as a devout young Shiite who was trained in Baalbek by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Wright, In the Name of God, 122–23.
75. Jaber, Hezbollah, 115–20; Carl Anthony Wege, “Iran’s Terrorist Asset: A History of Imad Mugniyah,” Terrorism Monitor, September 8, 2006.
76. Also see interpretations by Kramer, “Moral Logic of Hizbullah,” 136, and Wright, Sacred Rage, 84–86.
77. Jaber, Hezbollah, 80–84.
78. Ariel Merari, Driven to Death: Psychological and Social Aspects of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 30.
79. Ibid., 31.
80. Krista E. Wiegand, “Reformation of a Terrorist Group: Hezbollah as a Lebanese Political Party,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 32 (2009): 669–80.
81. Kramer, “Moral Logic of Hizbullah,” 146–48.
1. Shashi Ahluwalia and Meenakshi Ahluwalia, Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1991), 1–26; Rajeev Sharma, Beyond the Tigers: Tracking Rajiv Gandhi’s Assassination (New Delhi: Kaveri Books, 1998), 16–27; Rohan Gunaratna, Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka: The Role of India’s Intelligence Agencies (Colombo: South Asian Network on Conflict Research, 1993), 464.
2. Manoj Joshi, “On the Razor’s Edge: The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 19, no. 1 (1996): 30–33.
3. Amy Waldman, “Masters of Suicide Bombing: Tamil Guerrillas of Sri Lanka,” New York Times, January 14, 2003.
4. For first use of suicide belts, see Sharma, Beyond the Tigers, 35–36. The LTTE carried out more than forty boat attacks. Brian A. Jackson et al., Breaching the Fortress Wall: Understanding Terrorist Efforts to Overcome Defensive Technologies (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 2007), 67.
5. Rohan Gunaratna, “The LTTE and Suicide Terrorism,” Frontline, February 5–8, 2000; Bruce Hoffman and Gordon H. McCormick, “Terrorism, Signaling, and Suicide Attack,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 27, no. 4 (2004): 261–62.
6. BBC News Online, “Tamil Rebels Commit Suicide,” March 11, 2000.
7. Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge, U.K., and Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2005), app., 241–53; National Counterterrorism Center, Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, wits.nctc.gov, accessed September 24, 2009. Also see Stephen Hopgood, “Tamil Tigers, 1987–2002,” in Making Sense of Suicide Missions, ed. Diego Gambetta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 44.
8. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 187; Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 33.
9. Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 46–48; Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam, The Tamil Tigers: Armed Struggle for Identity (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1994), 86–91.
10. Robert I. Rotberg, “Sri Lanka’s Civil War: From Mayhem toward Diplomatic Resolution,” in Creating Peace in Sri Lanka: Civil War and Reconciliation, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 5–6.
11. Neil DeVotta, Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), esp. chap. 4, “The Official Language Act of 1956,” 73–91, and chap. 5, “Institutional Decay: Consequences of the Official Language Act, 1956–77,” 92–142; H. P. Chattopadhyaya, Ethnic Unrest in Modern Sri Lanka: An Account of Tamil-Sinhalese Race Relations (New Delhi: M. D. Publications, 1994), 17–25.
12. DeVotta, Blowback, 140–42; also see Jagath P. Senaratne, Political Violence in Sri Lanka, 1977–1990: Riots, Insurrections, Counter-insurgencies, Foreign Intervention (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1997), 38.
13. M. R. Narayan Swamy, Inside an Elusive Mind: Prabhakaran, The First Profile of the World’s Most Ruthless Guerrilla Leader (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2003), 60.
14. Ibid., 29–39.
15. John Richardson, Paradise Poisoned: Learning about Conflict, Terrorism, and Development from Sri Lanka’s Civil Wars (Kandy, Sri Lanka: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 2005), 493–98; Barnett Rubin, Cycles of Violence: Human Rights in Sri Lanka since the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement (Washington, D.C., Asia Watch, 1987).
16. S. J. Tambiah, Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19–20.
17. Swamy, Inside an Elusive Mind, 4–9.
18. Tambiah, Ethnic Fratricide, 20–22; Chattopadhyaya, Ethnic Unrest in Modern Sri Lanka, 68–69; and Neelan Tiruchelvam, “Devolution and the Elusive Quest for Peace,” in Rotberg, Creating Peace in Sri Lanka, 189–202.
19. DeVotta, Blowback, 170.
20. Rubin, Cycles of Violence, 31–40.
21. Swamy, Inside an Elusive Mind, 126–30. For the LTTE perspective, see Adele Balasingham, The Will to Freedom: An Inside View of the Tamil Resistance (Mitcham, U.K.: Fairfax, 2001), 100–101.
22. Barbara Crossette, “Survivors of Attack in Sri Lanka Talk of ‘Calm, Disciplined’ Killers,” New York Times, April 20, 1987; Barbara Crossette, “105 Sri Lankans Die as Bomb Rips into Bus Station,” New York Times, April 22, 1987.
23. Rohan Gunaratna, War and Peace in Sri Lanka (Colombo: Institute of Fundamental Studies, 1987), 27, 68; Michael Roberts, “Pragmatic Action and Enchanted Worlds: A Black Tiger Rite of Commemoration,” Social Analysis 50, no. 1 (2006): 80.
24. The phrase “predatory rationalization” is from Senaratne, Political Violence in Sri Lanka, 85; also see Swamy, Inside an Elusive Mind, 132–38, 151, and 174.
25. M. R. Narayan Swamy, Tigers of Lanka: From Boys to Guerrillas, updated ed. (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2004), 86–87; Anita Pratrap, Island of Blood: Frontline Reports from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Other South Asian Flashpoints (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 100–106; Daya Somasundaram, Scarred Minds: The Psychological Impact of War on Sri Lankan Tamils (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1998), 66–67.
26. Rajan Hoole et al., The Broken Palmyrah: The Tamil Crisis in Sri Lanka—An Inside Account, rev. ed. (Claremont, Calif.: Sri Lanka Studies Institute, 1990). Thirinigama was murdered in 1989. See the second preface, ibid., x–xv.
27. Quoted in Jannie Lilja, “Trapping Constituents or Winning Hearts and Minds? Rebel Strategies to Attain Constituent Support in Sri Lanka,” Terrorism and Political Violence 21, no. 2 (2009): 314.
28. Swamy, Inside an Elusive Mind, 19–28. Interviews with Prabhakaran, “The Eye of the Tiger” (1986), “How I Became a Freedom Fighter” (April 1994), are from the website EelamWeb, http://www.eelamweb.com (accessed July 2007, but no longer operational).
29. Balasingham, Will to Freedom, 80.
30. Swamy, Inside an Elusive Mind, 29.
31. Peter Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom in the Process of State Formation of Tamililam,” in Martyrdom and Political Resistance Movements: Essays on Asia and Europe, ed. Joyce Pettigrew (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1997), 74–75.
32. Hellmann-Rajanayagam, Tamil Tigers, 67; newspaper account cited in Edgar O’Balance, The Cyanide War: Tamil Insurrection in Sri Lanka, 1973–1988 (London: Brassey’s, 1989), 111.
33. Gunaratna, Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka, 48–49, 407.
34. Steven R. Weisman, “India Airlifts Aid to Tamil Rebels,” New York Times, June 5, 1987; Rajesh Kadian, India’s Sri Lanka Fiasco (New Delhi: Vision Books, 1990), 9–11.
35. For favorable responses of the Tamil people, see Hoole et al., Broken Palmyrah, 143. According to William Clarence, radical Sinhalese were so opposed to the agreement that they called for the assassination of the president of Sri Lanka. Ethnic Warfare in Sri Lanka and the UN Crisis (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Pluto Press, 2007), 49. When Rajiv Gandhi arrived in Colombo to promote the accord, thousands protested. The Sri Lankan police used deadly force to pacify the crowds, killing five people. Kadian, India’s Sri Lanka Fiasco, 14.
36. Seth Mydens, “Leader Says Tamils Will Turn in Arms,” New York Times, August 5, 1987; Gunaratna, War and Peace in Sri Lanka, 6–9.
37. Kadian, India’s Sri Lanka Fiasco, 13, 24–25; “A Tamil Separatist Leader Dies in Protest Fast,” New York Times, September 27, 1987.
38. Gunaratna, Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka, 235–36.
39. K. M. de Silva, Regional Powers and Small State Security: India and Sri Lanka, 1977–1990 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 267–323.
40. Sharma, Beyond the Tigers, 119–20.
41. Casualty figures for the attack vary significantly. Contemporary newspaper reports varied between twenty and forty fatalities. The figure of twenty-seven is from the START Global Terrorism Database, http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd (accessed March 23, 2008).
42. Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom in the Process of State Formation of Tamililam,” 77; Liam Pleven, “Secrets of Their Success: Politics, Not Faith, Fuel the Suicide Bombers of Sri Lanka,” Newsday.com, July 18, 2005; Amantha Perera, “Suicide Bombers Feared and Revered,” Asia Times Online, July 17, 2003.
43. Chris Smith, “South Asia’s Enduring War,” in Rotberg, Creating Peace in Sri Lanka, 26.
44. Discussed in Pratrap, Island of Blood, 99.
45. START Global Terrorism Database, http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd (accessed April 28, 2011); Associated Press, “Blast Kills 60 in Sri Lanka; 1,400 Injured,” New York Times, February 1, 1996.
46. V. S. Sambandan, “Living Through the Bombs,” Frontline, December 25, 1999–January 7, 2000.
47. BBC News, “Sri Lanka Attack Causes Carnage,” October 16, 2006; “Suicide Bombing Kills More Than 100 Sri Lankan Sailors,” Times [London] Online, October 16, 2006.
48. D. B. S. Jeyaraj, “Another Human Bomb,” Frontline, June 19–July 2, 1999.
49. V. S. Sambandan, “Peace-maker as Terrorist Target,” and D. B. S. Jeyaraj, “Trails of the Tigers,” Frontline, August 14–27, 1999.
50. Hoole, et al., Broken Palymyrah, 134–35. For Prabhakaran’s public admission, see Swamy, Inside an Elusive Mind, 233.
51. Arjuna Gunawardena, “Female Black Tigers: A Different Breed of Cat?” in Female Suicide Bombers: Dying for Equality? ed. Yoram Schweitzer (Tel Aviv: Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, 2006), 81; for details on training, see Jackson et al., Breaching the Fortress Wall, 63–68.
52. Miranda Alison, “Cogs in the Wheel? Women in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam,” Civil Wars 6, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 37–54; Alisa Stack-O‘Connor, “Lions, Tigers, and Freedom Birds: How and Why the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Employs Women,” Terrorism and Political Violence 19, no. 1 (2007): 45.
53. Pratrap, Island of Blood, 98; Swamy, Inside an Elusive Mind, 227, 234–35.
54. Somasundaram, Scarred Minds, 51.
55. From http://www.eelamweb.com (accessed October 2007, but no longer operational).
56. Michael Roberts, “Tamil Tiger ‘Martyrs’: Regenerating Divine Potency?” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 28, no. 6 (2005): 494–95.
57. Peter Schalk, “The Revival of Martyr Cults among Illavar,” Temenos 33 (1997): 151–90.
58. Balasingham, Will to Freedom, 249, and 54 for details on the death of Shankar; on the ritual celebration of Great Heroes’ Day, see Roberts, “Pragmatic Action and Enchanted Worlds,” 84–93.
59. Schalk, “Revival of Martyr Cults among Illavar,” sec. 2, 3–5.
60. Christiana Natali, “Building Cemeteries, Constructing Identities: Funerary Practices and Nationalist Discourse among the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka,” Contemporary South Asia 16, no. 3 (2008): 297–99; Rohan Gunaratna suggests that LTTE cadres do believe that dying for the cause will confer immortality upon them. International and Regional Security Implications of the Sri Lankan Tamil Insurgency (United Kingdom: International Foundation of Sri Lankans, 1987), 104.
61. Translations of Prabhakaran’s Great Heroes’ Day speeches are from http://www.eelamweb.com (accessed October 2007, but no longer operational).
62. Schalk, “Revival of Martyr Cults among Illavar.”
63. For example, see Pleven, “Secrets of Their Success.”
64. Anthony W. Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3–32.
65. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism and the Mind: Essays on Modern Culture (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), 93–114; Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 1–22.
66. Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 367.
67. James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999), 4–5.
68. Also see Mia Bloom, “Dying to Kill: Motivations for Suicide Terrorism,” in Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism: The Globalization of Martyrdom, ed. Ami Pedahzur (New York: Routledge, 2006), 29.
69. Rohan Gunaratna, “The LTTE and Suicide Terrorism,” Frontline, February 5–8, 2000; Swamy, Inside an Elusive Mind, 272.
70. Pape writes that “the logic of religious difference” and “[f]ear of religious persecution . . . largely accounts for the pervasive use of suicide terrorism in this case.” Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Bombing (New York: Random House, 2005), 140, and also see 146–51. For his explanation of the lack of suicide attacks during India’s occupation, see ibid., 151–54.
71. David Rohde, “Tamil Suicide Bomber Kills 4 Policemen in Capital of Sri Lanka,” New York Times, July 8, 2004.
72. Hellmann-Rajanayagam, Tamil Tigers, 119–25.
73. Gunaratna, Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka, 411.
74. Crossette, “Survivors of Attack in Sri Lanka Talk of ‘Calm, Disciplined’ Killers”; Crossette, “105 Sri Lankans Die as Bomb Rips into Bus Station.”
75. For example, Balasingham, in The Will to Freedom, 126, writes that Miller’s attack was part of a “major counter-offensive” and that the attack killed “hundreds” of troops, both of which are patently false statements.
76. One other high-ranking member of the LTTE, S. P. Tamilselvan, chief negotiator (killed in 2007), denied that Miller’s attack had been inspired by the attacks in Lebanon. Tamilselvan, quoted in Pleven, “Secrets of Their Success,” 3.
77. Hoffman and Horowitz argue that Hizballah played a major role in the spread of suicide bombing to the LTTE, but this author disagrees. Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 141; Michael C. Horowitz, The Diffusion of Military Power: Causes and Consequences for International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 196–97.
78. G. P. V. Somaratne, “Sri Lanka’s Relations with Israel,” in External Compulsions of South Asian Politics, ed. Shelton U. Kodikkara (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993), 194–225. Also see Gunaratna, Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka, 131, and Swamy, Tigers of Lanka, 97–102.
79. Hoole et al., Broken Palmyrah, xi.
80. Shawn Teresa Flanigan, “Nonprofit Service Provision by Insurgent Organizations: The Cases of Hizballah and the Tamil Tigers,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 31, no. 6 (2008): 503–4, 507–8, 511; also see Lilja, “Trapping Constituents or Winning Hearts and Minds?” 314–15.
81. Human Rights Watch, “Living in Fear: Child Soldiers and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka,” New York, November 2004, 6, 17, 27–28.
82. Hoffman and McCormick, “Terrorism, Signaling, and Suicide Attack,” 245–47.
83. United Nations, “Report of the Secretary General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka,” March 31, 2011, ii–iii; Niel A. Smith, “Understanding Sri Lanka’s Defeat of the Tamil Tigers,” Joint Forces Quarterly, no. 59 (October 2010): 40–44.
1. The Provisional IRA is usually referred to simply as the IRA in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, so all references to the IRA in this book can be taken to refer to the Provisional IRA unless otherwise noted.
2. Jamie Dettmer and Edward Gorman, “Seven Dead in IRA ‘Human Bomb’ Attacks,” Times (London), October 25, 1990; David McKittrick, “IRA’s New Tactic Breaches Security Forces’ Defenses,” Independent (London), October 25, 1990.
3. Dettmer and Gorman, “Seven Dead in IRA ‘Human Bomb Attacks”; Kevin Fulton, the assumed name of a former British agent in the IRA, claims that he was part of the team that held McEvoy’s family hostage (and refers to him as Colman McAvoy); Kevin Fulton, with Jim Nally and Ian Gallagher, Unsung Hero: How I Saved Dozens of Lives as a Secret Agent inside the IRA (London: John Blake, 2006), 122–29.
4. David McKittrick, “SDLP Leader Denounces IRA ‘Cowards,’” Independent (London), October 26, 1990.
5. Ibid.
6. This is the primary argument of Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Bombing (New York: Random House, 2005).
7. Jonathan Zeitlin and Gerry Herrigel, eds., “Introduction,” in Americanization and Its Limits: Reworking US Technology and Management in Post-War Europe and Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2–3; Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 16–21, and see chapter 6, “Political Economy of Knowledge: Innovation and Resistance in Economic History,” 218–93.
8. Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. (New York: Free Press, 2003), 5, 14.
9. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 258–91. For the value of suicide bombing as a demonstrative act, or “signaling game,” see Bruce Hoffman and Gordon H. McCormick, “Terrorism, Signaling, and Suicide Attack,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 27 (2004): 243–81.
10. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 257–58.
11. Ibid., 229.
12. Ibid., 233.
13. Ibid., 241, 243, 246–47.
14. Sean MacStiofain, Revolutionary in Ireland (Edinburgh: Gordon Cremonisi, 1975), 138–39.
15. J. Bowyer Bell, IRA Tactics and Targets (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1990), 48–49; Brian A. Jackson et al., Aptitude for Destruction, vol. 2, Case Studies of Organizational Learning in Five Terrorist Groups (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2007), 113.
16. Green Book content is from Tim Pat Coogan, The IRA (New York: Palgrave 2002), 555.
17. The fifth part of the strategy consisted of “defending the war of liberation by punishing criminals, collaborators, and informers.” Ibid.
18. Bell, IRA Tactics and Targets, 107–11. The tension between the IRA’s urban and rural branches is discussed in James Dingley, “The Bombing of Omagh, 15 August 1998: The Bombers, Their Tactics, Strategy, and Purpose behind the Incident,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 24, no. 6 (2001): 456–57, and Eamon Collins, with Mick McGovern, Killing Rage (London: Granta Books, 1997). The emphasis on armed struggle over politics is the subject of M.L.R. Smith, Fighting for Ireland: The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement (London and New York: Routledge, 1997) esp. 219–20.
19. A. R. Oppenheimer suggests that the term “IED” should be the acronym for Irish Explosive Device given the centrality of such weapons to the republican cause from the late 1800s to the late 1900s. A. R. Oppenheimer, IRA: The Bombs and the Bullets. A History of Deadly Ingenuity (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009), 8; also see MacStiofain, Revolutionary in Ireland, 330–31.
20. Oppenheimer, IRA, 204–5; Toby Harnden, Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999), 19; J. Bowyer Bell, The Secret Army: The IRA, rev. 3rd ed. (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 453.
21. Oppenheimer, IRA, 206–10.
22. Bruce Hoffman, “Terrorist Targeting: Tactics, Trends, and Potentialities,” Terrorism and Political Violence 5, no. 2 (1993): 19–21, and Oppenheimer, IRA, chaps. 6 and 9.
23. Collins, Killing Rage, 162. It has become clear in recent years that by the 1980s the IRA was riddled with informers, who also contributed significantly to the organization’s numerous operational failures.
24. As told to Bob Perin, Bombs Have No Pity: My War against Terrorism (London: William Luscombe, 1975), 62, 122.
25. Tony Geraghty, The Irish War: The Hidden Conflict between the IRA and British Intelligence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 204; Martin van Crevald, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat from the Marne to Iraq (New York: Presidio Press, 2006), 234–35.
26. Quoted in Coogan, IRA, 555.
27. Oppenheimer, IRA, 70.
28. Harnden, Bandit Country, 197–216; Oppenheimer, IRA, 112–15; Bell, Secret Army, 449–55.
29. Chris Ryder, A Special Kind of Courage: 321 EOD Squadron—Battling the Bombers, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 2006), 236; Oppenheimer, IRA, 85.
30. For an introduction to the literature regarding nationalism as a modern religion, see Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism and the Mind: Essays on Modern Culture (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), especially chapter 5, “The Modern Religion,” 93–114; Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991).
31. Robert Kee, The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 143–45; Richard English, Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (London: MacMillan, 2006), 102–11.
32. Padraic H. Pearse, Political Writings and Speeches (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1966), 53, 65–66.
33. R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Allen Lane, 1988), 477–87, “theology of insurrection,” from p. 483. While in prison awaiting execution for his part in the Easter Rising, Pearse wrote to his mother that he did “not hope or even desire to live” and in a poem made an explicit comparison between himself and Jesus Christ. Quoted in Kevin Toolis, Rebel Hearts: Journeys within the IRA’s Soul (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995), 340; also see Kee, Green Flag, 503, 531, 568–73; English, Irish Freedom, 145, 190–91, 274–75; Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 99–113.
34. Sean O’Callaghan wrote that his own upbringing was just such a fusion of Catholicism and nationalism: “Padraig Pearse and the other rebel leaders executed by the British after the Easter Rising of 1916 were painstakingly interwoven with images of Christ and Catholic martyrs into a seamless mix of blood sacrifice.” Sean O’Callaghan, The Informer: The Real Life Story of One Man’s War against Terrorism (New York: Bantam Press, 1998), 17.
35. Stathis Kalyvas and Ignacio Sanchez-Cuenca, “Killing without Dying: The Absence of Suicide Missions,” in Making Sense of Suicide Missions, ed. Diego Gambetta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 213–23; Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 134–37.
36. Mia Bloom and John Horgan, “Missing Their Mark: The IRA’s Proxy Bomb Campaign,” Social Research 75, no. 2 (2008): 596.
37. The second rule was “never underestimate your enemy, but never overestimate him either.” Collins, Killing Rage, 18–19; O’Callaghan, The Informer, 69. Martin McGartland, an informer from the Belfast area, wrote that he was instructed not to risk his life or the possibility of arrest. His commander told him, “We can always get more arms and Semtex but we can’t afford to lose valuable members.” Martin McGartland, Fifty Dead Men Walking (Norwalk, Conn.: Hastings House, 1997), 179.
38. Padraig O’Malley, Biting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and the Politics of Despair (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 19.
39. For background on the prison protest, see Tim Pat Coogan, On the Blanket: The Inside Story of the IRA Prisoners’ “Dirty” Protest (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 62–65, 83–94.
40. Brendan Hughes, interviewed in Ed Moloney, Voices from the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), 214.
41. Ibid., 213.
42. For prisoner accounts of the escalation of the struggle, see Brian Campbell, Laurence McKeown, and Felim O’Hagan, eds., Nor Meekly Serve My Time: The H-Block Struggle, 1976–1981 (Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 1994). Also see Coogan, On the Blanket, 94.
43. Richard O’Rawe, Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-Block Hunger Strike (Dublin: New Island, 2005), 36–37.
44. Campbell, McKeown, and O’Hagan, Nor Meekly Serve My Time, 70, 84, quote from 90.
45. Ibid., 106–9.
46. Hughes, recollection in Moloney, Voices from the Grave, 235–40.
47. Hughes, interviewed in ibid., 229; David Beresford, Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987), 37.
48. Hughes, interviewed in Moloney, Voices from the Grave, 244; O’Rawe, Blanketmen, 121.
49. Quoted in O’Malley, Biting at the Grave, 85.
50. Beresford, Ten Men Dead, 69–88.
51. Robert W. White, Ruari O Bradaigh: The Life and Politics of an Irish Revolutionary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 283–307; Liam Clarke, Broadening the Battlefield: The H-Blocks and the Rise of Sinn Fein (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987).
52. Anthony McIntyre, Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism (New York: Ausubo Press, 2008), 264.
53. “Comms” (prison communications) from McFarlane quoted in O’Rawe, Blanketmen, 138, 168.
54. Quoted in O’Malley, Biting at the Grave, 82.
55. Beresford, Ten Men Dead, 285.
56. Martin Dillon, God and the Gun: The Church and Irish Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 1999), 88–91, quote from 91.
57. I am greatly indebted to Monsignor Frank Lane for helping me to understand the internal dimension of martyrdom in the Catholic tradition and other faiths.
58. O’Malley, Biting at the Grave, 171–89.
59. Beresford, Ten Men Dead, 103.
60. Ibid., 238, 315.
61. Van Crevald, Changing Face of War, 229–35; Sir Alistair Irwin and Mike Mahoney, “The Military Response,” in Combating Terrorism in Northern Ireland, ed. James Dingley (New York: Routledge, 2009), esp. 213–23; John Newsinger, British Counter Insurgency: From Palestine to Northern Ireland (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 179–90; and Sir Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 302.
62. Sir Rupert Smith, who as a young officer served (and was wounded by a IRA bomb) in Northern Ireland, wrote, “The IRA, who see themselves and to a large measure run themselves as an army, have been very careful to operate below the threshold of utility of the British Army’s weapon systems, and the army, in turn, has been careful not to introduce those systems into the Irish theatre.” Smith, Utility of Force, 302.
63. Van Crevald, Changing Face of War, 234–35.
64. Bloom and Horgan, “Missing Their Mark,” 581, 610–11. Members of the IRA seem to have understood that the use of proxy bombers was a risky one. Some told John Horgan that they anticipated a possible backlash, but believed that the impact of the attacks would be worthwhile (p. 599).
65. Joost Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
66. Aliza Marcus, Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Nur Bilge Criss, “The Nature of PKK Terrorism in Turkey,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 18, no. 1 (1995): 17–37.
67. Marcus, Blood and Belief, 30–40, 196.
68. Dogu Ergil, “Suicide Terrorism in Turkey: The Workers’ Party of Kurdistan,” in Countering Suicide Terrorism: An International Conference February 20–23, 2000 Herzliya, Israel (Herzliya: International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, 2001), 107.
69. Bloom, Dying to Kill, 110–11; Marcus, Blood and Belief, 204–5.
70. Marcus, Blood and Belief, 93–95, 135–38.
71. Ibid., 67. Also see Michael Biggs, “Dying without Killing: Self-Immolations, 1963–2002,” in Gambetta, Making Sense of Suicide Missions, 173–208.
72. Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge, U.K., and Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2005), 243.
73. Bloom, Dying to Kill, 106–7.
74. Marcus, Blood and Belief, 244.
75. Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism, 88, asserts that there was much more debate among the upper ranks of the PKK regarding suicide bombing than there had been in the LTTE, where the decision was Prabhakaran’s alone.
76. Ergil, “Suicide Terrorism in Turkey,” 123.
77. Marcus, Blood and Belief, 243–44.
78. Ergil, “Suicide Terrorism in Turkey,” 122.
79. Leyla Kaplan made a brief audiotape in which she said that she was giving her life for the cause, but this was the extent of the internal publicity generated by the suicide bombings of the PKK. Ergil, “Suicide Terrorism in Turkey,” 124.
80. Ergil, “Suicide Terrorism in Turkey,” 118–20.
81. Lawrence E. Cline, “From Ocalan to al Qaida: The Continuing Terrorist Threat in Turkey,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 27, no. 4 (2004): 326.
1. Yoram Schweitzer, “Palestinian Istishhadia: A Developing Instrument,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30, no. 8 (2007): 671–72; Ami Pedahzur, Arie Perliger, and Leonard Weinberg, “Altruism and Fatalism: The Characteristics of Palestinian Suicide Terrorists,” Deviant Behavior 24, no. 4 (2003): 405–23.
2. According to Ariel Merari, there were two unplanned instances of suicide attacks carried out by Palestinian groups in the early 1970s. Ariel Merari, Driven to Death: Psychological and Social Aspects of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 32–33.
3. Samuel Katz, The Hunt for the Engineer: The Inside Story of How Israel’s Counterterrorist Forces Tracked and Killed the Hamas Master Bomber (Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 1999), 74–75.
4. Said K. Aburish, Arafat: From Defender to Dictator, rev. ed. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 197–206; Sari Nusseibeh, with Anthony David, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 351.
5. Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 326.
6. The word “intifada” means “rising up” or “shaking off.” In addition to Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem, chapters 13 and 14, and Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country, chapters 18 through 21, this account of the intifada is also drawn from Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), chapter 12.
7. Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2004); Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country, chaps. 22–25; Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Arab-Israeli Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), chaps. 9 and 10; Morris, Righteous Victims, chaps. 13 and 14; and Aburish, Arafat, 244–59.
8. Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 243.
9. Ross, Missing Peace, 766; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, 190–93; Aburish, Arafat, 244.
10. Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), esp. 230; Brynjar Lia, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement, 1928–1942 (Reading, U.K.: Ithaca Press, 1998).
11. Khaled Hroub, Hamas: Political Thought and Practice (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2000), 11–23; Ziad Abu-Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 4–5, 18–19; and Meir Hatina, Islam and Salvation in Palestine: The Islamic Jihad Movement (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studes, 2001), 18–19.
12. Hroub, Hamas, 25–27; Abu-Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza, 43.
13. Hroub, Hamas, 36–37; Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 36; and Abu-Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza, 63–68.
14. Laetitia Bucaille, Growing Up Palestinian: Israeli Occupation and the Intifada Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 15–16.
15. Cited in Mishal and Sela, Palestinian Hamas, 51.
16. Eli Berman, Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 121–32; Hroub, Hamas, 60–64.
17. Azzam Tamimi, Hamas: A History from Within (Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2007), 43–44; Human Rights Watch, Erased in a Moment: Suicide Bombing Attacks against Israeli Civilians (New York, 2002), 71–77; Hroub, Hamas, 78, 87; also see Matthew Levitt, Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 25–26.
18. Bernard Wasserstein, Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), esp. 1–13; Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 85–106.
19. Wasserstein, Divided Jerusalem, 337; Morris, Righteous Victims, 584–85.
20. Mishal and Sela, Palestinian Hamas, 57.
21. Zaki Chehab, Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Islamic Resistance Movement (New York: Nation Books, 2007), 39–41; Abu-Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza, 98; Ian S. Lustick, “Terrorism in the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Targets and Audiences,” in Terrorism in Context, ed. Martha Crenshaw (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 533–36.
22. Morris, Righteous Victims, 585.
23. Tamimi, Hamas: A History from Within, 64–66.
24. Levitt, Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism, 11; Chehab, Inside Hamas, 31–34.
25. Brynjar Lia, A Police Force without a State: A History of the Palestinian Security Forces in the West Bank and Gaza (Reading, U.K.: Ithaca Press, 2006), 58. Also see Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg, The Road to Martyr’s Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 35, 95–96.
26. Cited in Lia, Police Force without a State, 59–68, 72. Also see the B’Tselem website, www.btselem.org/English/index.asp.
27. Jeroen Gunning, Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 128.
28. Mishal and Sela, Palestinian Hamas, 67.
29. Joel Greenberg, “Mideast Accord: The Opposition: 4 Israelis and 3 Palestinians Killed in Guerilla Attacks,” New York Times, September 13, 1993.
30. Clyde Haberman, “30 Israelis Hurt by Suicide Bomber,” New York Times, October 5, 1993.
31. Mohammed M. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs: The Making of Palestinian Suicide Bombers (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2006), app. I, 79.
32. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs, 18; Mishal and Sela, Palestinian Hamas, 65–6.
33. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs, 19; Schweitzer, “Palestinian Istishhadia,” 673.
34. Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, Jewish Terrorism in Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 69–77.
35. Clyde Haberman, “Israelis’ Faith in Peace Is Put under Strain by Bombing and New Attack,” New York Times, April 8, 1994; Clyde Haberman, “5 Killed in Israel as Second Bomber Blows Up a Bus,” New York Times, April 14, 1994.
36. Clyde Haberman, “Attack in Israel: The Overview—20 Killed in Terrorist Bombing of Bus in Tel Aviv; 48 Are Hurt,” New York Times, October 20, 1994; Clyde Haberman, “‘Living Martyr’ Leaves Taped Statement,” New York Times, October 21, 1994. According to Hafez, twenty-two people eventually died and forty-eight were injured. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs, app. A, 79–86.
37. Ibid.
38. Clyde Haberman, “Palestinian Police Rounding up Radicals,” New York Times, November 15, 1994.
39. Sara Roy, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011), 36.
40. Clyde Haberman, “Suicide Bombs Kill 19 in Israel; Shadow Cast over Peace Talks,” New York Times, January 23, 1995.
41. Mishal and Sela, Palestinian Hamas, 72–73.
42. Hatina, Islam and Salvation in Palestine, 102.
43. Serge Schmemann, “Palestinian Believed to be Bombing Mastermind Is Killed,” New York Times, January 6, 1996; also see Katz, Hunt for the Engineer, 241–70.
44. Serge Schmemann, “Killing of Bomb ‘Engineer’ Unites Palestinian Factions,” New York Times, January 10, 1996.
45. Serge Schmemann, “Bombings in Israel: The Overview: 2 Suicide Bombings in Israel Kill 25 and Hurt 77, the Highest Such Toll,” New York Times, February 26, 1996.
46. Andrew Kydd and Barbara Walter, “Sabotaging the Peace: The Politics of Extremist Violence,” International Organization 56, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 263–96.
47. Quote from Chehab, Inside Hamas, 106; also see Gunning, Hamas in Politics, 207–20.
48. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs, app. I, 79.
49. Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 25.
50. Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005), 50, table 8.
51. Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. (New York: Free Press, 2003), chap. 9, esp. 366.
52. Haberman, “‘Living Martyr’ Leaves Taped Statement.” See Chapter 6 on the importance of these tapes for sustaining and legitimizing suicide bombing.
53. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs, 18; Haberman, “Attack in Israel.”
54. David Cook, Martyrdom in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chap. 8; Iris Jean Klein, “Palestinian Militancy, Martyrdom, and Nationalist Communities in the West Bank during the Intifada,” in Martyrdom and Political Resistance Movements: Essays on Asia and Europe, ed. Joyce Pettigrew (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1997), 85–109.
55. Bucaille, Growing Up Palestinian, 22–23.
56. Oliver and Steinberg, Road to Martyr’s Square, 60–81; Julie Peteet, “The Writing on the Walls: The Graffiti of the Intifada,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 2 (1996): 139–59.
57. Hatina, Islam and Salvation in Palestine, 123–26.
58. Daphne Burdman, “Education, Indoctrination, and Incitement: Palestinian Children on Their Way to Martyrdom,” Terrorism and Political Violence 15, no. 1 (2003), 96–123; Levitt, Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism, 105–42.
59. Levitt, Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism, 126–27.
60. Chehab, Inside Hamas, 43.
61. Bloom, Dying to Kill, 23.
62. Michael Horowitz argues that younger groups use suicide bombing because they are more open to technological innovation than are older, bureaucratically rigid organizations. I find this explanation implausible for numerous reasons. See Michael C. Horowitz, The Diffusion of Military Power: Causes and Consequences for International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 166–207.
1. Joel Brinkley, “Bomb Kills At Least 19 in Israel as Arabs Meet over Peace Plan,” New York Times, March 28, 2002; Matthew Levitt, Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 2–3.
2. Quoted in Brinkley, “Bomb Kills At Least 19”; also see Serge Schmemann, “Dire Day: Trying to See Beyond Sure Revenge,” New York Times, March 28, 2008.
3. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 653.
4. Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Arab-Israeli Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 212–13. Also see Sari Nusseibeh, with Anthony David, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 393.
5. Laetitia Bucaille, Growing Up Palestinian: Israeli Occupation and the Intifada Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 70–71; Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country, 402–7.
6. Said K. Aburish, Arafat: From Defender to Dictator, rev. ed. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 276–80; Farhad Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers: Allah’s New Martyrs, trans. David Macey (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Pluto Press, 2005), 123.
7. Morris, Righteous Victims, 658–59; also see Benny Morris, “Camp David and After: An Exchange. (1. An Interview with Ehud Barak),” New York Review of Books, June 13, 2002.
8. According to Shlomo Ben-Ami, when he met with Arafat in summer 2000, Arafat spoke admiringly of Hizballah, referring to its members as his disciples. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, 265.
9. Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, Jewish Terrorism in Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 39.
10. Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 14–15.
11. During the scuffle, Sheikh Faisal, the highest-ranking religious official of the al-Aqsa mosque, lost his turban, a symbol of his religious status. Palestinian clerics perceived this indignity to be a deliberate insult, contributing to the heightened tensions.
12. Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country, 432–35. Controversy later arose over whether al-Dura had actually been shot or whether the events filmed were staged. See James Fallows, “Who Shot Muhammad al-Dura?” Atlantic Monthly, June 2003, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/06/who-shot-mohammed-al-dura/2735.
13. Isabel Kershner, Barrier: The Seam of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 89; Morris, Righteous Victims, 665.
14. This is Barak’s interpretation of Arafat’s behavior. Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 2004), 730, and Morris, “Camp David and After.”
15. Human Rights Watch, Erased in a Moment: Suicide Bombing Attacks against Israeli Civilians (New York, 2002), 114–15, 139–40.
16. Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), xiv.
17. There is still significant variation among leading studies of suicide bombing by Palestinians as to how many attacks were carried out and by which groups during this time period. See Mohammad M. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs: The Making of Palestinian Suicide Bombers (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2006), 80–81; Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge, U.K., and Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2005), 245; Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005), 260; and Human Rights Watch, Erased in a Moment, 141–12.
18. Gal Luft, “The Palestinian H-Bomb: Terror’s Winning Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 4 (July/August 2002): 3.
19. Joel Greenberg, “Immigrants Bury Their Friends, but Hopes Live On,” New York Times, June 4, 2001.
20. Kershner, Barrier, 2.
21. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs, chart 2, p. 20.
22. Avi Jorisch, Beacon of Hatred: Inside Hizballah’s Al Manar Television (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2004); Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 28–30.
23. Ariel Merari et al., “Making Palestinian ‘Martyrdom Operations’ / ‘Suicide Attacks’: Interviews with Would-Be Perpetrators and Organizers,” Terrorism and Political Violence 22, no. 1 (2010): 105.
24. Human Rights Watch, Erased in a Moment, 79–87.
25. Yoram Schweitzer, “Palestinian Istishhadia: A Developing Instrument,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30, no. 8 (2007): 680–83. Also see Bader Araj, “Harsh State Repression as a Cause of Suicide Bombing: The Case of the Palestinian Israeli Conflict,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 31, no. 4 (2008): 295.
26. Details on Wafa Idris’ attack are from Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (New York: Rodale, 2003), 19–27. Victor is unclear on whether the attack was an accident, while Yoram Schweitzer asserts that Idris’ death was unplanned. Yoram Schweitzer, “Palestinian Female Suicide Bombers: Reality vs. Myth,” in Female Suicide Bombers: Dying for Equality? ed. Yoram Schweitzer (Tel Aviv: Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, 2006), 25.
27. Victor, Army of Roses, 19–20.
28. Rivka Yadin, “Female Martyrdom: The Ultimate Embodiment of Islamic Existence?” in Schweitzer, Female Suicide Bombers, 60 n. 7.
29. Bloom, Dying to Kill, 144; also see Avi Issacharoff, “The Palestinian and Israeli Media on Female Suicide Terrorists,” in Schweitzer, Female Suicide Bombers, 43–50.
30. It was not until 1996 that conservative, non-extremist Sunni clerics issued fatwas in support of suicide missions against Israeli targets. Gilles Kepel, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 93–94.
31. Yassin later explained this inconsistency by saying that he had initially been misquoted. Zaki Chehab, Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Islamic Resistance Movement (New York: Nation Books, 2007), 88–89.
32. Victor, Army of Roses, 96–97, 110–13; Bloom, Dying to Kill, 147–53, Yassin quote from 151. The first female Hamas suicide bomber, Reem al-Riashi, killed herself at an Israeli checkpoint on January 14, 2004, killing four Israelis. Justin Huggler, “‘God Gave Me Two Children and I Loved Them So Much’; The Suicide Message of a Mother Who Left Home To Kill,” Independent, January 15, 2004.
33. Schweitzer, “Palestinian Female Suicide Bombers,” 26.
34. Issacharoff, “Palestinian and Israeli Media.”
35. Karen Jacques and Paul L. Taylor, “Male and Female Suicide Bombers: Different Sexes, Different Reasons?” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 31, no. 4 (2008): esp. 315–16.
36. Victor, Army of Roses, 233–34; Bloom, Dying to Kill, 164; Schweitzer, “Palestinian Female Suicide Bombers,” 40.
37. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs, 54–55.
38. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs, 58; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, 267.
39. Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country, 479; also see Araj, “Harsh State Repression,” 290, 294–96.
40. Bloom, Dying to Kill, 23.
41. Kershner, Barrier, 136–40.
42. Ariel Merari, Driven to Death: Psychological and Social Aspects of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 39–42.
43. Ibid., 40; Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un) Making of Terrorists (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 362.
44. Steven Erlanger, “Israeli and Palestinian Leaders Pledge to Halt Attacks,” New York Times, February 8, 2005.
45. Greg Myre, “Bomber Kills 3 Israelis as Hamas Takes Power,” New York Times, March 31, 2006.
46. By one estimate, as many as a thousand rocket attacks took place between 2001 and 2006, with the pace of attacks increasing in 2006. Ben Wedeman, “Reporter’s Dangerous Trip To Secret Rocket Factory,” CNN.com, June 1, 2006; also see Tony Karon,” The Homemade Rocket That Could Change the Mideast,” Time, February 11, 2002.
47. Robin Wright, Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (New York: Penguin, 2008), 59–63.
48. Human Rights Watch, Deprived and Endangered: Humanitarian Crisis in the Gaza Strip (New York, January 2009).
49. BBC News Online, “Just Married and Determined to Die,” October 13, 2008.
50. Abdul Hameed Bakier, “Gaza’s ‘Ghost’ Suicide Bombers—More Rhetoric than Threat?” Terrorism Focus, January 21, 2009.
51. Jack Khoury, “‘Watch Your Step,’ Barak Warns Hamas Over Renewed Gaza Rocket Fire,” www.miftah.org, January 12, 2010.
52. Daniel Byman, “How to Handle Hamas,” Foreign Affairs 89, no. 5 (September/October 2010): 56.
53. Merari, Driven to Death, 261; also see Assaf Moghadam, “Palestinian Suicide Terrorism in the Second Intifada: Motivations and Organizational Aspects,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 26, no. 2 (March 2003): 65–92; Assaf Moghadam, “Roots of Suicide Terrorism: A Multi-causal Approach,” in Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism: The Globalization of Martyrdom, ed. Ami Pedahzur (New York: Routledge, 2006), 81–107; Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, “The Changing Nature of Suicide Attacks: A Social Network Perspective,” Social Forces 94, no. 4 (June 2006); and Mohammed M. Hafez, Suicide Bombers in Iraq: The Strategy and Ideology of Martyrdom (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007), 16.
54. Max Taylor and John Horgan, “A Conceptual Framework for Addressing Psychological Process in the Development of the Terrorist,” Terrorism and Political Violence 18, no. 4 (2006): esp. 591.
55. Hafez, Manfacturing Human Bombs, 25.
56. Anat Berko, The Path to Paradise: The Inner World of Suicide Bombers and Their Dispatchers, trans. Elizabeth Yuval (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2007), 27, 29, 34, 110; Merari, Driven to Death, 151–53, 171.
57. Ami Pedahzur, Arie Perliger, and Leonard Weinberg, “Altruism and Fatalism: The Characteristics of Palestinian Suicide Terrorists,” Deviant Behavior 24, no. 4 (2003): 405–23; also see Jacques and Taylor, “Male and Female Suicide Bombers,” 321.
58. Levitt, Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism, 59–60; Merari, Driven to Death, 112–19.
59. Merari, Driven to Death, 112–19.
60. Pedahzur, Perliger, and Weinberg, “Altruism and Fatalism,” 420.
61. Israel Orbach, “Terror Suicide: How Is It Possible?” Archives of Suicide Research 8, no. 1 (2004): 118.
62. Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg, The Road to Martyr’s Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 75.
63. Christoph Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, trans. Helena Ragg-Kirkby (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 128.
64. Raphael Israeli, “Islamikaze and Their Significance,” Terrorism and Political Violence 9, no. 3 (1997): 105.
65. Ariel Merari, “The Readiness To Kill and Die: Suicidal Terrorism in the Middle East,” in Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, ed. Walter Reich (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1990), 195.
66. Merari, Driven to Death, 163.
67. Atran, Talking to the Enemy, 27, 222–23.
68. Nasra Hassan, “An Arsenal of Believers: Talking to the ‘Human Bombs,’” New Yorker, November 19, 2001.
69. Taylor and Horgan, “A Conceptual Framework,” 594.
70. Oliver and Steinberg, Road to Martyr’s Square, 130–31, 153–54. Merari cautions that the impact of the tapes in this respect should not be overstated, because he found that many of the bombers who voluntarily abandoned their missions did so even after they had recorded their testimonial. Merari, Driven to Death, 168–69.
71. This is particularly noteworthy because Merari’s research shows that most Palestinian suicide attackers did not display many of the characteristics of predisposed individuals more generally. Merari, Driven to Death, 218–21.
72. Thomas Joiner, Why People Die by Suicide (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 49–58, quote from 81–82.
73. David P. Phillips, “The Influence of Suggestion on Suicide: Substantive and Theoretical Implications of the Werther Effect,” American Sociological Review 39, no. 3 (1974), 340–54; Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2009), 121–29.
74. Elmar Etzersdorfer and Gernot Sonneck, “Preventing Suicide by Influencing Mass-Media Reporting. The Viennese Experience, 1980–1996,” Archives of Suicide Research 4, no. 1 (1998): 67–74.
75. Graham Martin, “Media Influence to Suicide: The Search for Solutions,” Archives of Suicide Research 4, no. 4 (1998): 59.
76. Phillips, “Werther Effect,” 351–52.
77. Quoted in Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs, 26.
78. Merari, Driven to Death, 99–100; Atran, Talking to the Enemy, 407.
79. Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon, 72.
80. Chehab, Inside Hamas, 93–97, quote from 96.
81. Merari, Driven to Death, 101.
82. Quote from Azzam Tamini, Hamas: A History from Within (Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2007), 180–81; also see Meir Hatina, Islam and Salvation in Palestine: The Islamic Jihad Movement (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, 2001), 119.
83. Merari, Driven to Death, 163–64, 156.
84. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs, 33–45, quote from 33.
85. Merari, Driven to Death, 133, 145.
1. Dexter Filkins and Richard A. Oppel Jr., “Top Aid Officials Are Among 17 Killed,” New York Times, August 19, 2003; George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 217–18.
2. Jarrett Brachman, Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2009), 5; Thomas Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 222–24; Nelly Lahoud, The Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 18–19.
3. Brian A. Jackson, “Groups, Networks, or Movements: A Command-and-Control Driven Approach to Classifying Terrorist Organizations and Its Application to Al Qaeda,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29, no. 3 (2006): esp. 253–56.
4. Lahoud, Jihadis’ Path, xix, 97; Brachman, Global Jihadism, 12–14; Mohammed M. Hafez, Suicide Bombers in Iraq: The Strategy and Ideology of Martyrdom (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007); Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, “The Changing Nature of Suicide Attacks: A Social Network Perspective,” Social Forces 94, no. 4 (June 2006): 1,987–2,008.
5. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (New Delhi: Millat Book Centre, n.d.); for context, see John Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 189–95 and 197–227.
6. David C. Rapoport, “Sacred Terror: A Contemporary Example from Islam,” in Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, ed. Walter Reich (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1998), 103–30; Jean-Pierre Filiu, “The Brotherhood vs. Al Qaeda: A Moment of Truth?” Current Trends in Islamist Ideology 9 (2009): 18–25; Lahoud, Jihadis’ Path, 120–27.
7. Thomas Hegghammer, “Abdallah Azzam: The Imam of Jihad,” in Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, ed. Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 81–101, esp. 98–101; Lahoud, Jihadis’ Path, 127–31.
8. See excerpts from Azzam’s “Join the Caravan,” 119, and “Morals and Jurisprudence of Jihad,” 132–35, in Kepel and Milelli, Al Qaeda in Its Own Words.
9. Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 99–120; Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia, 38–48.
10. Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 24–25.
11. Wright, Looming Tower, 121–44.
12. Quote from Kepel and Milelli, Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, 49; also see Assaf Moghadam, The Globalization of Martyrdom: Al Qaeda, Salafi Jihad, and the Diffusion of Suicide Attacks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 80–83.
13. Roy, Globalized Islam, 10–11, 165.
14. Daniel Benjamin and Steve Simon, The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right (New York: Times Books, 2005), 56.
15. Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia, 28.
16. Yoram Schweitzer and Sari Goldstein Ferber, “Al-Qaeda and the Internationalization of Suicide Terrorism,” Memorandum no. 78, Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University, November 2005, 26, quote from 33.
17. Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 42; Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 195–98.
18. Joshua Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou: Saudi Arabia’s Islamic Opposition (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2000), 73–77.
19. For the Egyptian embassy bombing, see Wright, Looming Tower, 217–18, and Zawahiri’s own discussion of the attack, Ayman al Zawahiri, His Own Words: Translation and Analysis of the Writings of Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri, trans. Laura Mansfield (n.p.: TLG Publications, 2006), 43–45.
20. Brigitte L. Nacos, Mass Mediated Terrorism: The Central Role of the Media in Terrorism and Counterterrorism (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 49–50; Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat (New York: Random House, 2006), 77; Wright, Looming Tower, 246.
21. Albert Bandura, “Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement,” in Reich, Origins of Terrorism, 164.
22. For general background to the conflict, see Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), chap. 3, and John B. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
23. Gordon M. Hahn, Russia’s Islamic Threat (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 36–54; James Hughes, Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 97–107; Matthew Evangelista, The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2002), 71–73.
24. Moshe Gammer, The Lone Wolf and the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Rule (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 210; Hughes, Chechnya, 125.
25. Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, trans. Alexander Burry and Tatiana Tulchinsky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 81–82.
26. Quoted in Hughes, Chechnya, 155.
27. Anne Speckhard and Khapta Ahkmedova, “The Making of a Martyr: Chechen Suicide Terrorism,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29, no. 5 (2006): 451–52, 484–86.
28. Hahn, Russia’s Islamic Threat, 40–41, 49–54.
29. Speckhard and Ahkmedova, “Making of a Martyr,” 431.
30. Steven Lee Myers, “Russians Find Explosives on Second Plane,” New York Times, August 29, 2004.
31. Steven Lee Myers, “Suicide Bomber Kills 9 at Moscow Subway Station,” New York Times, September 1, 2004.
32. Alexander Knysh, “The Caucasus Emirate: Between Reality and Virtuality,” Keyman Program in Turkish Studies Working Paper Series Working Paper no. 09–001, Northwestern University, June 2009.
33. Center for Strategic and International Studies, Human Rights and Security Initiative, “Violence in the North Caucasus: 2009: A Bloody Year,” January 2010.
34. Steven Lee Myers, “From Dismal Chechnya, Women Turn to Bombs,” New York Times, September 10, 2004; Anne Nivat, “The Black Widows: Chechen Women Join the Fight for Independence—and Allah,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 28, no. 5 (2005): 413–19.
35. Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un) Making of Terrorists (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 138–49; Moghadam, Globalization of Martyrdom, 168–70.
36. Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, National Counterterrorism Center, wits.nctc.gov (accessed December 12, 2010).
37. Atran, Talking to the Enemy, 155–67.
38. Brachman, Global Jihadism, 17–19; Moghadam, Globalization of Martyrdom, 189–91.
39. Jack Kalpakian, “Building the Human Bomb: The Case of the 16 May 2003 Attacks in Casablanca,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 28, no. 2 (2005): 113–27; Rogelio Alonso and Fernando Reinares, “Maghreb Immigrants Becoming Suicide Terrorists,” in Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism: The Globalization of Martyrdom, ed. Ami Pedahzur (New York: Routledge, 2006), 179–97; Rogelio Alonso and Marcos Garcia Rey, “The Evolution of Jihadist Terrorism in Morocco,” Terrorism and Political Violence 19, no. 4 (2007): 571–92.
40. Alonso and Rey, “Evolution of Jihadist Terrorism in Morocco,” 474–75.
41. Kalpakian, “Building the Human Bomb,” 115–16.
42. Craig Whitlock, “Suicide Bombers Strike N. Africa Again,” Washington Post, April 15, 2007; Ian Fisher, “Bombings Leave Moroccans Both Worried and Confused,” New York Times, April 21, 2007.
43. Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman, “Becoming a Foreign Fighter: A Second Look at the Sinjar Records,” in Bombers, Bleedout, and Bank Accounts: Al-Qa’ida’s Road in and out of Iraq, ed. Brian Fishman (West Point, N.Y.: Combating Terrorism Center, 2008), 35, 56.
44. Kalpakian, “Building the Human Bomb, 118–23; Javier Jordan and Fernando M. Mañas, “Strengths and Weaknesses of Grassroot Jihadist Networks: The Madrid Bombings,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 31, no. 1 (2008): 25; Atran, Talking to the Enemy, 195–210.
45. Craig Whitlock, “Odyssey of an Al Qaeda Operative,” Washington Post, May 2, 2005; Craig Whitlock, “In Morocco’s ‘Chemist,’ A Glimpse of Al Qaeda,” Washington Post, July 7, 2007; Moghadam, Globalization of Martyrdom, 177.
46. Alison Pargeter, The New Frontiers of Jihad: Radical Islam in Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 115–39, 175–79; Atran, Talking to the Enemy, 173–94.
47. Thomas Hegghammer, “Deconstructing the Myth about al-Qa´ida and Khobar,” CTC Sentinel 1, no. 3 (February 2008): 20–22.
48. Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia, 152–77.
49. Douglas Jehl and David Johnston, “U.S. and Saudis Sensed Attacks Were Imminent,” New York Times, May 14, 2003.
50. Steven R. Weisman, “Toll in Saudi Arabia Rises to at Least 20, U.S. Official Says,” New York Times, May 13, 2003; Neil MacFarquhar, “Saudis Link 4 in Bomb Plot to Qaeda Cell,” New York Times, May 19, 2003.
51. Neil MacFarquhar, “Four Killed and 148 Wounded in a Suicide Bombing in Riyadh,” New York Times, April 22, 2004.
52. Christopher Boucek, “Saudi Security and the Islamist Insurgency,” Terrorism Monitor, January 26, 2006.
53. Thomas Hegghammer, “Terrorist Recruitment and Radicalization in Saudi Arabia,” Middle East Policy 13, no. 4 (2006): 39–60; Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia, chap. 9.
54. Christopher Boucek, “Extremist Re-education and Rehabilitation in Saudi Arabia,” in Leaving Terrorism Behind: Individual and Collective Disengagement, ed. Tore Bjørgo and John Horgan (London: Routledge, 2009), 212–23.
55. Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia, 217–23.
56. Murad Batal al-Shishani, “An Assessment of the Anatomy of al-Qaeda in Yemen: Ideological and Social Factors,” Terrorism Monitor, March 5, 2010, 6–8.
57. BBC News Online, “Profile: Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” January 4, 2010; Dominic Kennedy, “Abdulmutallab’s Bomb Plans Began with Classroom Defence of 9/11,” Times (London), December 28, 2009.
58. Sam Dagher, “2 Blasts Expose Security Flaws in the Heart of Iraq,” New York Times, August 20, 2009.
59. Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, National Counterterrorism Center, wits.nctc.gov (accessed November 12, 2009).
60. Hafez, Suicide Bombers in Iraq, 94.
61. Associated Press, Brian Murphy, “106 Shiite Pilgrims Killed by Bombers; Nine U.S. Soldiers Slain on Monday, Military Announces,” March 7, 2007.
62. John Ward Anderson and Salih Dehima, “Offensive Targets Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Washington Post, June 20, 2007.
63. Stephen Farrell, “Around 150, Death Toll in Iraq among War’s Worst,” New York Times, July 9, 2007; Damien Cave and James Glanz, “Toll Rises above 500 in Iraq Bombings,” New York Times, August 22, 2007.
64. Hafez, Suicide Bombers in Iraq, 104.
65. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 145–46.
66. Violence was an integral instrument in holding Iraq’s fragmented national community together during the relatively brief history of the state. Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6–7.
67. Nir Rosen, In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq (New York: Free Press, 2006), 1; for Kurdish autonomy in the aftermath of the American invasion, see Peter W. Galbraith, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 158–71.
68. Hafez, Suicide Bombers in Iraq, 35–56.
69. Ahmed S. Hashim, Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 131.
70. Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman, Al-Qa´ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq: A First Look at the Sinjar Records (West Point, N.Y.: Combating Terrorism Center, 2007), 6.
71. David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), basic idea of the “accidental guerilla,” 28–38, and application to Iraq,127–28.
72. James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, 2nd ed. (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000), 322–41.
73. Martin van Crevald, Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1991), 70–72.
74. Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq (New York: Scribner, 2008), 136.
75. Kilcullen, Accidental Guerilla, 127.
76. Brian Fishman, Dysfunction and Decline: Lessons Learned from Inside Al-Qa’ida in Iraq (West Point, N.Y.: Combating Terrorism Center, 2009), 2.
77. Jean-Charles Brisard, with Damien Martinez, Zarqawi: The New Face of Al-Qaeda (New York: Other Press, 2005), 12–13, 24–25, 30, 44, 56–57, 88; Bruce Riedel, The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press, 2008), 85–115.
78. Brisard, Zarqawi, 150–51, 203.
79. Riedel, Search for al Qaeda, 101.
80. Richard A. Oppel Jr., “Foreign Fighters in Iraq Are Tied to Allies of U.S.,” New York Times, November 22, 2007; Felter and Fishman, “Becoming a Foreign Fighter.”
81. Felter and Fishman, Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq, 7–9, 16–18; Felter and Fishman, “Becoming a Foreign Fighter,” 58. For detail on one particularly striking case, see Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 175–78.
82. Quoted in Hafez, Suicide Bombers in Iraq, 75–76 and 78.
83. Zawahiri, His Own Words, 250–79, esp. 258–60; see discussion in Riedel, Search for Al Qaeda, 104–5.
84. James J. F. Forest, Jarret Brachman, and Joseph Felter, eds., Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting al-Qa’ida’s Organizational Vulnerabilities (West Point, N.Y.: Combating Terrorism Center, 2006), 34–36.
85. Robin Wright, Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (New York: Penguin, 2008), 5.
86. BBC News Online, “Zarqawi ‘Replaced as Unrest Head,’” March 4, 2006.
87. Felter and Fishman, Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq, 5–6; Fishman, Dysfunction and Decline, 4.
88. Kilcullen, Accidental Guerilla, 171–83; Fishman, Dysfunction and Decline, 10.
89. Letter from Zawahiri to Zarqawi, October 11, 2005, in Zawahiri, His Own Words, quote from 273, also see 259, 261–63.
90. Steven R. Hurst, “2 Mentally Disabled Women Blown Up,” Associated Press, February 2, 2008.
91. Ernesto Londoño, “Al Qaeda in Iraq Regaining Strength,” Washington Post, November 22, 2009.
92. Timothy Williams, “Bombings in Iraq, Deadliest Since 2007, Raise Security Issue,” New York Times, October 26, 2009.
93. Londoño, “Al Qaeda in Iraq Gaining Strength.”
94. “Scores Die as Car Bombs Rock Baghdad,” CNN.com, December 9, 2009; Steven Lee Myers and Marc Santora, “Election Date Set in Iraq as Bombs Kill Scores,” New York Times, December 9, 2009.
95. Roger Hardy, “Iraq: The Violence Returns,” BBC News Online, December 11, 2009.
96. Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. (New York: Free Press, 2003), 389.
97. A jihadi in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region admitted that the sacrifice of the first few suicide attackers would make the recruitment of future attackers easier. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008), 366.
1. Jarret M. Brachman, Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2009), 40.
2. Ralph Joseph, “40 Killed in Attack on Tribal Assembly,” Washington Times, March 3, 2008.
3. Carlotta Gall, “Old Line Taliban Commander Is Face of Rising Threat,” New York Times, June 17, 2008; Imtiaz Ali, “The Haqqani Network and Cross-Border Terrorism in Afghanistan,” Terrorism Monitor, March 24, 2008.
4. Elizabeth Rubin, “In the Land of the Taliban,” New York Times Magazine, October 22, 2006; Carlotta Gall and Ismail Khan, “Taliban and Allies Tighten Grip in North of Pakistan,” New York Times, December 11, 2006.
5. BBC News Online, “Bomb Rocks India Embassy in Kabul,” July 7, 2008; Abdul Waheed Wafa and Alan Cowell, “Suicide Car Blast Kills 41 in Afghan Capital,” New York Times, July 8, 2008; for allegations of Pakistani complicity, see “Pointing a Finger at Islamabad,” Economist, July 12, 2008, and Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, “Pakistanis Aided Attack in Kabul, U.S. Officials Say,” New York Times, August 1, 2008.
6. Antonio Giustozzi, Koran, Kalishnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 120–22, 138–39.
7. Gall, “Old Line Taliban Commander.”
8. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 567–76.
9. Ahmed Rashid writes that in 1992 Maulvi Jamil-ur Rehman, a Saudi-backed warlord, was killed by a suicide attacker in Afghanistan. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008), 366.
10. Ibid, 133–35, 195, 218.
11. Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, “Does Killing Afghan Civilians Keep Us Safe?” Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2008.
12. Human Rights Watch, “‘Troops in Contact’ Airstrikes and Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan,” September 2008, 13–14; United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA), Human Rights Unit, “Afghanistan: Annual Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, 2008,” January 2009, 16; UNAMA, Human Rights Unit, “Afghanistan: Mid Year Bulletin on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, 2009,” July 2009, 10.
13. David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 2; Tom Coghlan, “The Taliban in Helmand: An Oral History,” in Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field, ed. Antonio Giustozzi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), esp. 126.
14. Coghlan, “Taliban in Helmand,” 142. Also see Kilcullen, Accidental Guerilla, 48–49.
15. Thomas Ruttig, “Loya Paktia’s Insurgency: (I) The Haqqani Network as Autonomous Entity,” in Giustozzi, Decoding the New Taliban, 57–100; David Rohde, “Inside the Islamic Emirate,” New York Times, October 19, 2009.
16. Assaf Moghadam, The Globalization of Martyrdom: Al Qaeda, Salafi Jihad, and the Diffusion of Suicide Attacks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 133–41; Anne Stenersen, “Foreign Fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan after 9/11” (paper presented at the conference “Understanding Jihadism: Origins, Evolution, and Future Perspectives,” Oslo, March 19–21, 2009).
17. Claudio Franco, “The Tehrik-e Taliban in Pakistan,” in Giustozzi, Decoding the New Taliban, 269–91; also see Mukhtar A. Khan, “Pakistan’s Most Wanted: A Profile of Tehrik-e-Taliban Leader Baitullah Mahsud,” Terrorism Monitor, April 24, 2009; Carlotta Gall, “Pakistan and Afghan Taliban Close Ranks,” New York Times, March 27, 2009; and Imtiaz Gul, The Most Dangerous Place: Pakistan’s Lawless Frontier (New York: Viking, 2010), 21–24, 38–42.
18. For the anti-technology stance of the original Taliban, see Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 115; for the development of communications capabilities by the Neo-Taliban, see Joanna Nathan, “Reading the New Taliban,” in Giustozzi, Decoding the New Taliban, 23–42.
19. Brian Glyn Williams, “Mullah Omar’s Missiles: A Field Report on Suicide Bombers in Afghanistan,” Middle East Policy 15, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 30.
20. Ibid, 31–32.
21. Quotes from Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 366; Gul, Most Dangerous Place, 130.
22. Franco, “Tehrik-E Taliban in Pakistan,” 283; Williams, “Mullah Omar’s Missiles,” 32–44.
23. United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA), “Suicide Attacks in Afghanistan, 2001–2007,” September 2007, 29, 95.
24. Ibid., 61; Williams, “Mullah Omar’s Missiles,” 35–36; Brian Glyn Williams, “The Taliban Fedayeen: The World’s Worst Suicide Bombers?” Terrorism Monitor, July 19, 2007.
25. Williams, “Mullah Omar’s Missiles,” 38–39; UNAMA, “Suicide Attacks in Afghanistan,” 75, 11, 50.
26. Williams, “Mullah Omar’s Missiles,” 40–41; Atia Abawi, “Teen Trained To Be Suicide Bomber Feels Tricked,” CNN.com, January 2, 2009; Nic Robertson, “Pakistan: Taliban Buying Children for Suicide Attacks,” CNN.com, July 7, 2009; for analysis of some of the literature used to indoctrinate and recruit children, see Qanteel Siddique, “Child Martyrs,” www.jihadica.com, March 11, 2009.
27. Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 17–18.
28. Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 374–79; for the bombing of the Marriott in Islamabad, see Asif Shahzad, “At Least 60 Die as Suicide Bombers Hit Pakistan Hotel,” Independent, September 21, 2008.
29. Barnett R. Rubin, “Saving Afghanistan,” Foreign Affairs 86, no. 1 (January/February 2007): 57–78; Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 29–33, 91–93, 147, 241; Bruce Riedel, Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of Global Jihad (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2011), 68–70.
30. Rohde, “Inside the Islamic Emirate.”
31. Franco, “Tehrik-e Taliban in Pakistan”; Gul, Most Dangerous Place, 21–24, 185, 206–7.
32. BBC News Online, “Pakistani Soldiers Storm Mosque,” July 10, 2007; Syed Shoaib Hasan, “Profile: Islamabad’s Red Mosque,” BBC News Online, July 27, 2007; Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 381–83.
33. Moghadam, Globalization of Martyrdom, 183.
34. Animesh Roul, “Terrorism’s Trojan Horse: Vehicle-Borne Suicide Attacks Give Taliban Upper Hand in Pakistan,” Terrorism Monitor, November 6, 2009, 6–8.
35. Dan Edge, “Children of the Taliban,” PBS Frontline, August 14, 2009, quoted in Kalsoom Lakhani, “Indoctrinating Children: The Making of Pakistan’s Suicide Bombers,” CTC Sentinel 3, no. 6 (June 2010): 11–13.
36. BBC News, “‘Dozens Killed’ in Algerian Blasts,” December 11, 2007; Katrin Bennhold, “A Grandfather’s Suicide Bombing Puzzles Algerians,” New York Times, December 18, 2007; Katrin Bennhold, “Privation and Despair Colored an Algiers Bomber’s Life,” New York Times, December 14, 2007.
37. Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), xiv.
38. Camille Tawil, Brothers in Arms: The Story of al-Qa’ida and the Arab Jihadists, trans. Robin Bray (London: Saqi, 2010), 67–87.
39. Al Qaeda strategist Abu Musab al-Suri served as liaison to Algeria during the 1990s and also published a newsletter for the militants. Brynjar Lia, Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al-Qaida Strategist Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 126–27, 153; International Crisis Group, “Islamism, Violence, and Reform in Algeria: Turning the Page,” ISG Middle East Report no. 29, Cairo/Brussels, July 30, 2004, esp. 10–17.
40. Michael Moss, “Ragtag Insurgency Gains a Lifeline from al Qaeda,” New York Times, July 1, 2008; Kathryn Haahr, “GSPC Joins al-Qaeda and France Becomes Top Enemy,” Terrorism Focus, September 26, 2006; Andrew Black, “The Reconstituted Al-Qaeda Threat in the Maghreb,” Terrorism Monitor, February 21, 2007; Paul Cruickshank, “Al Qaida’s Expanding Franchise,” Guardian, December 12, 2007.
41. Jean-Pierre Filiu, “The Local and Global Jihad of al-Qa ‘ida in the Islamic Maghrib,” Middle East Journal 63, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 221–23.
42. Craig Whitlock, “Suicide Attacks Mark Turn in Algeria,” Washington Post, April 13, 2007; Andrew Black, “AQIM Employs Martyrdom Operations on Algeria,” Terrorism Focus, September 20, 2007.
43. BBC News, “Deadly Bombings Hit Algerian Town,” August 20, 2008.
44. Andrew Black, “The Ideological Struggle over al-Qaeda’s Suicide Tactics in Algeria,” Terrorism Monitor, February 11, 2008; Filiu, “Local and Global Jihad,” 225.
45. Hanna Rogan, “Violent Trends in Algeria Since 9/11,” CTC Sentinel 1, no. 12 (November 2008): 16–19; Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, National Counterterrorism Center, wits.nctc.gov (accessed August 3, 2010, and April 1, 2011).
46. BBC News Online, “Somalia Suicide Bombing Arrests,” September 28, 2006; “8 Die in Suicide Attack in Somalia,” Los Angeles Times, December 1, 2006.
47. David H. Shinn, “Somalia’s New Government and the Challenge of Al-Shabab,” CTC Sentinel 2, no. 3 (March 2009): 1–5; Leah Farrall, “How al Qaeda Works,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 2 (March/April 2011): 136–37.
48. Mohammad Ibrahim and Jeffrey Gettleman, “5 Suicide Bomb Attacks Hit Somalia,” New York Times, October 30, 2008; Edmund Sanders, “Suicide Bomber Kills 11 Soldiers in Somalia,” Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2009; Mohammad Ibrahim, “Somalia Fighting Kills at Least 15,” New York Times, February, 25, 2009; Alisha Ryu, “Suicide Bombing in Somalia Raises Concerns about Foreign Support,” VOAnews.com, May 26, 2009; Mohammad Ibrahim, “Somali Minister Killed in Bombing,” New York Times, June 19, 2009; Andrew McGregor, “Suicide Bombing Kills Somali Security Minister as Islamists Mount Assault on Mogadishu,” Terrorism Monitor, June 25, 2009; Reuters AlertNet, “Suicide Car Bombers Hit Main AU Base in Somalia,” September 17, 2009; BBC News Online, “AU Urges More Weapons for Somalia,” September 18, 2009.
49. BBC News Online, “Somali Ministers Killed by Bomb,” December 3, 2009; Tim Pippard, “Al-Shabab’s Agenda in the Wake of the Kampala Suicide Attacks,” CTC Sentinel 3, no. 7 (July 2010): 4–6.
50. Christopher Anzalone, “From ‘Martyrdom’ Videos to Jihadi Journalism in Somalia: The Rapid Evolution of Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahideen’s Multimedia,” www.juancole.com, August 25, 2010.
51. David Axe and John Masato Ulmer, “Somali ‘Travelers’: The Holiest Gang,” parts I and II, worldpoliticsreview.com; Raffaello Pantucci, “American Jihad: New Details Emerge about al-Shabaab Recruitment in North America,” Terrorism Monitor, December 3, 2009; Jean-Pierre Filiu, “Eid News from the Shabab,” www.jihadica.com, September 21, 2009.
52. Brachman, Global Jihadism, 178.
53. Alison Pargeter, The New Frontiers of Jihad: Radical Islam in Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 140–52.
54. Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2004), 242.
55. Brachman, Global Jihadism, 174–77.
56. Aidan Kirby, “The London Bombers as ‘Self-Starters’: A Case Study in Indigenous Radicalization and the Emergence of Autonomous Cliques,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30, no. 5 (2007): quote from 416.
57. Bruce Hoffman, “Radicalization and Subversion: Al Qaeda and the 7 July 2005 Bombings and the 2006 Airline Bombing Plot,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 32, no. 12 (2009): esp. 1102; James Brandon, “Al-Qa´ida’s Involvement in Britain’s ‘Homegrown’ Terrorist Plots,” CTC Sentinel 2, no. 3 (March 2009): 10–12.
58. Hoffman, “Radicalization and Subversion,” 1102–4.
59. Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), esp. 139–51, and Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), esp. 120–33, 145.
60. The ideas in this section were first explored in Jeffrey W. Lewis, “Precision Terror: Suicide Bombing as Control Technology,” Terrorism and Political Violence 19, no. 2 (2007): 223–45.
61. Gregory J. E. Rawlins, Slaves of the Machine: The Quickening of Computer Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 72.
62. G. J. Mulgan, Communication and Control: Networks and the New Economies of Communication (New York: Guilford Press, 1991), 4, 54; Peter McMahon, Global Control: Information Technology and Globalization since 1845 (Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2000), 2–4.
63. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999).
64. Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones, “Assessing the Dangers of Illicit Networks: Why al-Qaeda May Be Less Threatening Than Many Think,” International Security 33, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 12–13. For a different interpretation, see Jonathan Kennedy and Gabriel Weimann, “The Strength of Weak Terrorist Ties,” Terrorism and Political Violence 23, no. 2 (2011): 201–12.
65. Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 147–71.
66. For an introduction, see Ilya Prigogine with Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984), esp. 13–18, 140–53.
67. Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software (New York: Scribner, 2004), esp. 18–21; Stuart Kaufmann, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. 71–93; for the application of emergence specifically to militant groups, see John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2007), 125–27.
68. Mulgan, Communication and Control, 57.
69. Ayman al Zawahiri, His Own Words: Translation and Analysis of the Writings of Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri, trans. Laura Mansfield (n.p.: TLG Publications, 2006), 207.
70. Ayman al Zawahiri, “Loyalty and Separation,” quoted in Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, eds., Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 234 (emphasis in the original).
71. Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, 7–10; also see the discussion of Suri in Gilles Kepel, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 160–69.
72. Translated and quoted in Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, 421–23, quote from 422 (emphasis in the original).
73. Brigitte L. Nacos, Mass Mediated Terrorism: The Central Role of the Media in Terrorism and Counterterrorism (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 13–14.
74. Marc Lynch, Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
75. Gabriel Weimann, Terror on the Internet: The New Arena, the New Challenges (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2006), 5.
76. Sageman, Leaderless Jihad, 117–20.
77. Audrey Kurth Cronin, “Cyber-Mobilization: The New Levée en Masse,” Parameters (Summer 2006): 84. Sageman notes that in the post-9/11 wave of jihadi terrorism, recruits are far more likely to be poorly educated and have criminal backgrounds than in previous waves. Sageman, Leaderless Jihad, 140.
78. Brachman, Global Jihadism, 19.
79. Stephen L. Talbott, The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly and Associates, 1995), 74–75.
80. Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2009), 31, 185, 283–84, quote from 185. For the significance of social isolation for the jihadi movement in particular, see Adam Lankford, Human Killing Machines: Systematic Indoctrination in Iran, Nazi Germany, al Qaeda, and Abu Ghraib (New York: Lexington, 2010), 23–25, 76–79, 148–50.
81. Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 275–76.
82. Evan F. Kohlman, “Al-Qa’ida’s ‘MySpace’: Terrorist Recruitment on the Internet,” CTC Sentinel 1, no. 2 (January 2008): 8–9.
83. Anne Stenersen, Al-Qaida’s Quest for Weapons of Mass Destruction: The History Behind the Hype (Saarbrücken: Verlag Dr. Müller AG, 2008).
84. Michael Kenney, “Organizational Learning and Islamic Militancy” (paper submitted to the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, September 29, 2008), award no. 2006-IJ-CX-0025, 75–79, quote from 127; for the Glasgow bombings, see Michael Kenney, “Beyond the Internet: Mētis, Techne, and the Limitations of Online Artifacts for Islamist Terrorists,” Terrorism and Political Violence 22, no. 2 (2010): 187.
85. Peter Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2002); Christoph Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, trans. Helena Ragg-Kirkby (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 16.
86. Aaron Zelinsky and Martin Shubik, “Research Note: Terrorist Groups as Business Firms: A New Typological Framework,” Terrorism and Political Violence 21, no. 2 (2009): 327–36; Alex Gallo, “Understanding Al-Qa´ida’s Business Model,” CTC Sentinel 4, no. 1 (January 2011): 15–18. Gallo describes al Qaeda as pursuing a professional services/consultancy model.
87. Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 27.
88. Mukul Pandya, “A Good Brand Is Hard to Buy,” Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2000, quoted in James R. Gregory, with Jack G. Wiechmann, Branding across Borders: A Guide to Global Brand Marketing (New York: McGraw Hill, 2002).
89. Douglas B. Holt, How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004), quote from 8, also see 27–28, 211–12.
90. Ibid, 221.
91. Discussed in Thomas Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 227.
92. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, rev. ed. (New York: Pocket Books, 1980), 2, 68–78.
93. Michael J. Mazarr, Unmodern Men in the Modern World: Radical Islam, Terrorism, and the War on Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 49–52, 71; Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), esp. 155–68.
94. Moghadam, Globalization of Martyrdom, 105.
95. Nelly Lahoud, The Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), xix.
96. Ibid., esp. 245, 252, 196, 18–19.
1. Translated and quoted in Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 84.
2. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 16.
3. Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, National Counterterrorism Center, wits.nctc.gov (accessed on April 1, 2011).
4. Magnus Ranstorp, “Terrorist Awakening in Sweden?” CTC Sentinel 4, no. 1 (January 2011): 1–5.
5. Siobhan Gorman, Anand Gopal, and Yochi J. Dreazen, “CIA Blast Blamed on Double Agent,” Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2009; Richard A. Oppel Jr., Mark Mazzetti, and Souad Mekhennet, “Behind Afghan Bombing, an Agent with Many Loyalties,” New York Times, January 5, 2009.
6. For details on al-Balawi’s online activities, see Vahid Brown, “CIA Bomber a Jihadi Blogger?” jihadica.com, January 4, 2009; Joas Wagemakers, “From the Pen to the Sword,” jihadica.com, January 3, 2011; for details on the entire incident, see Joby Warrick, The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole Who Infiltrated the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2011).
7. Vahid Brown, “Al-Qa’ida Central and Local Affiliates,” in Self-Inflicted Wounds: Debates and Divisions within al-Qa’ida and Its Periphery, ed. Assaf Moghadam and Brian Fishman (West Point, N.Y.: Combating Terrorism Center, 2010), 70.
8. Kim Cragin, “Al Qaeda Confronts Hamas: Divisions in the Sunni Jihadi Movement and Its Implications for U.S. Policy,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 32 (2009): 576–90; Yoram Cohen and Matthew Levitt, with Becca Wasser, “Deterred but Determined: Salafi-Jihadi Groups in the Palestinian Area,” Policy Focus no. 99, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington, D.C., January 2010; Nelly Lahoud, The Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 165–70.
9. Leah Farrall, “Hotline to the Jihad,” Australian, December 7, 2009. For the failure of the jihadi message to resonate in the Islamic world more generally, especially in light of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, see Robin Wright, Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion across the Islamic World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), esp. chaps. 2 and 3, 41–64 and 65–89.
10. Alexandra Sandels and Patrick J. McDonnell, “Indictment Issued in Killing of Ex-Lebanese Leader Rafik Hariri,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 2011; additional information can be found on the website of the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon at www.stl-tsl.org; for background on the assassination, see Nicholas Blanford, Killing Mr. Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 11–12, 141–44, 150–52.
11. Thanassis Cambanis, A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War against Israel (New York: Free Press, 2010), 164–66.
12. Mohammad M. Hafez, Suicide Bombers in Iraq: The Strategy and Ideology of Martyrdom (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007), 78.
13. Quoted in Toby Harnden, Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999), 367.
14. Spencer Ackerman and Adam Rawnsley, “Wheelbarrow Rockets, Remote-Control Suicide Vests and Captured Drones: Wikileaks Eposes Insurgent Tech,” Wired, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/wheelbarrow-rockets-remote-control-suicide-vests-and-captured-drones-wikileaks-exposes-insurgent-tech.
15. Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St. Paul, Minn.: Zenith Press, 2004), 204–9.
16. Martin van Crevald, Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1991), 304.
17. Franklin C. Spinney, Defense Facts of Life: The Plans/Reality Mismatch, ed. James Clay Thompson (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), 37.
18. Che Guevara, Guerilla Warfare (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1961), 27–29.
19. Charles Kenny, Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding—and How We Can Improve the World Even More (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 40–41.
20. Adrian R. Lewis, The American Culture of War: The History of U.S. Military Force from World War II to Operation Iraqi Freedom (New York: Routledge, 2007), 443.
21. Declan Walsh, “Pakistan Suicide Bomb Kills 80 as Taliban Seeks Revenge for Bin Laden,” Guardian, May 13, 2011.
22. Bruce Hoffman, “Bin Ladin’s Killing and Its Effect on al-Qa‘ida: What Comes Next?” CTC Sentinel 4, no. 5 (2011): 1–2.
23. Will McCants, “Zawahiri Speaks,” Foreign Policy, June 9, 2011, www.foreign-policy.com.
24. Nelly Lahoud, “Bin Ladin’s Death through the Lens of al-Qa‘ida’s Confidential Secretary,” CTC Sentinel 4, no. 5 (2011): 12–15.