Tactical Advantages of Suicide Terrorism

Suicide bombing has become a serious tactical concern in transnational terror. It is a form of psychological warfare. It is intended not only to kill & demonstrate commitment to a cause, but also to demoralize the public of the targeted country. Demoralization of the public weakens its resolve in the face of adversity & induce it to pressure its government to compromise or change policies. As a tactic of terrorism, the suicide bomber is a complex but innovative weapon. It is the most extreme example of asymmetrical warfare.?It is dramatic, frightening & very effective for the terror group that uses it.?

One explanation of the notable increase in the resort to martyrdom in different conflicts is based on the internationalization of terrorist groups, including increased interpersonal contact among members. A perception of similarity of causes is likely to lead to sharing & modeling strategies across groups.

Suicide bombing is the most lethal form of terrorism. Suicide bombing is a simple & low-cost operation requiring no escape route or rescue mission.?The suicide bomber can choose the time, location & circumstances of the attack which increases the casualties & damage.?Dead bombers do not release important information on interrogation.?It makes a big impact on the public & the media because of the “overwhelming sense of helplessness”.

Suicide attacks are more potent than conventional terrorism in their psychological impact. 2 elements of suicide terrorism make it a powerful tool of psychological warfare.

Intimate Killers. Suicide attacks rarely distinguish between combatants & civilians & are not different from other forms of terrorism. However, unlike conventional bombs, which often cannot distinguish between the old & the young, men & women, soldiers & civilians, human bombs can make these distinctions because they walk among their victims, hear their voices & look into their faces. The intimate nature of suicide terrorism is psychologically damaging because the killers appear to be callous & exceptionally cruel. Furthermore, suicide attacks are carried out by individuals who often appear undistinguishable from their victims, heightening the sense of insecurity among the public. One cannot profile suicide terrorists because they deliberately disguise themselves during their missions to look like their victims.

Unprecedented & Incomprehensible Threat. Suicide attacks are nothing new in history, but the general public views them as an unprecedented threat to its security because of their relatively recent revival. The public’s unfamiliarity with this tactic raises its anxiety & apprehension about this form of terrorism. Suicide terrorism is not easily comprehensible because it appears to be illogical. Would rational people kill themselves to kill others? Terror groups often seek to make suicide attacks appear motivated solely by the “love of martyrdom.” The apparent illogic of suicide attacks is disconcerting because it implies that the terrorists are not people with whom one could reason with. Their willingness to die implies that they cannot be deterred.

However, the psychological impact of suicide terrorism lessens over time through the process of normalization. There are limits to the psychological potency of suicide attacks. In Israel, the public has become resilient in the face of such attacks. Suicide bombings are seen as tragic but not unprecedented & incomprehensible. People have become accustomed to them. Normalization is also achieved through government efforts that quickly repair the scene of the attack & restore it to its original condition, encouraging the public to proceed as it did before the attack.?

Suicide terrorism is not necessarily a religious phenomenon. Religion is not a motivator for all suicide attackers because not all suicide terrorists are religious. Many are secular. One of the terrorist organizations that have regularly employed suicide terrorism as a strategy in modern times is the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Not only are members of this organization not Muslim, most of them are not religious at all. Some Middle Eastern groups (Palestinian Fatah, the PFLP & the PKK) which use suicide attacks are secular & have little or no connection to fundamentalist Islam.

Furthermore, the notion that suicide terrorists cannot be suicidal because many are religious & religion protects against suicide is debatable. The protective power of religion in preventing suicide may be overstated. It is true that religious affiliation has been found to be associated with lower rates of suicide attempts. However, these findings may be biased since disclosure of suicidal ideation & behavior might be lower in people with religious affiliations because of the taboos against it. In Islam, suicide is forbidden by the Quran & few Muslims will admit to suicidal behavior when questioned directly although they will do so when the questions are open-ended. Taboos against suicide can result in underreporting of suicide & there is growing evidence that suicide is underreported in Muslim countries.

The number of suicide attacks worldwide rose from an average of 5 per year in the 1980s to 10 per year in the 1990s. It continued to climb after 9/11, reaching a peak of 521 in 2007 at the height of the Iraq War. While the frequency of these attacks declined in 2008, suicide operations have been on the upswing again since 2012. In 2013 alone, some 384 suicide terrorist acts were carried out in 18 countries causing 3,743 deaths. This represented a 46% growth over the number of attacks in 2012 & a 66% increase in the number of lethal casualties. These trends are of great concern because suicide terrorism is 13 times deadlier than any other form of attack. Overall, suicide attacks have taken the lives of more than 37,000 since 1991 & wounded more almost 102,000.

Tactically, suicide bombings have several obvious advantages. They are effective, cost-efficient & lethal. A successful attack has a mobilizing impact on a wider audience & many current suicide bombers are revered as martyrs in the Middle East. At the same time, suicide bombing causes confusion, horror & a feeling of hopelessness for those who are on the receiving end. The psychological effects are out of proportion to the damage caused.?

There have been notable successes in the use of suicide bombers. In 1983, Hezbollah in Lebanon used suicide attacks against US & French military personnel.?These attacks were assessed to be very significant by other terrorist groups because they resulted in the withdrawal of the US & French presence from Lebanon & have influenced American policy in that region ever since. ?

The LTTE assassinated 2 heads of state, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India in 1991 & President Ranasinghe Premadasa of Sri Lanka in 1993. The LTTE developed suicide bombing to be so unnerving & effective for a vastly outmanned fighting force, that their methods were studied & copied, notably in the Middle East.?Their?modus operandi?was so influential that it provides some insight into the motivation of future suicide terrorists.?They used men, women, children, animals, boats, trucks & cars, on & off the battlefield.?Casualties included thousands of civilians & moderate Tamil leaders.?The effect on the country’s political leadership & intellectual elite was severe as the LTTE attacked the Sri Lankan top military command, the Sri Lankan navy, oil tankers, oil storage & major buildings in Colombo.?They developed under-garments which carried hidden explosives & enabled then to get close to their targets. They developed principles & techniques which have resonated through future groups:

• Glorification of dead bombers with videos, pictures & songs.
• Use of the term “martyrdom” & not “suicide”.

• Use of female bombers. (Female suicide terrorists are the ultimate asymmetrical weapon. There is often more shock value if the suicide bomber is a woman. By both attracting attention & precipitating widespread fear, women provide a tactical advantage. Using females also significantly increases the number of combatants available to a terror group.)

• Careful selection from many applicants & rejection of those depressed or psychiatrically abnormal.
• Intense physical & psychological training.
• Careful planning by a support team.
• Reconnaissance & infiltration to reach targets.

These successful attacks reveal the sophisticated organizational use of suicide bombers. Every attack requires a series of operations, from intelligence gathering to the transportation of the bomber & his equipment. Dozens of operatives who would never consider committing suicide themselves are crucial to the success of the suicide attack & form a supportive infrastructure around the terrorist as he prepares for the mission. As the 1998 Nairobi & Dar es Salaam embassy attacks reveal, the level of organization is highly professional & the context remains adaptive.

The elements that shape how suicide terrorism is used include psychological expertise, tactical & operational planning, plus an understanding of the political & emotional nuances of terrorism.

A very simple summary of motivation for a terror group is revenge, renown, & reaction.?Terror groups have motivations for suicide attacks which have some commonality with the motivations of the individual attackers, but they also have motivations which are strategy or policy driven & are not relevant to attackers’ personal motivations.?

Revenge & renown are motivators for both terror group & individual.?Suicide attacks gain major publicity in the international media for the group & the individual gains personal fame & status.?Reaction, particularly an excessive reaction, by the target of the attack can be beneficial to the group but is not as relevant to a successful bomber who will be dead & unable to experience the gratification of an inappropriate reaction.?

Suicide attackers frequently claim revenge as a powerful motivator.?This information comes from a number of sources such as the attackers’ pre-suicide written or video recordings & the interrogation of failed or arrested suicide attackers.?The Israeli Government has made much of this available.?The revenge motivation may be expressed in very broad terms (anger at the occupation of the Middle East & holy cities by Western nations) or very personal & narrow terms (death of a relative or an act of personal humiliation).?The suicide attacker may be avenging personal grievances or may be avenging perceived grievances against relatives, friends, religion or nation (humiliation-by-proxy).?The profiles of?67 Palestinian suicide attackers found that almost all had a past history of injury, arrest or death of a family member by the IDF.?The level of desired revenge is extreme & is not limited to simple tit-for-tat.?It extends to hatred of the enemy & the need for their total destruction.

Terror groups may use suicide attacks to sabotage attempts at peaceful resolution, to gain ascendency over other groups & for retaliation & provocation.? Hamas effectively derailed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process throughout the 1990s.

There are tactical advantages for terror groups.?

Kill Ratio. Suicide terrorism on average kills & injures more people with a single attack than does any other form of terrorism. Conventional terrorist attacks since the early 1980s have killed on average less than one person per incident, whereas suicide attacks during the same period have killed on average 12 people per incident. Through suicide terrorism those seeking to coerce their stronger adversaries can impose unacceptable human & material losses, on average 12 times deadlier than conventional terrorism.

Smart Bombs. Suicide terrorists are “smart bombs” that can zero in on their targets, walk into highly secure areas, make last-minute adjustments in their plans & choose the time of detonation to inflict the greatest damage. A suicide bomber can wait for crowds to gather before setting off his explosives, killing scores of civilians. This tactical flexibility is rare in conventional terrorist attacks or even with the most expensive & technologically advanced weaponry.

A suicide bomber wearing a bomb is far more dangerous & far more difficult to defend against than a timed device left to explode in a marketplace. This human weapons system can effect last-minute changes based on the ease of approach, the paucity or density of people & the security measures in evidence. On a Thursday afternoon in March 2002, a reportedly smiling, self-satisfied bomber strolled down King George Street, in the heart of Jerusalem, looking for just the right target. He found it in a crowd of shoppers gathered in front of the trendy Aroma Café, near the corner of Agrippas Street. In a fusillade of nails & other bits of metal, 2 victims were killed & 56 wounded. In April 2002, a female suicide bomber tried to enter the Mahane Yehuda open-air market but was deterred by a strong police presence. So she simply walked up to a bus stop packed with shoppers hurrying home before the Sabbath & detonated her explosives, killing 6 & wounding 104.

Cost-effectiveness. Suicide bombing is an attractive option for terror groups seeking a cost-effective way to inflict the greatest possible damage. In highly repressive environments where recruitment is difficult, terrorist groups are conscious of the need to inflict the greatest amount of damage without sacrificing many valued assets. Suicide terrorism allows them to inflict mass casualties with one or a few bombers. If we assume that a suicide attack kills at least 13 times as many people as a conventional terrorist attack, it would require 13 separate attacks to achieve what 1 suicide bomber could achieve in a single mission. Furthermore, suicide operations do not require complicated escape plans that put other organizational personnel at risk of capture.

However, a more efficient use of resources might be for terror groups to protect the lives of their members so they can attack more than once. This is a key consideration in locations where recruitment is difficult & insurgents are waging a war of attrition against a powerful foe that cannot be defeated through a few mass-casualty attacks. A suicide bomber can strike only once; a living militant can attack again & again. This assumes that terrorists are operating in security environments where they can attack & then evade arrest or death for an extended period of time. However, in places like Israel or Saudi Arabia, vigilant security forces often capture & kill militants after they have acted once or twice. Palestinian militants have learned through experience that attacking a military post in the West Bank through conventional hit-&-run operations will most likely result in their capture or death, because Israel has a long history of protecting its personnel in danger zones. In such circumstances it might be more effective to engage in mass-casualty attacks & lose one bomber than to engage in conventional, low-casualty attacks & assume the risk of protecting a wanted terrorist.

Given the substantial difference between the kill rate of a suicide attack & that of a conventional operation, some groups might deem it more cost-effective to lose one member in a mass-casualty suicide operation than to send several militants on operations repeatedly to achieve the same kill rate.

It must also be noted that not all terror groups pursue a strategy of attrition. Some pursue a strategy of sabotaging peace, as some Palestinian groups tried to do during the Oslo peace process from 1993 to 2000. Others follow a strategy of agitation where the goal is to induce the state to overreact by excessively repressing a category of people such as workers, Muslims, or Sunnis. Such repression can turn these people into supporters of terrorists. The 9/11 attack is a form of agitation in the Muslim world. In Iraq, suicide attacks are not about waging a war of attrition but producing sectarian polarization that can mobilize Sunnis behind the most extreme & marginal faction in the insurgency.

Group Security. The suicide bomber usually cannot be captured & interrogated; hence the possibilities for betrayal are almost non-existent. Even if the mission fails to kill or injure anyone besides the suicide terrorist, the recruiters of the terrorist remain undetected, able to recruit others for future operations.

Suicide Bombing is Strategic Communication. Suicide bombing is intended not only to kill, it also is an effective form of strategic communication with the targeted countries, the international community & the terrorists’ own constituency. There are 4 strategic messages that suicide bombers seek to communicate.

Determination. Suicide attackers send the message to the targeted country that they are so determined to achieve their goals that they are willing to die for their cause. Suicide bombers’ willingness to sacrifice their lives voluntarily is often interpreted as the ultimate testimony to the righteousness of the cause. This extraordinary commitment cannot be deterred easily by the threat of counter terrorism. The targeted country is coerced into addressing the terrorists’ underlying demands.

Commitment to Escalate. Suicide attacks heighten expectations of future attacks in 3 ways.

• Suicide bombers often issue prerecorded statements that they are part of an ever-growing pool of “living martyrs” awaiting the opportunity to serve their cause.
• By breaching societal taboos & international norms on the use of violence, they make suicide bomber threats of escalation appear credible. If they did it once, surely they are likely to do it again.
• Terror groups that send suicide bombers are under internal organizational pressure to continue such attacks, so that the deaths of the initial “martyrs” are not in vain. Failure to continue on this path without achieving the organization’s major objectives could demoralize the organization’s members.

Deterrence of Neutral Observers. The extraordinarily destructive nature of suicide bombers sends a message to uncommitted allies to stay on the sidelines lest they become targets of mass-casualty attacks. The suicide attacks in Britain on July 2005 were clearly intended to coerce Britain to abandon its support of the US in Iraq & Afghanistan & included a message to Italy & Australia to reconsider their alliance with the US.

Shaming the Enemy. Suicide attacks send the message that oppression by the targeted country has reached such unbearable levels that ordinary men & women are willing to kill themselves to end it. In suicide bombing, sympathy shifts toward the perpetrators of violence because they are seen as victims of intolerable oppression; otherwise they would not have taken such extraordinary measures for their cause.

However, there are limits to this. Suicide attacks can also result in a public backlash if the attackers are unrestrained in the killing of non-combatants, especially civilians in their constituent group. Suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia that killed innocent Muslims resulted in a public outcry against the terrorists. The massacre of schoolchildren in Beslan, Russia, resulted in worldwide condemnations of the Chechen terrorists.

International support is very likely to decline after the initial wave of sympathy for the suicide bombers. International backlash emerges when suicide bombing is no longer localized within conflict zones but diffuses worldwide. In Europe, sympathy for Palestinian suicide bombers waned as suicide attacks spread to America on 9/11 & subsequently to other countries around the world. This decline in international support stems partly from international diplomacy to counter suicide bombings as more & more countries feel the effects of this form of terrorism.

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Endro Sunarso is an expert in Security Management, Physical Security & Counter Terrorism. He is regularly consulted on matters pertaining to transportation security, off-shore security, critical infrastructure protection, security & threat assessments, & blast mitigation.

Besides being a Certified Protection Professional (CPP?), a Certified Identity & Access Manager (CIAM?), a Project Management Professional (PMP?) & a Certified Scrum Master (CSM?), Endro is also a Fellow of the Security Institute (FSyl) & the Institute of Strategic Risk Management (F.ISRM).

Endro has spent about 2 decades in Corporate Security (executive protection, crisis management, critical infrastructure protection, governance, business continuity, loss mitigation, due diligence, counter corporate espionage, etc). He also has more than a decade of experience in Security & Blast Consultancy work, initially in the Gulf Region & later in South East Asia.