everyday suicide bombers

Four men meet at King’s Cross. Each goes his separate way from there and three die, one in each blast. Presumably the fourth is the bus bomber, though that hasn’t been confirmed as far as I’m aware. So statistical probability alone points to a suicide bombing, irrespective of forensic evidence.

It doesn’t rule out the possibility that the men were dupes who believed that they were on some important jihadi mission, perhaps carrying explosives or other materials, so they believed, to fellow jihadis. That would certainly be a good angle for propaganda war purposes. They were not only killers, but were treated as fools and dupes by the organisation they believed in – a suitable warning for others thinking along the same lines and an excellent way of sowing distrust in radical jihadi circles.

I believed in the first place that they weren’t suicide bombers because the mission looked more like a paramilitary operation designed as an attack on London’s general communications network than a deliberately spectacular atrocity. The particular power of suicide bombing lies in its emotional payload, the sense that you’re being confronted by people eager to die whom nothing will stop. As Tacitus put it: the man who is willing to die will always be your master. Following this logic, a suicide bombing directed at a systems attack is a waste of terrorist resources.

But if they were suicide bombers, what does it mean specifically? Jason Burke writes in the Guardian Newsblog:

So, personal or practical motives for last week's attacks? A critical element here is whether the bombers blew themsevles up or not. If the attacks did not deliberately involve the death of the attackers, my sense at the moment is that we should focus more on personal motives. Few terrorist planners, even before Madrid, thought that attacking the tube would build support for them. The Madrid attacks were roundly condemned by almost everyone in the Islamic world. No one could genuinely have thought that striking commuters by just leaving bombs and running away could rally anyone to their cause. This would leave us with a bunch of semi-criminal misfits, or a very local British-based group with little more general awareness, acting out of twisted personal motives rather than an al-Qaeda 'A team' committed to a general jihad. Religion may not have even been a particularly powerful motivating force, more a legitimising device for activities that sprung from a combination of personal impulses and small group dynamics.

But suicide bombers are the ... well ... smart bomb of the propaganda war. They are an incredibly sophisticated weapon that taps into all sorts of myths of heroic resistance, death and of course martyrdom. They make people decide: murderer or martyr. If the attacks were suicide bombs then the motivation may have been more practical than personal and the group we are up against far more professional than previously thought.

I think he’s making the same mistake as I did coming from the opposite direction, namely that the suicide element in the bombing is itself part of the nature of the mission. This is true on the supply side, but since 9/11 there have been hundreds of suicide bombers in Iraq alone. They’ve been integrated into the jihadi war fighting structure as smart bombs, as Burke puts it. But this in turn means that we’re in a situation where the possibility that suicide bombers were used tells us very little about target selection for attacks or the capabilities of the group behind them, except inasmuch as they actually have suicide bombers at their disposal. They’re just another weapon in the armoury.

That’s assuming that we are talking about suicide bombers. The story’s still an unconnected stream of spectacular revelations. Tomorrow might bring another one, and we’ll all go off chasing that hare.

Comments

[rob]

"Presumably the fourth is the bus bomber, though that hasn’t been confirmed as far as I’m aware."

The "fourth" as far as the news described him was I think the King's Cross/Russell Square bomber, who took longest to identify. The police have no said they believed he died in that blast.

[Rob]

"no said"="now said"

Damned typos.. Also, I believe the bus bomber is the only one they know "definitely" died in the blast (presumably they found his blood rather than just his credit cards). This is, indeed, one of the more interesting aspects: it appears they had all their wallets and shit with them. They weren't afraid to be identified, or of the consequences (ie. for "the rest of the cell" if there is such a thing) of being identified.

[Paul Davies]

re: the suicide mentality/recruitment process

fascinating piece in the T2 today, interview with a suicide bomber that cocked up and lived
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,173-1692606,00.html