Mick Hartley

In the Times, Michael Binyon reviews “My Life as a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing” by Christoph Reuter.

Why has the phenomenon reappeared now? In his concise, well-researched and illuminating study, Christoph Reuter traces it to the reinvention of an historic archetype long thought to have vanished: the martyr. And despite his powerlessness, the martyr’s strength lies in his compelling example. He says to the world: “We fear humiliation more than we fear death, and, therefore, we have no fear of your well-trained and well-equipped armies, your high-tech arsenal.”

But, as Reuter says, suicide attackers are not killing machines who come out of nowhere. They are born of the societies and myths they grew up with. “What makes the deed effective is its embeddedness with a network of reimagined medieval myths and popular-culture hero-worship.”

More than anything, these myths have been propagated by radical, fundamentalist Islam, which burst upon Iran with the Khomeini revolution in 1979. But if this was the defining moment for the subsequent spread of religious fanaticism throughout all branches of Islam, it was the Iran-Iraq war that brought forth the official cult of the martyr. The embattled clerical leadership in Tehran, shaken by the early military success of Iraq, decided to mobilise the most revered incident in Shia history — the final stand of Imam Hussein’s 72 followers at Karbala in AD680 — as a way of confronting Saddam Hussein on the battlefield. Child martyrs, volunteers or not, were to be sent to their death across the minefields to clear them for seasoned Iranian troops.

From 1981, 10,000 boys, no more than 13 or 14, were drafted into martyr brigades, given a brief and brutal military training, decked with special headbands and hung with a plastic key for their entry into paradise, and sent in human waves into the Iraqi guns. Most were expected to die; indeed, a national cult grew up to celebrate their heroic deaths. Their families were not allowed to grieve, but were obliged to rejoice at their sons’ sacrifice.

The tactic, like the slaughter on the western front during the First World War, gained almost no military advantage. But it confirmed suicide attacks as a central tenet of militant Shia Islam. After the Iran-Iraq war ended, the tactic was adopted in other wars — in particular, by Hezbollah, the Iranian-supported Shia fighters in southern Lebanon. The first and most spectacular demonstration came on October 23, 1983, when a yellow lorry approached the US Marine barracks in southern Beirut. Instead of stopping when challenged, the driver accelerated, smashed straight into the building and detonated a huge bomb that killed 241 American troops. Later, the only surviving American eye-witness said that the driver “looked right at me and smiled . . . As soon as I saw the truck over there I knew what was going to happen.”

The review, and to judge by it the book being reviewed, are strangely emotionless in their descriptions. We’re used to the most appalling cruelty being visited on enemies: that’s as old as history. And those in power sending the young to their death – as in the First World War – is sadly familiar. But children of 13 or so being sent to their deaths “with a plastic key for their entry into paradise” is surely about as low as it is possible to go.

In the Observer magazine, an article on one of the female Palestinian suicide bombers (“shahidas”), Wafa Idris, makes the point that these women are generally outcasts from their society in one form or another: in Idris’ case a divorcee and a “troubled young woman who was prone to bouts of melancholy and depression”.

Knowing this, the point that Reuter wishes to make, about the “compelling example” of the martyr, is rather vitiated. There’s nothing compelling or noble about sending children or vulnerable women to their death. Despicable is a more apt description.

Binyon closes his review:

Despite the worries of some Palestinian leaders at the global condemnation, Reuter sees no let-up by Islamist radicals; indeed, he scorns Bush’s claim that al-Qaeda is on the run. But he believes that no society can sustain suicide bombings in the long run. In the main non-Muslim conflict where the tactic has been copied, by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the use of child bombers has fallen. And in Iran itself there is now total disillusion; the child martyrs are no longer celebrated, and families openly question the point of the sacrifice.

This leads Reuter to the book’s thought-provoking conclusion: suicide bombers cannot be defeated by Western military might or the threat of reprisals. That only confirms their zealotry. “Global manipulators of resentment and fear like bin Laden can be defeated only from within, by their own societies and cultures,” he says. As events in the troubled Muslim world show, that is likely to take a very long time.

This is not a thought-provoking conclusion: it’s so obvious that it’s barely worth stating. Of course the ultimate defeat of terrorism will only come when attitudes within those societies that nurture it have changed. But force can have a considerable effect on these attitudes, particularly the belief that suicide bombing works: an attitude that gained some credence with the perceived success of Hezbollah in driving the Israelis out of Southern Lebanon.

Another step towards the end of suicide bombing would be a clear condemnation of this practice from the Western societies these attacks are aimed at: in particular an end to the fatuous notion that these crimes are understandable, or in any way justified.