Friday, June 21, 2002

The New Suicide Bombers: Larger and More Varied Pool
Her face adorns no martyr's poster, but Arien Ahmed, a 20-year-old Palestinian student of business administration, has one of the many profiles of the new suicide bomber.

She did not go through months, or even weeks, of indoctrination before setting out last month on a suicide bombing mission. She had no connection to the militantly Islamic groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad that once orchestrated most such attacks. She received little more preparation than a demonstration of how to push a button.

Her case is becoming typical. Palestinian society itself, under pressure from the grinding conflict with Israel, appears to be providing the only necessary indoctrination, experts on both sides say.

Indeed, a survey by Israel's national security service of Palestinian suicide bombers has concerned Israeli officials precisely because it identified no particular pattern. All the suicides and would-be suicides have been Muslim, and most have been unmarried, but their ages and levels of education vary.

Since the first female suicide bomber struck here on Jan. 27, groups tied to Yasir Arafat's Fatah faction have sent at least seven more women as attackers, at least four of whom were arrested by Israel, including the mother of a 3-year-old.

It used to take months of training to prepare a Palestinian terrorist from the West Bank or Gaza Strip to commit suicide in the course of killing Israelis. The attackers were strictly from the fundamentalist Hamas and Islamic Jihad, envisioning a covey of virgins and automatic passes to paradise for loved ones left behind.

But the who, why and how of Palestinian suicide bombing have changed, and the changes alarm not only Israelis but also Palestinians concerned for the impact on their own society. Palestinian militants and Israeli experts warn that the changes could reverberate overseas, should the target list in this metastasizing conflict continue to grow.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad continue to conduct devastating attacks. But since early this spring, most of the attacks have been conducted by more secular groups, by Fatah-linked organizations like the one that sent Ms. Ahmed.

The range of recruits to suicide missions continues to broaden in often bewildering ways. This week, Israel's forces arrested a 12-year-old Palestinian boy its intelligence had identified as planning an attack.

Dr. Iyad Sarraj, a Palestinian psychiatrist in Gaza City, has watched the trend toward suicide bombing with growing alarm. He said that having grown up with the idea of suicide attacks, Palestinian children were equating death with power.

"They are creating a new kind of culture," he said, arguing that they were in part compensating for the powerlessness of their parents in the face of the restrictions and frequent humiliations of Israeli occupation.

To this psychiatrist, the development is comparable to a fad for body-building, gathering adherents by presenting an ideal that is embraced, even unconsciously. "Once you create such a culture," Dr. Sarraj said, "you create something automatic."
The "infrastructure of terror," as the Israelis call it, has fragmented into small cells throughout the West Bank, each fighting its own parallel war. Separate, mid-level leaders emerge briefly, to be cut down by Israel and swiftly replaced. Such men are more than willing to seize on emotional turmoil, weakness of character or zealotry, to give someone a lethal backpack and to send him on his way, Israeli intelligence agents said.

Palestinian intelligence officials say the speed with which bombers are now primed makes intercepting them almost impossible. It used to be that during the long preparation, word of a planned attack might get around.

"Our aim first is to show the world that we no longer love this life without our land," said Dr. Nizar Rayan, a Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip. One of Dr. Rayan's sons died last fall in a suicidal shooting attack on a Jewish settlement, Eli Sinai.

Dr. Rayan, who studied martyrdom as a graduate student, brought his Toshiba laptop to a recent interview in Gaza City, so that he could call up relevant Islamic scripture.

He questioned what he described as American hypocrisy on the use of suicide as a weapon, saying Palestinians were at war with Israelis and had no other choice. "If we had weapons like the Israelis, we would kill them in a way that is acceptable to Americans," he said wryly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/21/international/middleeast/21SUIC.html?pagewanted=all&position=top

No comments:

Post a Comment

con·cept