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Article Excerpt
SUICIDE CAR BOMBS HAVE BECOME A COMMONPLACE AND VIRTUALLY daily event in conflicts such as those taking place in Iraq or Afghanistan. * When an attack occurs, we make assumptions about the intent and motivation of the driver and the organization that sent him (and increasingly, her). Often, such attacks in an Islamic context presume that the act is a deliberate Istish'hadi (martyrdom) operation. This paper challenges the basic assumptions about how the concept of martyrdom has been constructed in the literature until now. Using the little-known case of the IRA's proxy bomb campaign in Northern Ireland in 1990, we demonstrate how complex these operations are in reality.
A plausible assumption for most observers of terrorist movements is that such groupings, given their tendency to frequently operate outside societal norms, are relatively immune to the vicissitudes and pressures of public opinion. In fact, most terrorist movements, like political parties, are ultimately power seeking, perceiving themselves as the future leaders of their respective community. This is especially the case when the conflict in question relates to ethnoreligious and territorial disputes. Consistent with Mao's theory that guerrillas must live among the people as a fish moves through the sea, terrorists operate within certain parameters of the public and, for reasons explored in this article, are both cognizant of and susceptible to how they are perceived by members of their ethnic-religious community and by rival groups as well as international public opinion.
This sensitivity to public support occasionally means that when the terrorists engage in tactics that are perceived to be more radical or violent than that which their publics have become used to tolerating, the movement risks the consequences of backlash. It thus would seem to follow that terrorists may be circumscribed not only in the kinds of strategies they can pursue but also in the immediate tactical methods they can deploy. The main problem to date with analyses of terrorist incidents has been that we often take the event at face value and work backwards to determine motivation and intention when in fact, the reality might be quite different. The term "suicide bomb" or "martyrdom operation" gets thrown around far too easily to encompass many behaviors that may not in fact be voluntary.
This paper challenges the way martyrdom is and has been constructed and forces us to examine terrorist events without preconceived notions. It is important to note that when we witness an event that on the surface appears to be an instance of martyrdom, the reality might be far more complex. Part of the problem has been the current inductive logic associated with the study of terrorism in which attacks are a given and experts will engage in a psychological autopsy to trace perpetrators' intentions and motives after the fact. If they are religious, we assume that this act was one of self-sacrifice for a religious cause. However, this is not always the case. We argue that we need to question the intent of the action rather than assume that the event is automatically an act of martyrdom. While attacks in Kabul or Baghdad may appear as deliberate jihadi operations by the Taliban or by A1 Qaeda in Iraq, our investigation has determined that a portion of such attacks are the product of coercion and not martyrdom in the traditional sense although observers may understand them to be martyrdom operations.
The use of martyrs represents a strategic choice that can either mobilize large numbers of recruits and invigorate the support base of a community, or enrage the rank and file to such an extent that it undermines the group's very credibility. The example of the IRA provides an interesting case in point. Although the IRA embraced many different concepts of martyrdom and linked them to the historical struggle against the British, the term "martyrdom" itself was used selectively. Martyrdom and self-sacrifice encompassed high-risk missions, including the use of hunger strikes in which the strikers knew with certainty at what point they would die. Yet the IRA never used the term "suicide" and also refrained from using suicide car bombers (although it did use coerced car bombers). Rather than consider the proxy bomb as a footnote in the history of the IRA, we argue that public support might circumscribe what terrorist organizations can and cannot do. Clearly, the nationalist community supported the self-sacrifice of the hunger strikers but rejected the notion of killing oneself deliberately or being coerced by the organization.
Although the IRA and its predecessors in Irish Republican militarism wholly embraced the broad concept of martyrdom--as perhaps best illustrated through the series of hunger strikes by which 10 Republicans took their own lives in 1981--the IRA never engaged in martyrdom operations with the aim of physically attacking its enemies at the same time. However, in a series of notorious events in 1990, the IRA came close. Sometimes referred to as the "human bomb campaign," these events are more commonly known as the IRA's "proxy bombs." The operations involved the kidnapping at gunpoint of several Catholic civilians (not members of the IRA) who were subsequently coerced to drive vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) into military targets. In some cases the victim's family was held at gunpoint until the completion of the operation. Public opinion against the IRA, even from within the broader Republican community, was so negative that the IRA quickly discontinued the use of the tactic.
While the reasons behind both the execution and discontinuation of the proxy bomb campaign are still poorly understood, the IRA is one of the few historical cases we have in which the use of human bombs (albeit of one particular type here) failed in a strategic sense due to the limits of public sensibilities and a lack of tolerance for targeting civilians in this manner. The IRA campaign is the preeminent example of how a car bombing might be a coerced attack in which the driver has very little say or choice in the mission. Significantly, the use of coerced bombers has spread from Ireland to Colombia, Iraq, and Afghanistan and requires us to alter our assumptions regarding martyrdom and self-sacrifice.
Proxy bombing as a tactic mirrors the extent to which the population is willing to support this use of violence against civilians. In the cases of Iraq or Afghanistan, it might signal a difficulty in mobilizing members of the population to volunteer for such actions. But Ireland teaches us that coercing individuals (as we have seen in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan) might in fact drive a wedge between the organization and the very public it purports to represent. Proxy bombing may in fact be the last ditch effort of a group losing popular support or it might be the very incident that causes the group to lose support once and for all.
THE SHIFT TO COERCION
The "proxy bomb" refers to the vehicle-borne delivery of an explosive with the distinct feature that the driver has been coerced into participating. In some cases, the coerced driver of the bomb has time to escape before it detonates, often by remote control operated by an accompanying terrorist unit. In other cases, however, the coerced drivers are blown up as part of the operation. As we have noted, the proxy bomb is perhaps most often associated with Irish Republican terrorism in Northern Ireland, but the tactic has since spread.
In Northern Ireland the delivery of terrorist bombs by proxy had a long history. The first scholarly reference to the proxy bomb was in 1970 in the Irish University Review ("International Association," 1970). As the IRA began to routinely kidnap civilians to drive bombs toward predetermined locations, the tactic caused increasing consternation and revulsion, perhaps characterized nowhere more effectively than in Benedict Kiely's 1977 novella Proxopera. In Kiely's fictional account, Latin teacher Mr. Binchey is forced to drive a proxy bomb to the local town. As he drives he speaks for the author: "Not even the Mafia thought of the proxy bomb, operation proxy, proxopera for gallant Irish patriots fighting imaginary empires by murdering the neighbors" (Kiely, 1987). That such revulsion stood out in communities that for so long ran the risk of becoming immune to the surprise and shock of ever evolving terrorist tactics (by both sides) is a testament to how abhorrent they considered the proxy bombs. Over the next two decades the phenomenon of proxy bombing proliferated and metamorphosed, culminating in a series of coordinated attacks in October 1990 that would simultaneously signal both the apex and soon the demise of the tactic.
While the phenomenon of proxy bombs has received scant attention in the contemporary literature, examples of coerced martyrdom abound throughout the history of terrorism and have been increasing in recent years. The concept of coercion becomes critical when we closely consider the nature of what we might term the "proxiness" of the bomb-carrier; that is, it is possible to consider a bomber or bomb carrier as situated along a continuum between being fully conscious of the bomb he or she is carrying and willing to die in the process, being conscious of the bomb but carrying it against one's will (the cases under examination here), and being completely oblivious (sometimes associated with cases of detonation by remote control of a distant observer). These distinctions challenge the characterization of these events as martyrdom operations by negating the assumption that people necessarily volunteer to engage in these acts of violence. Surprisingly, these issues have escaped analysis to date. Although international relations theorists have long considered the coercive effect of bombing campaigns (see, for example, Pape, 1996), the theoretical literature does not assess whether individuals can likewise be coerced into bombing. The misleading analytical assumption of voluntariness has acquired more relevance and urgency in recent years with the dramatic increase in car bombs (notably in Iraq and Afghanistan) by what appears to be an unending flow of voluntary recruits.
Historically, we have some interesting starting points. The investigations into the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 have alleged that a proxy might have been the culprit. Wain ("Alternative theories," n.d.) has suggested that a "mule"--someone who knew he or she was smuggling something, but thought it might be drugs or diamonds--may have unknowingly carried the explosive device on board. Wain further draws a parallel with a case two years earlier of Jordanian terrorist Nezar Hindawi, who duped his pregnant Irish girlfriend, Anne Marie Murphy, into carrying a suitcase bomb on board an El Al flight from London to Tel Aviv on April 17, 1986 without her knowledge. (Wain, 1998; 60 Minutes II, 2002.) Similarly, in the Middle East there have been a number of proxy attacks in which the operative was unwilling or unaware of the bomb. Although we might assume that every car bomb attack in the Middle East involves operatives willing to die for the cause, the reality is far...
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