Understanding what drives suicide missions could help make us safer

By Timothy Garton Ash (THE GUARDIAN, 18/05/06):

There's a photograph that has haunted me for months. I have it posted on my computer screen as I write. Taken by a CCTV camera at 09:00:13 on Thursday July 7 2005, it shows a stocky, dark-haired young man in a light-blue, open-necked shirt emerging from Boots the chemists at King's Cross station. He is carrying a rucksack on his back. Three-quarters of an hour later, 18-year-old Hasib Hussain blew himself up on a No 30 bus, killing 13 other people and injuring 110. The rucksack carried the bomb. The question I've kept asking myself is: what do you go into Boots to buy when you know you're going to blow yourself to smithereens a few minutes later? Indigestion pills? Ibuprofen? Nail clippers?

Now I know the answer. According to the recently released Home Office report on the 7/7 London bombings, Hussain merely passed through Boots on his way to WH Smith, where he appears to have bought a nine-volt battery. "It is possible that a new battery was needed to detonate the device, but this is only speculation at this stage." By this stage, his three - what should we call them? Co-conspirators? Comrades in arms? Fellow terrorists? Fellow martyrs? Each term is prejudicial - had already killed themselves, as planned, on the underground.

We don't know why Hussain had not also gone underground, but the report speculates that he may have been "frustrated by delays on the Northern Line" - a passage that could be read as a piece of the darkest possible humour by regular commuters on that line. We do know that he rang his three mates from his mobile. "His demeanour over this period appears relaxed and unhurried." Then he went into McDonald's on Euston Road. Again, I can't stop wondering: why on earth would you go to fill your stomach when you are about to tear your whole body apart? To steady your nerves? Or perhaps it was just to visit the lavatory?

For all the haunting detail thrown up by an exhaustive police investigation, the essential mystery remains. What does it feel like to be a suicide bomber in the minutes before you die? What are your last thoughts? Why do you do it? Few questions are harder to answer, because this conduct is so much at odds with the way most of us think and act. And you can't ask the bomber afterwards. Few questions are more important to answer, for understanding this better might help to make us safer.

So I've been reading the now quite extensive literature on the subject, and especially a scrupulous and fascinating study called Making Sense of Suicide Missions, edited by Diego Gambetta, which looks at suicide missions (a carefully chosen, deliberately neutral term) from the Japanese kamikaze pilots in the second world war (still much the largest group numerically) to al-Qaida today. Those who engage in suicide missions are by no means usually poor or ill-educated, although they may come from poor and marginalised communities. The father of one of the July 7 bombers, Shehzad Tanweer, was a prominent local businessman. Two of them had attended Leeds Metropolitan University.

Nor do suicide missionaries generally display the psychological symptoms typical of people at high risk of committing suicide. Often they seem well-adjusted members of a family and a community. Tanweer played cricket in a local park until late into the evening of July 6: "he appeared perfectly normal to those around him". A study of Palestinian suicide bombers notes that "none of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded or depressed ... Two were the sons of millionaires ... They were polite and serious, and in their communities they were considered to be model youth[s]. All were deeply religious." Obviously there was also a strong Islamic motivation in the case of the London bombers, but the majority of recorded suicide missionaries, including the Tamil Tigers and the kamikaze pilots, have not been religiously motivated.

So what do they have in common? One major common feature is spelled out starkly by Gambetta: suicide missions have mostly been used to attack democracies. Democracies, he suggests, are more likely to change their policies as a result of such attacks, less likely to carry out annihilating reprisals against the offending group, and, above all, democracies give them the oxygen of publicity through a free media. (Even if Iraq is not a proper democracy, the media effect is there in spades.) So it's a rational choice.

Moreover, most suicide missionaries see themselves as soldiers in a noble cause. "We are at war and I am a soldier," said the leader of the London bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, in a video that also praised "today's heroes like our beloved Sheikh Osama bin Laden". Suicide missionaries, whether religious or secular, believe they will achieve glory and honour - two concepts that seem anachronistic to bourgeois liberal societies like ours, which prefer fame and celebrity. The dying is therefore as important as the killing. Martyrdom is a desired goal. Palestinian suicide bombers talked to one author on condition that the term "suicide" should not be applied to their actions; they preferred "sacred explosions". "We do not have tanks or rockets," said one, "but we have something superior - our exploding Islamic human bombs. In place of a nuclear arsenal, we are proud of our arsenal of believers." That comment reflects another common feature: suicide missions are generally carried out by the weaker side, in conflicts marked by a sharp asymmetry of military force. They are a weapon of David against Goliath.

Suicide missions are usually planned by a team, rooted in particular communities. Very rarely is the suicide bomber a loner. They support each other and psych each other up. The Home Office report records the four London bombers hugging each other at King's Cross before going to their separate deaths: "they appear happy, even euphoric". Often, they have been systematically indoctrinated over a longer period by an inspiring leader. In the case of young Hussain, that leader was almost certainly the older Sidique "Sid" Khan, otherwise known as a talented primary-school mentor of children with language or behavioural problems.

The suicide group's calculations are extreme, inhumane, barbaric and, in the long run, probably mistaken; but they are not irrational. Such attacks bring enormous publicity to their cause. Horrible though this may sound, in cases ranging from the Tamil Tigers to al-Qaida they can strengthen the morale of their supporters and the prestige (within a given community) of their groups. Early in the Iraq war, a group of Arab teenagers from the poor suburbs of Paris marched through the streets of the French capital chanting: "We are all Palestinians, we are all Iraqis, we are all kamikazes!"

To understand is not to excuse. Whatever the perverted courage involved in blowing yourself up, the only certain effect of the London bombers' actions was the killing and maiming of innocent civilians. Yet to understand is the beginning of working out what to do about it. The pattern we are beginning to discern makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to predict who the individual suicide missionary will be; but at least it suggests the kinds of places to start looking.