Children increasingly found among perpetrators and victims(October, 20, Washington, Sri Lanka Guardian) Suicide terrorism is on the rise and increasingly includes children as both victims and perpetrators, say terrorism experts.
"What suicide terrorist attacks are about is ... killing large numbers of people in a target audience in order to generate the kind of fear and chaos that can produce political change in various ways," Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, said in a recent interview with USINFO. Pape noted that suicide terrorism has been increasing steadily since the early 1980s.
According to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, children were reported as victims more often in 2006, up by more than 80 percent as compared to 2005, with more than 1,800 children either killed or injured in terrorist attacks in 2006. Targeting children creates enormous suffering and loss to families and inflicts much deeper economic and social damage on societies because children's deaths destroy future generations, experts say.
Pape says from his research that teenagers from 15 to 18 years old make up about 20 percent of all suicide bombers. Participation by children younger than that age group is rare, but not unheard of, he said, because terrorist groups experiment constantly with different tactics to defeat strengthened security measures.
The use of women, who make up about 20 percent of attackers worldwide, and children in suicide attacks serves a central strategy to avoid early detection by security forces, Pape said. Terrorist groups tend to rely less on younger children, too, because the terrorists intend that the attacker actually will conduct the attack, he said.
The great majority of suicide bombers are often middle-aged and young adults, married and unmarried, and some have children, Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University wrote for the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In his article, "The Logic of Suicide Terrorism," Hoffman says that there is not a clear profile of what makes up suicide attackers today, which, in turn, makes detection doubly difficult for police and security forces.
Attacks Not Necessarily related to Religion
Pape said that more than half of the attacks are unrelated to religion.
Until recently, Pape said, the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) in Sri Lanka had committed more suicide terrorist attacks than any other single group. The LTTE is motivated largely by Marxism, he says, not religious doctrine. Since 1980, Pape said, nearly half of all attacks have not been associated with the religious fundamentalism often cited in Middle Eastern-based groups.
The use of suicide attacks has grown for several key reasons, according to experts, and the frequency of their success is the most critical factor. The use of suicide terrorist attacks first emerged in Lebanon in 1983 from the group Hezbollah, which initially perfected the technique.
Pape said his research indicates that most suicide terrorist attacks, about 95 percent since 1980, stem from the real or imagined perception of foreign occupation of a country or region. But, he added, that is only a general pattern. Whatever the cause, Pape said, "you're not seeing a decline in suicide terrorism."
"Suicide tactics have been adopted by a growing number of terrorist organizations around the world because the tactics are shocking, deadly, cost-effective, and very difficult to stop," says Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, writing recently for the RAND Review.
The RAND Review is a publication of the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit organization that conducts policy-related research and analysis.
Hoffman, an international terrorism expert and formerly director of RAND's Washington office, says that suicide terror attacks are undertaken as part of a larger campaign "to undermine confidence in government and leadership, to crush popular morale, and to spread fear and intimidation."
According to the National Counterterrorism Center, suicide bombings fell slightly in 2006 largely because of a decline in the use of car bombings, which are less reliable than a suicide attacker. However, the report also notes that suicide bombers operating without vehicles increased by 25 percent in 2006, "and the ability of these attackers to penetrate large concentrations of people and then detonate their explosives probably accounted for the increase in lethality of bombings in 2006."
Disturbingly, the terrorism report also notes that religious education and training, thought to be a contributing factor in an attacker's radicalization, plays a small role in the making of suicide attackers, experts say. Pape says religious education plays a small role in helping to encourage young men to become attackers.
Dr. Marc Sageman, a medical doctor and an independent researcher on terrorism and founder of Sageman Consulting near Washington, said his research on terrorists in several key regions indicates that 87 percent of terrorists in his study received secular educations, and religious education was not a significant factor in their radicalization.
"The vast majority of al-Qaida terrorists in the sample came from families with very moderate religious beliefs or a completely secular outlook. Indeed, 84 percent were radicalized in the West, rather than in their countries of origin," Sageman said in an August 2006 e Journal Rebuilding and Resilience Five Years After 9/11.
(US State Department Report )
 Suicide terrorism is on the rise a...){kind=link}
Post a Comment