?Here’s What a Man Who Studied Every Suicide Attack in the World Says About
ISIS’ Motives
By Joshua Holland [1]
The Nation [2], December 8, 2015
http://www.alternet.org/print/news-amp-politics/heres-what-man-who-studied-every-suicide-attack-world-says-about-isis-motives
Despite the existence of a good deal of research about terrorism, there’s a
gap between the common understanding of what leads terrorists to kill and
what many experts believe to be true.
Terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are widely seen as being motivated
by their radical theology. But according to Robert Pape, a political
scientist at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on
Security and Terrorism, this view is too simplistic. Pape knows his subject;
he and his colleagues have studied every suicide attack in the world since
1980, evaluating over 4,600 in all.
He says that religious fervor is not a motive unto itself. Rather, it serves
as a tool for recruitment and a potent means of getting people to overcome
their fear of death and natural aversion to killing innocents. "Very often,
suicide attackers realize they have instincts for self-preservation that
they have to overcome," and religious beliefs are often part of that
process, said Pape in an appearance on my radio show, Politics and Reality
Radio [3], last week. But, Pape adds, there have been "many hundreds of
secular suicide attackers," which suggests that radical theology alone doesn’t
explain terrorist attacks. From 1980 until about 2003, the "world leader" in
suicide attacks was the Tamil Tigers, a secular Marxist group of Hindu
nationalists in Sri Lanka.
According to Pape’s research, underlying the outward expressions of
religious fervor, ISIS’s goals, like those of most terrorist groups, are
distinctly earthly:
What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common, since 1980, is not
religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military
intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that
the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon and the
West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the
Paris suicide attacks we’ve just experienced in the last days, military
intervention--and specifically when the military intervention is occupying
territory--that’s what prompts suicide terrorism more than anything else.
ISIS emerged from the insurgency against the US occupation of Iraq just as
the Al Qaeda network traces its origins to the Afghan resistance to the
Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
This view differs from that of Hillary Clinton [4] and others who believe
that ISIS "has nothing whatsoever to do" with Islam, as well as the more
common belief, articulated by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic [5], that ISIS can
be reduced to "a religious group with carefully considered beliefs." It’s a
group whose outward expressions of religious fervor serve its secular
objectives of controlling resources and territory. Virtually all of the
group’s leaders were once high-ranking officers in Iraq’s secular military.
Pape’s analysis is consistent with what Lydia Wilson found when she
interviewed captured ISIS fighters in Iraq. "They are woefully ignorant
about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law,
militant jihad, and the caliphate," she recently wrote [6] in The Nation.
"But a detailed, or even superficial, knowledge of Islam isn’t necessarily
relevant to the ideal of fighting for an Islamic State, as we have seen from
the Amazon order of Islam for Dummies by one British fighter bound for
ISIS."
But how does the notion that terrorists are intent on getting powers to
withdraw from their territory square with the view that the group’s shift to
terrorist attacks in the West is designed to draw France and its allies into
a ground war in Syria? Writing at theHarvard Business Review, Northeastern
University political scientist Max Abrahms argues [7] that these analyses
are contradictory. But Pape says that it’s important to distinguish between
ISIS’s long-term goals and its shorter-term strategies to achieve them:
It’s about the timing. How are you going to get the United States, France
and other major powers to truly abandon and withdraw from the Persian Gulf
when they have such a large interest in oil? A single attack isn’t going to
do it. Bin Laden did 9/11 hoping that it would suck a large American ground
army into Afghanistan, which would help recruit a large number of suicide
attackers to punish America for intervening. We didn’t do that--we used very
limited military force in Afghanistan. But what Bin Laden didn’t count on
was that we would send a large ground army into Iraq to knock Saddam out.
And that turned out to be the most potent recruiting ground for
anti-American terrorists that ever was, more so than Bin Laden had ever
hoped for in his wildest dreams.
So if your goal is to create military costs on these states and get them to
withdraw, you’ve got to figure out a way to really up the ante. And the way
that you really up the ante is to get them to overreact. You try to get them
to send a large ground army in so that you can truly drive up the costs.
That’s what ISIS is trying to sucker us into doing.
Another theory holds that ISIS--and Al Qaeda--set their sights on France in
order to polarize mainstream French society against its Muslim community. As
University of Michigan historian Juan Cole put it after the Charlie Hebdo
attacks [8], "The problem for a terrorist group like Al Qaeda is that its
recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in
terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less
political Islam." In Cole’s formulation, if violent Islamic fundamentalists
"can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds
that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity
around grievance against discrimination."
Pape says this analysis is also consistent with his research:
If ISIS is going to end the military intervention by France, one attack is
not likely to do it. In the statement that ISIS released, they say that they
want a storm of similar attacks against Paris and other French targets
because their goal is to knock France out of the military coalition. To do
that, to achieve that goal, they’re going to need to recruit many more
attackers to do suicide attacks like the ones that occurred in Paris. In the
short-term it makes perfect sense to want an environment that stirs up
hostility towards Muslims in France, because that will make them much easier
to recruit for their longer-term object of kicking France of the coalition.
Pape also argues that ISIS’ shift in strategy to attacks overseas is a sign
not of its strength, but of its weakness on the ground in Syria and Iraq. He
points out that over the past year, the amount of territory ISIS controls
has shrunk by 10 percent:
The U.S. strategy against ISIS is working and it’s putting enormous pressure
on ISIS. It’s a strategy of air and ground power, with the ground power
coming from local allies--the Kurds and the Shia in the region, and even
some Sunnis who are opposed to ISIS. They’re increasingly working with us on
the ground while we’re fighting from the air. The problem here is not that
we don’t have enough ground forces.
It’s because the strategy is working that ISIS is now desperate, and is
shifting its pattern of behavior. In October, ISIS launched only eight
suicide attacks in Iraq and Syria, when they normally do 30 to 35 per month,
and that’s the same month that they shifted to suicide attacks in Ankara,
Turkey, on October 10. Then they downed the Russian plane on October 31st,
and now the Paris attacks on November 13th. As ISIS’ territory has shrunk in
Iraq and Syria, it is now clearly shifting its suicide attack resources out
of Iraq and Syria, and into Turkey, into killing Russian civilians, and now
also into Paris.
In Pape’s view, most of the conventional wisdom about what terrorists want
to achieve is wrong, and that disconnect has limited the effectiveness of
the West’s response to terrorism.
Robert Pape’s responses have been condensed and edited for clarity. You can
listen to the entire 18-minute interview below.
You can also download the whole show at iTunes [9]. It also featured Rebecca
Hamlin, an assistant professor of legal studies at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst and the author ofLet Me Be a Refugee: Administrative
Justice and the Politics of Asylum in the United States, Canada and
Australia [10], discussing Syrian refugees, and Salon columnist Heather
"Digby" Parton talking about the ugly politics of terrorism.
?Joshua Holland is a contributor to The Nation and a writing fellow with The
Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute [11]. He's also the host of
Politics and Reality Radio [3].
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mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on iChr$(34)¿Herea??s What a
Man Who Studied Every Suicide Attack in the World Says About ISIS’ Motives
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Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-what-man-who-studied-every-suicide-attack-world-says-about-isis-motives
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/joshua-holland-0
[2] http://www.thenation.com
[3]
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/politics-and-reality-radio/id931213292?mt=2
[4]
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2015/11/19/3724020/clinton-defends-muslims/
[5]
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
[6]
http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/
[7]
https://hbr.org/2015/11/why-people-keep-saying-thats-what-the-terrorists-want
[8]
http://www.thenation.com/article/whats-real-reason-al-qaeda-attacked-charlie-hebdo/
[9]
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/politics-and-reality-radio/id931213292
[10]
http://www.amazon.com/Let-Me-Refugee-Administrative-Australia/dp/0199373310
[11] http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/
[12] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on ?Here’s What a Man Who
Studied Every Suicide Attack in the World Says About ISIS’ Motives
[13] http://www.alternet.org/
[14] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
