Nationalism, zealotry and humiliation drive suicide attacks

BEERSHEBA, Israel – A bomb strapped to his abdomen, Rafat Moqadi walked into a Tel Aviv restaurant and saw a woman dining with her two little girls. “Seeing that, I decided not to carry out the operation. I couldn’t do it,” he said.

Yet, Moqadi said he longed for what he believes awaits a suicide bomber in the hereafter – God’s reward and a special place in heaven for martyrs. “He has a life in paradise,” he told the Associated Press on Thursday. “He doesn’t die.”

A rare jailhouse interview with the would-be suicide bomber revealed a common thread running through the rising worldwide phenomenon: Most attackers are driven not by poverty or ignorance, but by a lethal mix of nationalism, zealotry and humiliation.

As the pace of attacks increases in the Middle East and beyond, a surprising profile is emerging of those willing to take their own lives: many are young, middle class and educated.

Nearly four-fifths of all suicide attacks over the past 35 years have occurred since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes in the U.S., according to the RAND Center for Terrorism Risk Management. And 80 percent of those have been carried out by radical Islamic groups, said the center’s director, Bruce Hoffman.

But religion is only part of the picture. Moqadi said that wasn’t his motivation.

“The main reason was to resist the (Israeli) occupation, to create a balance of power with the Israeli army,” he said.

“At the moment they put the (explosives) belt on me there were a few seconds of doubt,” he said. “But after that I felt strength. I felt stronger than the whole state of Israel. It was a good feeling.”

Moqadi, who is serving a 14-year sentence in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, said he graduated from high school and worked with his brothers laying tile before joining the Hamas militant group in 2002. The soft-spoken 26-year-old with neatly cropped hair said he did so in response to massive gunbattles between Israeli forces and Palestinians in Jenin.

Moqadi is not alone in having doubts before pressing the button, said Ariel Merari, an Israeli psychologist who has interviewed numerous would-be bombers.

“A person who volunteers usually hesitates. He has second thoughts,” Merari said.

Often what makes the person carry out the mission is commitment to a group, making it difficult to back out without losing face, experts say.

“Usually there are rites and rituals just before launching that constitute the last nail in the coffin,” Merari said.

For Palestinian attackers, the last ritual is usually the making of a videotape in which the bomber proclaims commitment to national liberation.

Since the early 1980s, three countries have accounted for the vast majority of suicide bombings: Iraq, Israel and Sri Lanka. Iraq has become the global leader in suicide attacks, with an average of two a day during the past six months, attracting jihadists the world over, said Merari, who studies the issue at Tel Aviv University.

Recent studies have debunked some common misperceptions about suicide bombers: that most are poor, that they’re in it for personal revenge, that they’re crazy and uneducated.

Many suicide bombers have come from middle class families and have attended university. But most were “relatively unimportant people, not leader types but follower types,” Merari said.