An Interview with Mia Bloom

In Dying to Kill Mia Bloom examines the use, strategies, successes, and failures of suicide bombing in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe and assesses the effectiveness of government responses. Bloom boldly contends that social and political motivations inspire suicide bombers, and she develops a theory explaining why terrorist tactics work in some instances and fail in others.nnQuestion: Are there different types of terrorism? nnMia Bloom: In Dying to Kill I identify several strains of terrorism and break down nationalist and secular terrorism and religiously inspired terror. There are important differences among the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK), and groups like Hizb’allah and Hamas. In the book I also break down the different kinds of terrorist forces attacking Americans in Iraq.nnQ: What is religious terrorism? nnMB: Religious terrorists seek to use violence to further what they see as divinely commanded purposes, often targeting broad categories of enemies in an attempt to bring about change. Religious terrorists come from many major faiths, as well as from small cults. This type of terrorism is growing swiftly; nearly half of the known, active international terrorist groups are religiously motivated. Because religious terrorists are concerned not with rallying a constituency of fellow nationalists or ideologues but with pursuing their own vision of the divine will, they lack one of the major constraints that historically has limited the scope of terror attacks. The book argues that the most extreme religious terrorists can sanction almost limitless violence against a virtually open-ended category of targets: that is, anyone who is not a member of the terrorists’ religion or religious sect.nnQ: What differentiates nationalist and secularist terrorism from religiously motivated acts?nnMB: Nationalist terrorists are seeking to liberate a homeland territory. They have stated goals, boundaries, and territory that can be divided. One can sit at the table with them and discuss options. On the other hand, religious terrorists are generally more difficult to reason with because they have God on their side. If you oppose them, you are evil and must be destroyed.nnQ: Do suicide terrorists fit a common profile?nnMB:  We used to think so, but after September 11, and after some of the tactical innovations of the terror groups themselves, we cannot point to any physical or socioeconomic indicators. We used to assume that Middle Eastern suicide bombers were poor, not very well educated, and possibly psychologically damaged young men in their early twenties, and that older men, who were better educated and had more social status, would be less inclined to kill themselves.nnQ: Do women ever become suicide bombers? nnA. Yes. Women have carried out around one-third of the LTTE’s suicide attacks in Sri Lanka and two-thirds of the PKK’s in Turkey. Women bombers in Chechnya, known as the “Black Widows,” have been particularly effective. All of the groups, along with the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, have used seemingly pregnant women to get past security checks on the way to their targets. In January 2002, Palestinian secular groups began using women bombers; within a year, the militant Islamic groups jumped on the bandwagon. Al Qaeda has yet to use women although it has established a new website (Al Khansa) intended to mobilize and encourage female participation.nnQ: Do suicide terrorists work on their own?nnMB: Rarely. Instead of thinking of suicide terrorists as passionate people driven to kill themselves and others out of a spontaneous surge of emotion, we should regard them as a sort of guided missile, carefully prepared and launched by some larger, organized terrorist group. In other words, suicide terrorism is chiefly a deliberate tactic used by terrorist groups, not an individual act of rage.nnQ: Is suicide terrorism more dangerous than traditional terrorism?nnMB: Yes, because it can make it easier for terrorist groups to achieve dramatic results. Once the suicide terrorist is psychologically ready for the job, planning the rest of the operation can be less complicated than it would be if the terrorist’s life needed to be safeguarded. (For instance, the September 11 pilots did not need to learn how to land a plane, only how to fly it into a building.) A clever and determined suicide terrorist, moreover, may be able to get closer to a target than other delivery methods could and can make last-minute tactical decisions like swerving toward crowds or pausing before they detonate until more potential victims gather—that render their attacks more effective and more deadly. Finally, the organizations do not need to worry about an operative revealing any information since he or she is dead. In the book I have included a number of interviews with failed bombers (people caught en route, some who changed their minds, or bombers whose equipment failed them). These personal accounts add an additional nuance to understanding what motivates the individuals as well as the groups engaged in suicide terrorism.nnQ: Can suicide terrorism be prevented?nnMB: Sometimes. Good, timely intelligence can potentially prevent or disrupt a suicide attack. In 1997, for example, police in Brooklyn arrested two men, one Palestinian and the other Lebanese as they were finalizing plans for a suicide-bomb attack in the New York City subways. And since suicide terrorism is less a spontaneous individual act than a method used by existing terrorist groups, using human intelligence to infiltrate the network of the organization may be useful.nnCertain kinds of counter-terror operations may have the reverse effect, so I highlight in the book strategies that have proven to be mostly effective. Strong arm tactics may work in the short run but may also have unintended consequences. Nonetheless if a competent terrorist organization can operate freely and keep its operations secret, stopping its suicide attacks may be extremely difficult. Thus, I emphasize that solving the problem of suicide terrorism should involve a number of different tactics working in concert.nnQ: What grade would you give the Bush administration in homeland security? What has been done well and what needs improvement?nnMB: The Bush Administration, by passing the intelligence reforms suggested by the 9/11 Commission report, is beginning to make some progress. Many of the Bush government’s foreign policy decisions, however, complicate our ability to fight the war on terror by making more enemies than friends.

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