Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (44 page)

At the trial of eight men accused of planning to bomb transatlantic airliners in the summer of 2006 with homemade liquid explosives, the “martyrdom video” of one of the men, AbdullahAhmed Ali, was played. There was relish in the prospect of shredding flesh:

I’m doing this … to punish and to humiliate the
kuffar
[nonbe-lievers], to teach them a lesson that they will never forget…. Leave us alone. Stop meddling in our affairs and we will leave you alone. Otherwise expect floods of martyr operations against you and we will take our revenge and anger, ripping amongst your people and scattering the people and your body parts and your people’s body parts responsible for these wars and oppression, decorating the streets.
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In all societies, moral norms strongly constrain and punish murder, rape, torture, desecrating the body, pillage, and plunder. But in war, all may be allowed, even encouraged. A man who kills many in our own society is a mass murderer. In war, mass killing may rate the Medal of Honor: Sergeant Alvin York, America’s best-known World War I war hero, religiously rejected all forms of violence at home but got a ticker tape parade for attacking a German machine gun nest and killing twenty-eight. Torture “is basically subject to perception,” said CIA lawyer Jonathan Friedman, according to meeting minutes released at a Senate hearing in June 2008. “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”
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Arguably, this may be some sort of an advance over cannibalizing an enemy, but it’s doubtful the victims appreciate the difference.

War has been a supremely moral act for most societies throughout history. Hatred and dehumanization of the enemy as animals, or at least barbarians, is almost a constant of war that is fought in defense of the group. “Barbarian” is one way the United States government designates Al Qaeda, as Al Qaeda does the United States.

“The art of war,” Adam Smith wrote in
The Wealth of Nations,
“is certainly the noblest of all arts.”
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The reason, he argues, is thatit has allowed the progressive advance of commerce and civilization, bringing the greatest benefits of peace and prosperity to the most people for the longest time. People are most cooperative and creative when they fight others in war. “War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it,” exulted Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator and founder of modern fascism.
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This sentiment has been felt and proclaimed throughout history, regardless of whether war was to conquer or set people free.

War between human groups is as much or more a constant part of the evolution of society and civilization as peace. War is better at defining who the group is, what its boundaries are, and what it stands for. War is also more compelling and effective in generating solidarity with something larger and more lasting than ourselves. War compresses history and dramatically changes its course.

There is urgency, excitement, ecstasy, and altruistic exaltation in war, a mystic feeling of solidarity with something greater than oneself: a tribe, a nation, a movement—the Group. Following a successful attack during the American Civil War, a Union officer in the Twelfth New York expressed this common sentiment:

It is impossible to describe the feelings one experiences in such a moment. God, Country, Love, home, pride, conscious strength & power, all crowd your swelling breast … proud, proud as a man can feel over this victory to our arms—if it were a man’s privilege to die when he finished, he should die at such a moment.
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Nobel laureate William Faukner poignantly describes how these feelings so acutely linger in society well after war is done:
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For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet twoo’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet … we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time … the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory.

In peace, there is calm and, ultimately, boredom. I suspect that boredom’s role in generating war over the ages is considerable. It’s a big part of today’s story of why young men with few other lifeway channels or challenges join the jihad.

WAR MAKES MEN MEN, AND WOMEN SOMEWHAT DIFFERENT

Until very recently, hunting and warfare have been occupations of men. Indeed, in most cultures, initiation into manhood has required proof of skill in hunting savage beasts or men. Among the Maasai of Kenya, a boy would become a man by killing a lion and then going to war. Frontiersmen of British and French North America got manly reputations from hunting bear and scalping Indians. For many Native American tribes,
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a man had to fight in war before he could be called a man.
²⁰
Among the Dorzé of Ethiopia, to become a man meant taking as a trophy an enemy’s testicles—the larger the testicles, the greater a man he would become. For the Naga of Assam (India), the Iatmul of New Guinea, and the Shuar of Peru, to become a man was to take off the head of another.
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And, of course, warfare is often linked to male sexuality, from the strategic planning and vocabulary of invasions, to the ecstasy of conquest,and down to the thrusting and penetrating motions of much weaponry. Not to mention modern “missile envy.”

In
The Descent of Man,
Darwin noted that most human violence is committed by young men. About 80 percent to 90 percent of all human killing is committed by males, most of them aged fourteen to thirty-five.
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In the United States, for example, men were responsible for 88 percent of all homicides between 1976 and 2004, and nearly three-fourths of these involved men killing other men. The peak years for murder in recent U.S. history were 1990 to 1994, when the homicide rate exceeded 9 killed per 100,000 people (it’s been between 5 and 6 for the last few years).
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In those years, the number of killers ranged from 23 to 30 per 100,000 for male teens aged fourteen to seventeen, from 34 to 41 per 100,000 for young men aged eighteen to twenty-four, and 15 to 18 per 100,000 for men aged twenty-five to thirty-five.
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These trends closely follow statistics for killing in war, except that in war nearly 100 percent of killing is by men. Only in the last few decades of human history have women played any appreciable killing role in war, a dubious advance for women’s rights.

Controlled experiments by the Dutch team of Mark Van Vugt, David De Cremer, and Dirk Janseen show that men sacrifice more for their group when it is competing against other groups (as in war) than if there were no intergroup rivalry.
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Women generally scored higher than men on measures of cooperation within the group, and their levels of cooperation were not significantly affected by inter-group competition. Men scored higher than women on cooperation only when competition with other groups was in the offing. Men kill much more than women do in competitive situations and with and for small bands of buddies. And men often celebrate their conquests between the legs of women, whereas evolutionary psychology and history suggest that women who win are less likely to mirror that sort of behavior.

The data on suicide bombing bear out these general trends.Among groups that allow female suicide bombers, fewer than 15 percent of suicide bombers are women. Overall, the rate of female suicide bombing corresponds to the general rate of female homicide and participation in war. Only among the Chechens and Tamil Tigers have female suicide bombers been represented in significant numbers. About a third of Tamil Tigers suicide bombers were young women and girls, carefully selected, cultivated, and trained for their missions because females could pass more easily through security and their dress could better hide bombs. Once enrolled, these living dead couldn’t opt out lest they be executed or their families punished.

Revenge for close family members seems to be a highly significant motivator for female suicide bombers. At least this appears to be so where data are available: in Chechnya, Iraq, and Palestine. There are cases of male suicide bombers out for revenge, but studies by Ariel Merari for Palestine indicate it is not significant overall, nor can it be so for the several hundred foreign volunteers in the “Sinjar” group for jihad and martyrdom in Iraq.
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A recent study of captured Al Qaeda volunteers by the Saudi Ministry of the Interior also fails to indicate revenge or death of a close relative as a relevant factor.
²⁷

Lindsay O’Rourke, a political science student at the University of Chicago who has studied female suicide attacks across the world since 1981, surmised in the
New York Times
that “surprisingly similar motives” drive men and women to blow themselves up: “The primary motivation of male and female suicide bombers is a deep loyalty to their communities combined with a variety of personal grievances … it is simply impossible to say one sex cares more about the others.”
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She argues that “95 percent of female suicide attacks occurred within the context of a military campaign against occupying forces,” that is, in a situation of intergroup conflict.

But the issue is not who cares more about the group; it’s how they care. Cross-cultural research on killing by women undertakenby psychologists Margo Wilson, Martin Daley, and David Buss indicates that women kill most often in self-defense and in defense of family, especially children.
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Between June 2000 and April 2010, more than one-third of the sixty or so Chechen suicide bombers were women. Known as “Black Widows,” they mostly volunteered to revenge the deaths of family members. For example, on November 29, 2001, Elza Gazueva volunteered for a bombing mission after her husband and brother were tortured and killed by Russian forces. She went to the Russian military headquarters and managed to get close enough to the commandant who was responsible for taking her husband and brother from her home and who had ordered their torture and death. Gazueva approached the commandant asking, “Do you remember me?” before exploding herself and killing him. Most of the other cases are quite similar, from the first Chechen suicide bombers, Khava Baraeva and Luiza Magomadova in June 2000, to Roza Nogaeva and Mariam Tuburova in September 2004.
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Chechen suicide bombings fell off in the wake of popular revulsion to the Beslan massacre in September 2004, when Islamists seized a school in North Ossetia (Russian Federation), demanding an end to the Russian occupation of Chechnya. (In the ensuing gun battle between the hostage takers and Russian security forces, more than 300 hostages were killed, including nearly 200 children.) But bombing resumed in 2007, when the pro-Russian Chechen government moved to crush remaining militants in coordination with Russia’s newly picked president of neighboring Dagestan. Dzhanet Abdullayeva, the seventeen-year-old widow of a Dagestani rebel she had met through the Internet and who was killed in 2009, was one of two “Black Widows” responsible for the March 2010 Moscow subway bombings, in which forty people died.
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As O’Rourke notes, women, although occasionally involved in mass bombings, are five times more likely than men to target specific individuals for assassination. Male suicide bombers rarely act against singled-out individuals, and even more rarely act alone. Inalmost all cases, males form part of a small group of friends that becomes a “band of brothers” whose members die for one another as much or more than for any cause. The Saudi study finds that 64 percent join through friends and 24 percent through family, a result that accords with Marc Sageman’s research on how volunteers across the world join the Al Qaeda–inspired movement.
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We’ve already seen some detailed examples of how these bands of buddies form. There are a few examples of two, three, or four Chechen, Uzbek, and Iraqi women striking in a coordinated suicide bombing, but scant evidence that these operations involved close friends.

Although the jihad discriminates against frontline participation by women (as most military organizations and groups still do) their occasional participation does little to lessen the general lesson that jihad is a team and blood sport for morally outraged and glory-seeking young men.

THE RISING RISK FROM ASYMMETRIC CONFLICTS AND VERY BIG WARS

The rise of large-scale, cooperative civilization has reduced death from individual violence and natural hazard. In modern times, the frequency and lethality of “small wars” have also progressively declined among nations increasingly intertwined within global trade networks. But large, catastrophic intercontinental wars that markedly change the course of history have only increased in severity.