Middle East Strategy at Harvard

MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Assaf Moghadam is a research fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, and a member of MESH. His new book is The Globalization of Martyrdom: Al Qaeda, Salafi Jihad, and the Diffusion of Suicide Attacks.

From Assaf Moghadam

The Globalization of Martyrdom is the product of a more than decade-long, intensive interest I have taken in studying suicide terrorism.

In this book, I argue that two distinct patterns of suicide terrorism have evolved. The vast majority of studies on suicide terrorism to date have focused on the traditional pattern of “localized” suicide attacks carried out by such groups as Hezbollah, the LTTE (”Tamil Tigers”), Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Fatah, and the PKK—the groups responsible for the bulk of suicide attacks during the 1980s and 1990s. Although these groups continue to be fervent enemies of Israel, Sri Lanka, and Turkey, and most continue to plot violent attacks against their foes, most suicide attacks today are perpetrated by other groups, targeting different countries. Especially since 9/11, suicide missions by Al Qaeda, its affiliates, and other Salafi-Jihadist groups have risen exponentially, far outnumbering the attacks conducted by the previously dominant groups. They also target far more countries than have other groups before, and their attacks are more deadly. For these reasons, suicide attacks by Al Qaeda and its associated movements are the new epicenter of this deadly phenomenon and form a new pattern of “globalized” suicide attacks.

I argue that existing explanations of suicide attacks, most notably the notions that suicide terrorism are the result of foreign occupation or organizational outbidding, fail to account for the global proliferation of this tactic. I believe that the reason for the spread of suicide attacks instead lies in the evolution of Al Qaeda into a global terrorist actor and in the growing appeal of its guiding ideology, the Salafi Jihad. The Globalization of Martyrdom describes in detail how both Al Qaeda and Salafi-Jihadist ideology place utmost importance on the two core elements of the globalization of suicide attacks: the element of suicide operations, and the globalization of terrorist activity.

As I write in the opening passages of the book, my interest in this particularly sinister tactic began in the mid-1990s, when I witnessed the devastating consequences of one of the first early campaigns of suicide terrorism as a college student in Jerusalem. My early fascination with this tactic led me to write my masters’ thesis on Palestinian suicide terrorism, and later a doctoral dissertation examining the global proliferation of this modus operandi. Based on my dissertation, The Globalization of Martyrdom provides a history of suicide missions and their precursors from the biblical Samson to the murder of Benazhir Bhutto; a description of the importance of suicide attacks for Al Qaeda and other Salafi-Jihadist groups; and detailed case studies of suicide attacks in modern theaters ranging from Afghanistan, Algeria, Chechnya, and Iraq to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and half a dozen other countries. My findings are based in part on an analysis of a dataset of nearly 1,300 suicide attacks between 1981 and April 2007. (I recently updated that data set to 1,857 suicide attacks which I analyze in an article forthcoming in International Security.)

The Globalization of Martyrdom highlights the importance of ideology—an issue neglected in nearly all existing studies of suicide attacks. Examining the wills, farewell videos, and other reports about suicide attackers, I found that many of the suicide bombers echo Salafi-Jihadist doctrines. They adopt the general worldview offered by this ideology; the same diagnosis about the reasons for Islam’s relative decline; the belief that Islam is attacked by an evil coalition; and the argument that their personal participation in martyrdom operations is the ultimate proof of their religious devotion. They have internalized Al Qaeda’s and its Salafi-Jihadist allies’ broad conception of the enemy as being composed not only of Westerners in general, Christians, and Jews, but also of those Muslims whose beliefs and practices do not meet the standards set by Salafi-Jihadists. They also buy into the Salafi-Jihadist belief that martyrdom is the ultimate form of waging jihad.

In my conclusion, I suggest that while a strategy to counter suicide terrorism clearly consists of several important components, challenging Salafi-Jihadist ideology is among the more important and overlooked elements. It is incumbent particularly upon Muslims to challenge a threat that places them at even higher risk than it places Western countries, since it is an indisputable fact that Salafi-Jihadist terrorism kills Muslims in far greater numbers than it kills Westerners. The Salafi Jihad suffers from a fundamental contradiction: on the one hand, it claims to act for the benefit of Islam; but on the other hand, Muslims suffer the consequences of Salafi-Jihadist ideology and terrorism more than any other group. Muslims should expose this fundamental hypocrisy as often and as forcefully as possible.

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