The Export and Import of Suicide Bombers
by Yoram Schweitzer
(Updated May 2003)
The suicide
bombing on the Tel
Aviv promenade that killed two Israelis and a French woman working
as a waitress in "Mike's Place" Pub was essentially just another
entry in the roster of terrorist attacks that have long since become
a routine part of life in Israel. Since 1993, there have been about
155 suicide attacks carried out by almost 250 perpetrators. In this
case, what the two bombers did was precisely what so many others before
them had done in response to exhortations by Palestinian
terrorist organizations, especially Islamist ones, as well as by al-Qaeda and its offshoots - to walk "in the path of God" ("Fi
Sabil Illah").
True, the attack came immediately after the appointment
of Abu Mazen as Palestinian
Prime Minister. That does not necessarily mean that Abu Mazen has no
intention of trying to change the course of Palestinian affairs. But
it does serve to underscore the fact that Abu Mazen is still too constrained
by Yasir Arafat as well
as by various terrorist organizations, including Fatah in its various guises (Tanzim,
al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades) to do that, at least in the short term. Since
these elements have shown no more willingness to renounce the "right
of terror" than to renounce the "right of return," the
attack simply showed that the mere assumption of office by Abu Mazen
does not mean an early end to this method of action.
Perhaps more suggestive was the fact that the two
perpetrators, Asif Muhammad Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, were British
citizens of Pakistani origin. The reliance on imported suicide bombers
has been widely interpreted by the media as a significant innovation.
In fact, there is nothing particularly novel about the involvement of
foreigners in Palestinian terrorism. Even back in the early 1970s, the
"secular" Palestinian terrorist organizations recruited young
people, mainly females, especially young Europeans (British, Dutch)
and South Americans (Peruvians) to bypass strict Israeli security checks
and smuggle explosives onto aircraft or into Israel. Some of these foreign
accomplices were dupes but some were fully conscious of their roles
and willingly took part in what they saw as a romantic international
revolutionary struggle represented by Palestinian organizations led
by Yasir Arafat, George Habash and Ahmad Jibril.
In the latter half of the 1990s, Shi'ites entered the picture and even managed to infiltrate into Israel foreign
citizens or bearers of foreign travel documents in order to carry out
terrorist attacks. The most prominent example was Steven Smirek, a German
who converted to Islam and was recruited by Hizbullah in Germany and dispatched to Israel after expressing a willingness to
carry out a suicide attack. He was apprehended when he landed at Ben
Gurion Airport in November 1997 for what was meant by his Hizbullah
handlers to be a training mission and a test of his determination and
capabilities. Hizbullah, whose leaders consistently deny any involvement
in terrorism outside the borders of Lebanon,
also sent Lebanese Shi'ites with foreign passports or nationality to
Israel (by way of Europe), who posed as businessmen or tourists. The
most notorious of these was Hussein Mikdad, who arrived in Israel on
a flight from Switzerland. In April 1996, he was caught in possession
of explosive materials apparently provided by local Palestinians after
a bomb he was assembling in his room at the Lawrence Hotel in East Jerusalem
exploded prematurely, leaving him seriously wounded. Other examples
include Gerard Shuman, who carried Sierra Leone travel documents and
was caught in Jerusalem after arriving on a flight from Britain in January
2000, and Hussein Ayoub, who was apprehended in 2002.
Al-Qaeda, which ceaselessly struggles to inject itself
into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as part of its global Islamic jihad against the "Judeo-Crusader
axis of evil," has also sent its own operatives to Israel. One
of these was Richard Reid, a British citizen who converted to Islam
during his stay in a British prison and subsequently made his way to
al-Qaeda. In July 2000, after undergoing training in Afghanistan, Reid,
posing as a tourist, came to Israel to gather information about various
targets in Israel in order to plan for terrorist attacks. Reid later
gained notoriety as "the shoe bomber." He was captured in
December 2001 during a suicide mission for al-Qaeda when a bomb he carried
in his shoes onto an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami failed
to detonate. Al-Qaeda was also implicated in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict when Nabil Ukal, a Hamas-affiliated
Palestinian who underwent training in Usama Bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan,
returned to Gaza and tried to set up a terrorist network before being
captured in June 2000.
All in all, there is nothing new in the recruitment of immigrant and
second-generation Muslims in Europe by al-Qaeda and other organizations
in order to carry out terrorist operations, including suicide attacks.
Many of these recruits have been arrested by the French, Italian, British
and German security services. Nor do the attacks constitute a precedent
insofar as young Britons of Pakistani origin are concerned. In 2000,
for example, one such youth who had been recruited in Britain and trained
in Afghanistan carried out a suicide attack on an Indian Army base in
Srinagar, Kashmir. Umar Sheikh, who was convicted of involvement in
the kidnap and murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl at the
beginning of 2002 and was implicated in the kidnapping of other foreigners
in India going back to 1995, underwent a similar course after he abandoned
his studies at the London School of Economics in favor of terrorism
and joined the ranks of "Global Jihad."
The media have correctly reported several tactical innovations in the
suicide bombing at Mike's Place: the itinerary followed by the bombers
(Britain-Damascus-Jordan-Gaza-Tel Aviv); the use of very sophisticated
explosive material; and possible coordination between Hamas elements
in Damascus and Gaza and Islamist supporters of al-Qaeda in Britain.
But the involvement of foreigners, in and of itself, is not new. Instead,
this bombing simply provides one more warning sign to western leaders
about the threat of globalized Islamic terror, the futility of trying
to contain terror beyond the borders of their own countries, and the
need for effective, coordinated action against it.
Sources: Tel Aviv University
- The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies |