Why do people become terrorists?

Journal of International Criminal Justice

Volumn 6, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 507-524

  Spataro, Armando ^a  

^a Department of the Milan Prosecution Service ^*  (Italy)

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EID: 49449092672     PISSN: 14781387     EISSN: 14781395     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jicj/mqn033     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. The term 'so-called Islamic terrorism' is adopted here partly to comply with the joint request of authoritative representatives of the magistracies, police forces, and academic worlds of various Islamic countries, who have pointed out in the course of various meetings, for scholarly purposes or those of international cooperation, that the ' so-called' is needed to avoid any inaccurate, not to say offensive, generalization.
2. J. Burke, Al Qaeda - Casting a Shadow of Terror (London/NY: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 239-240.
3. On this point see in any case the clarifications in Part 10.
4. These findings are in line with the conclusions of A.W. Kruglanski and S. Fishman 'Terrorism Between "Syndrome" and "Tool",' 15 Current Directions in Psychological Science (2006) 45-48 (see also X. Chen and A.W. Kruglanski, 'Psychological Bases of Support for Terrorism - Instrumentality and Morality Justification', Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, San Diego, California, 22 March 2006, online at http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p100000.index.html; visited 5 May 2008 , according to whom there is no relationship between the terrorist option on the one hand and poverty, education or positions of social disadvantage on the other: They are neither necessary nor sufficient causes for it.
5. Jihad: The term, rendered in Western languages, often erroneously, as 'holy war', literally means 'struggle', 'effort' accomplished 'on the path of God'.
6. Similar stories are recounted by Jason Burke, who has spent a lot of time in Afghanistan: 'Modern Islamic terrorists are made, not born. There are various stages in that process of creation. The route to terrorism starts with a feeling that something is wrong that needs to be set right. This can be a real problem or merely a perceived injustice (or indeed both). The second stage is the feeling that the problem, whether cosmic or purely personal, cannot be solved without recourse to a mode of action or activism beyond those provided for by a given society's political or legal framework. The third stage changes the individual from being an activist, or even a militant, into a terrorist. It involves the acceptance of an ideology or the development of a worldview that allows the powerful social barriers that stop most people from committing acts of violence to be overcome .... This is the moment when an individual begins to conceive of ... acts of appalling brutality ....' (Burke, supra note 2, at 247-248).
7. A.W. Kruglanski, 'Inside the Terrorist Mind', Paper presented to the National Academy of Science at its annual meeting Washington D.C., 29 April 2002, at 4.
8. According to A.W. Kruglanski and A. Golec, in order to understand the individual motivations of suicide terrorism one ought also to bear in mind, given the prevalent age group of the suicides (18-27), the surge in testosterone and consequent increase in aggressiveness against self and others, as well as the greater degree of influenceability and rebellion, connected with the passage from adolescence to adulthood ('Individual Motivations, The Group Process and Organizational Strategies in Suicide Terrorism', in E.M. Meyersson Milgrom (ed), Suicide Missions and the Market for Martyrs: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).
9. S. Varvin, 'Terrorism and Victimization: Individual and Large-Group Dynamics' in S. Varvin and V.D. Volkan (eds), Violence or Dialogue? Psychoanalytic Insights on Terror and Terrorism (London: Institute of Psychonalytic Association, 2003) maintains that 'Acts of violence, terrorism and atrocities do not necessarily involve manifest psychopathology at the individual level. Malignant group processes may involve the individual in atrocities that may be lent a "higher" rationale .... On a group level, the violence is associated with the threatening of identity and group cohesion .... At an individual level, violence is concerned with the ultimate threat of identity and individuality' (at 57-58).
10. See also, H. Shmuel Erlich, 'Reflections on the Terrorist Mind', in Varvin and Volkan, ibid., chap. 9, who states that certainly the terrorist's mind 'is not marked by gross deviance', and 'the attempt to depict "the Terrorist" as a deranged, emotionally deprived and impoverished, mentally ill person is misleading and basically wrong' (at 148).
11. As far as we know, this childhood story is in many ways similar to that of the Egyptian Mohammed Atta, one of the attackers on 11 September 2001.
12. From the interrogation in October 2003 of Dedar Khalid Khaler, at Suleimaniya in Kurdistan, by Norwegian police officers.
13. From the interrogation in October 2003 of Raza Sirwa Abdul Karim, at Suleimaniya in Kurdistan, by Norwegian police officers.
14. From the interview of Keis Abu Assim (Abu Assi) by Professor Marco Lombardi, Dipartimento di Sociologia dell'Università Cattolica di Milano (http://ww.unicatt.it/progetto/kurdistan/cattolica7.bis/ terroristi.htm; visited 5 May 2008).
15. The declaration was also signed by Al-Zawahiri (in his capacity as emir of Egyptian Islamic Jihad), Abu- Yasir Rifa'i Ahmad Taha (of the Egyptian al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya) and Fazlur Rahman (emir of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh).
16. In connection with the relationship between religion and terrorism, see J. Anderson Thomson Jr. ('Killer Apes on American Airlines, or: How Religion was the Main Hijacker on September 11' in Varvin and Volkan (eds), supra note 9, chap. 4) writes: 'Religions serve as a cultural adaptation for facilitating terrorism and war. They permit the take-over of groups by disenfranchised young males. Belief in an afterlife and a reward for dying in a holy war helps minimize the fear of death in the pursuit of conquests' (at 82). The three monotheistic religions preach that death is not the end of an individual's existence, which enables the religious warriors to minimize the fear of death' (at 83).
17. W. Bohleber, 'Collective Phantasms, Destructiveness and Terrorism', in Varvin and Volkan (eds), supra note 9, at 111-130.
18. In relation to the 'Palestinian question' too, however, the advance of the 'Islamization' of certain modes of action seems clear: On the Hamas-Al Fatah dichotomy that highlights the probable or possible fracture among Arab Moslems, 'a fracture in the present portending the fracture of the future', the Syrian poet Adonis, whose real name is Ali Ahmad Sa'id Isbir, has written: 'The strength of Hamas lies not only in these [material, ed.] weapons but in the religious bases on which it rests .... The violence of the armed illusion ... is not, then, a violence surrounded by frontiers, for it crosses them as if it wanted to wipe out the Earth itself. For the Earth, according to Hamas, is Dar al-Islam (the abode of Islam) wherever it be and wherever it can be imagined to be, beyond nations, languages and countries, and beyond history. This is a transcontinental extension that runs through the Islamic jihadist organizations in all their denominations, forms and variants. Thus Hamas seems to be fighting current history while remaining within the universal orbit of Islamic history whereas Al Fatah seems to be fighting a specific, delimited enemy, remaining within the orbit of power. Hamas is in every Islamic place, Al Fatah only in the West Bank or Gaza' ('If Hamas and Al Fatah read Shakespeare', La Repubblica, 9 November 2007).
19. G.A. Awad, 'Contributi psicoanalitici per una teoria unificata del terrorismo', in P. Capozzi, Alle radici dell'Odio, un'analisi del fenomeno terrorismo ('Quaderni del Centro Milanese di Psicoanalisi Cesare Musatti', September 2006) remarks that 'an event that happens in Iraq or in Algeria acts on populations living at distances of hundreds or even thousands of kms. What do these populations living in such different geographical areas have in common? They share a level of identity, viz. the Arab, Islamic or Arab-Islamic identity ....' G. Salvi, considering the characteristics of terrorism of the Islamic type, also picks out what he calls the 'delocalization of the jihadist organizations, a primary consequence of the many conflicts in the course of which the itinerant combatants (moving from Bosnia to Chechnya, to Kashmir, to Iraq) were trained', but, while noting that 'the spread of these areas of conflict and the sharing of a common psychological substrate bring an unprecedented integration among the diverse backgrounds of the militants', he arrives at the conclusion that 'the delocalization does not at all imply lesser relevance for the local conflict situations [since] it is in just such situations that the origin of the militant experience and the greater recruitment capacity of the terrorist organizations even in areas not involved in the conflicts, for instance the countries of Europe, is rooted' ('Ciò che non dobbiamo imparare dall'America', Limes, 16 February 2007, 'L'America in panne').
20. The videocassette seized in a flat in Leganés (Madrid) occupied by terrorists had been recorded on 27 March 2004 at 00.05 a.m. and shows a few terrorists with covered faces reading the communiqué claiming the massacre committed on 11 March.
21. Burke, supra note 2, says that the men who had been in Afghanistan, under the bombs at Tora Bora, 'were from the Yemen, Egypt, the Sudan and Algeria as well as from southwest Asia. The reason for what had happened at Tora Bora involved their histories as much as those of the Afghans' (at 4).
22. The third pillar of Islam and one of the most important religious duties, the religious tax or zakat is, in a sense, the debt to God that the Moslem owes for what He has given: It is a way to purify ( za-ka-ha) oneself and make legal whatever one possesses. Zakat, like other religious duties, is mentioned in the Koran.
23. It is once again proper to refer to the work - from which the assessments here summarized are taken - of Jason Burke (supra note 2), who has analysed inter alios the lives of: Osama bin Laden
24. Abdallah Azzam, the ideologue and spiritual guide of bin Laden, killed by a car bomb in Peshawar in November 1989
25. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian paediatrician who also seems to have had great influence on bin Laden's thinking
26. Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, jointly responsible for the first attack on the World Trade Center on 26 February 1993
27. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, among the key authors of the plan for 11 September and one of the most dangerous members of bin Laden's group
28. Mohammed Atta, Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi, three of the suicide attackers on 11 September
29. Ramzi bin al-Shibh, coordinator of the Hamburg cell, likewise involved in planning the 11 September attack
30. Ahmed Ressam, arrested in the USA in December 1999 and involved in the 'Millennium plot'
31. Fateh Kamel and Abderraouf Hannachi, both Algerians and veterans of the wars in Bosnia and Afghanistan, also involved in the same plot
32. Omar Saeed Sheikh, responsible for the kidnapping and brutal murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl
33. Abu Zubaydah, bin Laden's right-hand man in coordinating and moving volunteers in the training camps in Afghanistan
34. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and leader of the terrorism in Iraq until killed in 2006 following an American attack.
35. Only one woman, for instance, has been charged in Italy in connection with criminal proceedings for acts of international terrorism: She was, however, charged with the crime of 'assistance' to members of the terrorist grouping, having housed them, looked after a sum of money, and procured false documents for them.
36. The historical reconstruction and the texts are taken from S. Campana and C. Reschia, Quando l'orrore è donna (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 2005), 64.
37. Thenmuli Rajaratnam, the Tamil Tiger who killed Rajiv Gandhi and 16 others at Sriperumbudur (India) on 21 May 1991 by blowing herself up while pretending to put a garland of flowers round his neck: One of the first examples of this mode of action favoured by the criminal's gender. In Iraq, much more recently, one female suicide bomber was pregnant and another pretended to be.
38. Campana and Reschia, supra note 24, at 29-31.
39. Ibid., at 62-64.