He does not stop on his mission: the 18-year-old boy is now a perfect soldier. Downstairs on the No 30 bus he fiddles again and again with his equipment. Something is wrong, the circuit is broken. He could so easily turn back and save his life. But at 9.47am the device finally works and Hasib Hussain, on the top deck, joins his comrades in paradise by blowing himself to pieces. Thirteen innocent passengers are killed.
My name is Robert Baer. For 21 years I worked as a CIA agent in the Middle East. I was stationed there when the first suicide bomber appeared from nowhere and blew up our embassy in Beirut in 1983. I survived — I was not there that day — but six of my close CIA colleagues were killed. I can still remember seeing pictures of the embassy after the explosion, staring at the collapsed floor and smoking rubble. The whole building was pancaked. And all that remained was to pull out the crushed bodies.
The embassy bombing was not just a devastating terrorist strike. It was the beginning of a new kind of warfare — the suicide bomber. At the time in the CIA we had no idea who or what had hit us. All we knew was that a truck had somehow been driven into the lobby. The idea that this was a human bomb, a “martyr” operation, was inconceivable to us.
But once I knew a human being had done this I made it my mission to discover the name and face of the bomber, and thus identify the organisation or state who carried out the attack. Beirut was a dangerous, lawless place back then, the first of the western hostages were being seized, and it took years of patient spying, and the recruitment of sources within Hezbollah, before I had a name and old picture of the bomber — Mahmud Hassuna.
He was a Shi’ite from a village in the south whose family was told he was “martyred” on the battlefields of the ongoing Iran-Iraq war. In reality he was one of Hezbollah’s first suicide bombers in Iran’s undeclared war against the United States.
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What’s the connection between Hassuna and Hasib Hussain, an 18-year-old British Asian who was born four years after Hassuna killed himself? Although separated by time, sect and ethnic origin they all share the same deadly virtue — their willingness to sacrifice themselves to commit mass murder for a cause. I wasn’t surprised when British police discovered home-made “martyrdom” videos on laptops in recent raids. This terrorist “artwork”, a filmed declaration justifying the coming slaughter and debuting the latest would-be martyr, is an intrinsic element of the cult of the suicide bomber.
I have now left the CIA but over the past two years, with a British documentary company, I have gone back on the intelligence trail to trace the origins and evolution of that cult. From Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and now Britain we have followed the “virus” of the cult of the suicide bomber as it has migrated from one conflict to another and mutated from a weapon of war to a weapon of chaos.
The origins of suicide bombing lie among the Shi’ite in Iran. A 13-year-old child, Hossein Fahmideh, strapped rocket-propelled grenades to his chest and blew himself up under an Iraqi tank in November 1980. Ayatollah Khomeini’s embattled Islamic republic adopted Fahmideh as a national hero and as an inspiration for further bloodshed and martyrdom. Even today on the streets of Tehran huge propaganda posters depict Fahmideh as the “grandson” of the Islamic revolution.
The posters are adorned with tulips and beds of flowers — symbols of eternal life. His tomb on the outskirts of the city is a national monument, a site of pilgrimage for hundreds of thousands of Iranians. The Khomeini regime even issued every Iranian schoolchild with a plastic knapsack depicting Fahmideh’s heroic sacrifice under the tank and the grenades he used to blow himself up. It’s not difficult to read the message. In life you may be a nobody but if you die for Khomeini or his successors you will become a blessed shahid, a martyr, and rise up in death, and dwell in paradise.
Normally, it is not easy to persuade anyone to kill themselves. Think how instinctively even small children are wary of potential harm. To create a willing martyr like Fahmideh or Hasib Hussain you need to overwhelm every natural instinct. Suicide bombers are not born but indoctrinated. And it helps to have a cult that glorifies those who have blown themselves up and so encourage fresh recruits.
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The cult has easily spread itself, like the recipe for the bomber’s home-made explosives, over the internet. If you have just a few words of Arabic and know where to look you can download a constant stream of martyrdom videos from Iraq.
Western suicide bombing is a collective act, a tight conspiracy of individuals drawn together by what at the beginning is an unfocused anger at the West, their own sense of frustration with their lives and a search for identity. As the group tightens in on itself its distorted view of the world blocks all alternative viewpoints. Every allied blunder in Lebanon/ Iraq/ Afghanistan merely confirms what the group sees as a revealed truth that the US and its ally the UK are at war with the ummah, the entire Islamic world.
The videos, the glorification, compound the distorted world view of the would-be bombers and help cancel out other loyalties like marriage, love and education. A willingness to die becomes the ultimate loyalty test to the group and its leader. Both the September 11 cell, based in Hamburg, and the July 7 bombers spent a huge amount of time in each other’s company at mosques and gyms insulating themselves against the outside world.
But what makes suicide bombing different from other terrorism is its doctrine of religious sacrifice. For the would-be bomber the deliberate sacrifice of his or her own life is a guarantee of a place in paradise and thus a vindication of the deed. Dying on a distant Afghan battlefield fighting British troops and blowing yourself up in the toilet of a crowded transatlantic plane are one and the same.
I once asked a failed suicide bomber in an Israeli prison what he thought would happen to him when he pressed the detonator. “Jenna,” paradise was his one word answer. When I asked about the innocent bus passengers he said they would all be going to hell. I am sure the July 7 bombers thought the same way. Killing innocent London commuters was not just a necessary but a glorious act.
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How can anyone think like this? We live in an age of doubt. But for these would-be “seekers of paradise” the afterlife is real. On his last night on earth, Ziad Jarrah, the Lebanese-born hijacker pilot of United 93, wrote a final love note to his Turkish-German girlfriend Aysel Sengun: “I love you and I will always love you, until eternity. I don’t want you to get sad. I live somewhere else where you can’t see me and can’t hear me but I will see you and I will know how you are. And I will wait for you until you come to me.”
The July 7 ringleader Mohammad Sidique Khan on his death video proclaims that “by presenting ourselves for this work we are guaranteeing ourselves a place in paradise”. The thought processes are circular: because they are going to sacrifice their lives they really do believe they will go to paradise. And because they are going to paradise their act of mass murder is therefore justified. No target, an airplane, a Tube train, even, as in Iraq, a mosque of your fellows Muslims, is off-limits.
Eventually, like all other plagues, the “virus” of the cult of the suicide bomber will burn itself out and cease. But as the recent alleged airline plot in the UK has revealed I doubt if we are even at the end of the beginning of this suicidal terrorism.
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© Many Rivers Films 2006
Bob Baer’s documentary series The Cult of the Suicide Bomber II begins on Channel 4 on September 11 at 8pm