Volunteers to be Suicide Bombers

they publish their entire benefits program.
Their retirement is really gret!.

Try www.ZealotZine.com

LOL

Seriously,,,,this week in the news after the media got a hold of the diary of Osama bin Laden and his reading list, there was a bunch of revelations about his thinking process and how he recruited suicide bombers. Have you looked for that in the news?

Ragman-

Thanks.

I read about his reading list but haven't seen anything on how he recruited suicide bombers. I will keep looking.

Why not try here. The info on Osama bin Laden is extensive:
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/al-qaeda-terrorism.html

Recruiters typically screen candidates. They want to know whether they possess combat skills or non-combat support skills. They also ask whether the individual prefers to offer their services as a combatant or in "martyrdom operations". Presumably those who indicate the latter enter the pool of potential suicide bombers.

Incidentally, suicide bombing used to be a tactic employed mostly by Shiites rather than Sunnis like ISIS. I'd be interested in learning exactly how and where along the way this changed. Presumably since the text of the Koran has remained constant (there aren't multiple Arabic revisions like there are with the Bible), what has changed are the interpretations or sources used in the non-Koranic sayings attributed to Muhammad (the Hadith).

P.S. As far as difficulty in recruiting suicide bombers, I'd think so. Still, the Centers for Disease Control says that in the United States in 2013 suicide was the 10th highest cause of death, over 41,000 cases, with a rate of 13 per 100,000 population.

If the will to live is a strong instinct, then this must either be lost or undermined.

In evangelical Christianity (or more broadly, Paulist versions of Christianity), the simple act of faith in Christ is (perhaps supplemented with baptism) enough to guarantee an afterlife in heaven rather than hell. By contrast, Islam is rather more uncertain about who gets to go to heaven. Islam conditions this much more on acts and on the inscrutable will of Allah, and some forms of fundamentalist Islam teach that martyrdom increases one's chance for a heavenly afterlife.

Now, if someone is raised in a hellfire and brimstone religious background, and there is some aspect of their life which is highly inconsistent with this (e.g., homosexuality), and if one combines these factors with failure in life and depression, then conceivably some combination of guilt, fear and the desire to atone and avoid punishment, and personal factors, might combine to predispose some act of "martyrdom" which simultaneously transforms a failed life into a triumph, wins the effusive admiration and respect of others, atones for sinfulness, practically guarantees entry into heaven, and ends ones temporal troubles in an "instant" death that (provided one is blown to smithereens) doesn't allow much scope for failure, incapacitation, or lingering death.

puzzledperson-

Thank you.

What is the suicide rate in the countries that the suicide bombers came from?

Since suicide attackers come from a variety of countries, the suicide rate for each country would have to be researched independently.

Here's a great resource:

"The Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST) maintains a searchable database on all suicide attacks from 1982 through June 2015. The database includes information about the location of attacks, the target type, the weapon used, and systematic information on the demographic and general biographical characteristics of suicide attackers. The database expands the breadth of the data available in English using native language sources (e.g., Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Tamil) that are likely to have the most extensive relevant information."

http://cpostdata.uchicago.edu/search_new.php

Also click on the Home link for other features including essays (myths, ISIS, etc.).

It's difficult for me to navigate this website using a cellphone, but certain patterns stand out:

Hindus and Muslims accounted for the vast majority of attackers where the religion of the attackers is known. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Chechnya, Lebanon, and Sri Lanka account for the overwhelming majority of suicide attacks. The vast majority of suicide attacks have occurred since 2000. The number of such attacks rose sharply since 2001 (invasion of Afghanistan) and very sharply since 2003 (invasion of Iraq).

A couple of interesting points:

IRAQ

"Many of those carrying out the bombings were from outside of Iraq, with Saudi Arabia contributing the highest number of (bombers) followed by Libya, Syria, Algeria and Yemen."

AFGHANISTAN

"Many of the attacks in Afghanistan are carried out by children. Some as young as nine have been intercepted on suicide bomb missions. Often trained at Pakistani madrassas, they are particularly vulnerable to indoctrination. ‘These kids might disappear at 12 and come back at 15 fully militarised and conscious of their own bodies as weapons.’"

SRI LANKA:

"Unlike Hezbollah and the Palestinian groups, the LTTE were a secular guerrilla movement. Their objective was the creation of a separate state for Tamil people in Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka.

The group was led by Velupillai Prabhakaran. A charismatic leader, he developed a cult of personality around himself and played a pivotal role in the recruitment of suicide bombers known as the Black Tigers. To join the Black Tigers, LTTE members had to write application letters to Prabhakaran who would decide whether they were worthy. There were so many applications that a lottery for martyrs was created."

https://aoav.org.uk/2013/a-short-history-of-suicide-bombings/

P.S. The "short history of suicide bombings" link cited above appears to conflate statistics on foreign fighters in Iraq with statistics on foreign suicide bombers. However, it does include a link in the text to a document examining the distinction in considerable detail.

According to that document, which seems well documented and from an authoritative source, 56 percent of foreign fighters in Iraq were there as suicide bombers. Since Saudi Arabians made up 45 percent of foreign fighters they also accounted for the most foreign suicide bombers. Libyans contributed fewer foreign fighters but among Libyan foreign fighters 85 percent went to Iraq as suicide bombers.

You asked what the suicide rate is in countries where suicide bombers come from. I took a look at rates for several countries. Out of 172 countries listed, official suicide rates are actually quite low in many cases: Saudi Arabia is dead last (172nd); Iraq is 166th; Syria is 171st; Libya is 164th; Afghanistan is 114th; and Pakistan is 83rd.

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/suicide/by-country/

That said, Saudi suicides increased by 185 percent from 1994 to 2006. Also:

"The recorded number of suicides is undoubtedly well below the actual figure, due to the fact that families often refuse to send the body of a deceased relative for an autopsy. Similarly, many prefer to attribute death to "unspecified causes" without an autopsy, which makes the government data incomplete."


http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/6675

Also, I suspect that in most Muslim countries, non-martyrdom suicides have a strong social stigma attached to them, so that they might be highly underreported.

Here's a working link to the Time Magazine story about the suicide bombers "martyrs lottery":

http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1193862,00.html

There is a revealing profile of one applicant:

"But asked when she hoped to achieve her dream of being a suicide bomber, she grinned, squirmed and buried her face in her arms. "She's already written her application," said her commander, Lt. Col. Dewarsara Banu, smiling at her charge's shyness. "But there's still no reply." "Why hasn't there been a reply?" whined Samandi, looking up with the one eye, her left, that survived a shot to the head and fiddling with the capsule of cyanide powder around her neck. "I want this. I want to be a Black Tiger. I want to blast myself for freedom.""

This is also remarkable:

"Samandi was not alone. Banu said every time there is a call for suicide mission volunteers — called Black Tigers — more than 50 young guerrillas applied. So many, in fact, that Prabhakaran created a martyrs' lottery. "They put everyone's name in a tombola," said Banu. "They swirl them around. Then the Leader pulls out two names, reads them out and the 48 who aren't chosen are all crying. But the two who are chosen, they are very happy and the people around them raise them on their shoulders and are all clapping and celebrating.""

Note that this is a secular guerrilla insurgency, not an Islamic fundamentalist group.

Here's a working link to the Time Magazine story about the suicide bombers "martyrs lottery":

http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1193862,00.html

There is a revealing profile of one applicant:

"But asked when she hoped to achieve her dream of being a suicide bomber, she grinned, squirmed and buried her face in her arms. "She's already written her application," said her commander, Lt. Col. Dewarsara Banu, smiling at her charge's shyness. "But there's still no reply." "Why hasn't there been a reply?" whined Samandi, looking up with the one eye, her left, that survived a shot to the head and fiddling with the capsule of cyanide powder around her neck. "I want this. I want to be a Black Tiger. I want to blast myself for freedom.""

This is also remarkable:

"Samandi was not alone. Banu said every time there is a call for suicide mission volunteers — called Black Tigers — more than 50 young guerrillas applied. So many, in fact, that Prabhakaran created a martyrs' lottery. "They put everyone's name in a tombola," said Banu. "They swirl them around. Then the Leader pulls out two names, reads them out and the 48 who aren't chosen are all crying. But the two who are chosen, they are very happy and the people around them raise them on their shoulders and are all clapping and celebrating.""

Note that this is a secular guerrilla insurgency, not an Islamic fundamentalist group.

To put some of this in perspective, the Time article on the Tamil Tigers mentioned a response of 50 "young volunteers" when the leadership issued a call for suicide attackers. The organization's armed membership (not counting its political wing) was estimated by the U.S.State Department at 10,000. The population of Sri Lanka at the time the article was published was about 20 million.

So far as I can tell from the CPOST database, from 1982 through June 2015 there were about 5,500 suicide attackers. That's about 165 a year from a wide variety of countries.

Your question is a reflection on why the west does not have a clue about why they grow or how to respond to movements like Isis, Boco haram, etc. The west cannot conceive of why anyone would be willing to die for anything other than 'The American Dream' or why anyone would want anything else.

Those volunteers are vulnerable because they feel there is more than that to life and somebody promised it to them. Unfortunately those groups don't really have anything better to offer.

Sixty percent of the casualties from suicide bombers in Iraq were civilians killed for no reason other than the fact that they belonged to a different religious sect (e.g. Shiite Islam vs. Sunni Islam). I admit, I don't see why anyone would kill themselves because somebody else disagrees about who should have succeeded Ali as Caliph. But to be fair, European and American history is replete with baffling things.

One might also draw a distinction between risking one's life for a cause and sacrificing it.

That said there are numerous incidents from "western" military history involving personal sacrifice, a number of which were posthumously awarded medals of honor and the like.