Suicide Bombers - III

A new monograph entitled The Hijacked Caravan - Refuting Suicide Bombings as Martyrdom Operations in Contemporary Jihad Strategy is available for download (pdf format) at the Ihsanic Intelligence website. The introduction to the monograph states that

- The Hijacked Caravan is the first and only Islamic legal ruling which unequivocally condemns suicide bombing in all circumstances.

- Suicide terrorism has no precedent in fourteen centuries of Sunni Islamic tradition

- Islamist terrorist groups like al-Qa’eda have adopted the use of suicide bombings from the Hindu-Marxist terrorist groups like the Tamil Tigers and kamikaze pilots from Japan

- Islamist terrorists killing Muslims are considered to be in the tradition of the khawarij, an ancient Islamic heretical sect which also assassinated Prophet Muhammad’s cousin, Imam Ali

- Suicide bombings invoked under the rubric of Islamist terrorism, outside Israel and the Palestinian Territories, grew three-fold within the space of three years after 9/11, killing twice as many people as had been killed over two decades.

- Within the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, a case often given global exception by some scholars for using this tactic, suicide bombings doubled as did the number of people killed in the three years after 9/11 compared to the previous seven years of suicide terrorism. Worldwide, in merely three years after 9/11, the number of suicide bombings had increased three-fold than it had over two decades, whilst the number of people killed had doubled.

- Worldwide, for every person who undertook a suicide bombing prior to 9/11, 18 people were likely to be killed. After 9/11, this figure fell to killing of 14 people on average, which was only as a result of the disproportionate rise in the “export” of this practice to groups worldwide.

- Suicide bombing in the name of Islam has occurred in more than 20 countries: Lebanon [1981], Kuwait [1983], Argentina [1992], Panama, Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories [1994], Pakistan, Croatia [1995], Saudi Arabia [1996], Tanzania, Kenya [1998], Yemen, Chechnya [2000], USA, Kashmir, Afghanistan [2001], Tunisia, Indonesia, Algeria [2002], Morocco, Russia, India, Iraq, Turkey [2003], Uzbekistan and Spain [2004] - and possibly United Kingdom [2005].

(via global-geopolitics)