Steve Liddle: The mystery of terrorist radicalisation

Japanese riot police take positions against "armed terrorists" performed by police officers during an anti-terror drill at a port in Kobe. Photo / Ryutaro Hara, Kyodo News via AP

Steve Liddle looks at how psychology is offering insights into the mystery of radicalisation and how a mix of trauma-affected identity, prolonged injustice and fundamentalist indoctrination will keep producing suicide-bombers unless this issue is addressed.

With the spread of terrorism beyond usual hotspots to Africa, Russia, and European cities, analysts are looking for answers beyond tighter security and take-them-out solutions.

The mass murders in a Nairobi mall, the slayings of more than 40 students in Nigeria, and recent massacres in Paris and the US have focused on the Islamist identity of those involved.

However, while 80 per cent of US terrorist attacks since 9/11 have been by US citizens and often linked to Islam, such terrorism isn't tied to any one ideological background. Of 27 deadly 'homegrown' attacks, only eight are related to Islamic extremism. The other 19 attacks were led by right-wing extremists.

Labels aside, and wherever committed, what kind of human beings are motivated to perform such horrors? Religious fanatics distorting peaceful messages? Grievance-fuelled freedom fighters whose last effective weapons are bomb-primed selves?

In October a UN report revealed that since 2004 drones in Pakistan killed at least 400 civilians out of 2200 killed from 330 attacks, with another 58 civilian deaths in Yemen. It criticised the US for keeping secret their data on civilian casualties. Another report a day earlier warned drone technology is being misused as a form of global policing.

It is not difficult to see how in these cases trauma, from relatives' deaths or 'extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions,' as the UN calls strikes not in compliance with the principles of international humanitarian law, can provoke 'trans-generational terrorism'.

But in her recent book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here, Untold Stories from the fight against Muslim Fundamentalism law professor and human rights activist Karima Bennoune surprises by quoting statistics from sources which include the West Point Combating Terrorism Centre. These statistics reveal that only 15 per cent of al-Qaida casualties between 2004-08 were westerners. And between 2006-8, 98 per cent of al-Qaida's victims were Muslim. Not only does fundamentalist violence affect people in Muslim-majority countries disproportionately, Bennoune says, but also thousands of Muslims fight extreme violence daily. Such as her activist father, during the 1990s Algerian struggle against extremism, in which 150,000 people died.

Members of Pakistani civil society rally in Lahore to condemn a recent terrorist attack. AP photo / K.M. Chaudary

An understanding breakthrough in how even law-abiding, socially conformist adults can be radicalised came from a 1980s study of 'broken' identities in five traumatised orphans by renowned psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, Vamik D Volkan. These infant survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacres by so-called Lebanese Christian militias in Beirut in 1982 were saved only by the quick-wittedness of their doomed mothers who hid them in trash cans or under beds. These orphans later established what Volkan terms large group or team identity.

As their real identities were unknown, all were placed in the Biet Atfal al-Sommoud (Home of the Children of Steadfastness) orphanage sponsored by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and given the name Arafat, after then PLO leader Yassar Arafat. When first observed playing together, Volkan reports, they appeared normal, although each became agitated if separated. In 1991, when Volkan attempted to interview individuals apart from this group all became abnormal, unable to function separated from the group: "one hallucinated and another literally destroyed the interview room. Placed together again as a team of Arafats, however, they appeared 'normal' once more."

Although their case was extreme, Volkan recorded a milder version in all 52 children there. In observing that caregivers at this were themselves traumatised by regional conflicts then raging, Volkan deduced these adults were filling the cracks in the children's personal identities with a 'cement of Palestianism'.

By comparing these unintentional identity replacements with ones intentionally made during the Nazi era, Volkan shows how understanding this process can help with strategies to counter and avoid its later consequences.

Analysis in 2002 of Nazi physician Joanna Haarer's books on childrearing techniques gives further insights into how Nazi ideology filled cracks created in German's children's identitie. Directed to ignore their children's natural dependency needs by Haarer, mothers of the Nazi period robbed their children of opportunities to identify with nurturing parents. By ruining their children's sense of trust, mothers typically produced frustrated children who projected angry feelings onto both parents. With aggression the only way to protect themselves these children grew up to be tough adults who experienced no feelings of remorse for later destroying any undesirables, such as Jews.

Volkan found that in a similar way such religious, nationalistic or ideological large group identity is protective for suicide bombers too. They are not psychotic, however, in that their new identities do fit with their external reality. While such things as personal identity - and the killing of self or any others in the way - are not of primary concern to them, the self esteem and attention brought to their large-group identity are very important.
For although Islam forbids suicide, Volkan found 'there is no lack of conscious and unconscious approval of Muslim suicide bombers from other members of their communities'.

Support for suicide bombers in Gaza and the West Bank rose from 20 to 70 per cent from the years 1996 to 2001. And there was no shortage of suicide bombers in Gaza and the West Bank after 9/11 as so many met the entry criterion of concrete trauma, that is those damaged by some 'actual humiliating event visited upon [them] by an enemy, be it beating, torture or loss of a parent.' The more stress placed on their community, Volkan found, the greater the helplessness or feelings they are treated as less than human, the more likely even 'normal' persons can be pushed to become terrorism candidates.
This crucial difference in self-regard helps explain why such a mind-set is sustained, even in later isolation. And is so resistant to the realms of conscience, remorse or de-programming.

Research into how Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers are trained gives further insights into how women like the UK's 'white widow' involved in the Nairobi massacre, and fathers of young families, can be so transformed.

In Madrasses and training camps studied, ties to family ties and any meaningful communication are cut, and music and television forbidden, on the grounds they may be sexually stimulating. Which paves the way for a singular, final, passage to adulthood and paradise, with identity cracks filled by the same cement of an absolute ruler and salvation by suicide.

Even after 2001 with the emergence of a new breed of older, well-educated suicide bombers from wealthy, educated families the same kind of concrete trauma and cracked identities can be seen as underlying causal factors. Then by ritually mixing 'God's words' with practical instruction in mass murder radical teachers eased the awful transition involved.

Cleaning rituals combined with instructions for the dirty work of killing while even steps from leaving apartments to hijacking to murder by suicide are ritualized and thus made psychologically easier. It is not hard to see how trauma from civilian deaths or 'extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions', as the UN calls strikes not 'in strict compliance with the principles of international humanitarian law', could provide seed-beds for intergenerational terrorist retaliations.

If fundamentalism's moral world is derived from selected and distorted 'divine' texts, authority figures - whether in government or religious organisations - who do not immediately and publicly condemn mis-interpretations must surely themselves share moral culpability.

UC Davis' law professor Karima Bennoune concludes her book by insisting the fight against fundamentalist violence must involve empowering civil society in Muslim-majority countries, promoting education, and refusing alliances of convenience with 'moderate fundamentalists'. A term, she maintains, lacks meaning.

Steve Liddle is a teacher and free-lance journalist currently researching the history of civil society.