[piercehawkeye45]

Suicide terrorism doesn't necessarily have to do with religion but other factors.

But why are they prepared to kill themselves rather than conduct "normal" military attacks? A common assumption is that these jihadists must have been "brainwashed" or seized by the fervour of religious fundamentalism and cruelly initiated into a cult of death.

But is that the correct assumption? Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago the author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, who has conducted the most in-depth research into the motivations of suicide bombers certainly thinks not.

He has just outlined the findings of his revealing study of 462 suicide bombings across the globe to 50 of the FBI's top counter-terrorist chiefs.

His main conclusion is that suicide bombing is less about religious fundamentalism than secular or political grievances. Let me quote him at length from an interview he gave ABC Television in America:

There's a faulty premise in the current strategy on the war on terrorism. That faulty premise is that suicide terrorism and al- Qaida suicide terrorism in particular is mainly driven by an evil ideology Islamic fundamentalism independent of other circumstances.

However, the facts are that since 1980, suicide terrorist attacks from around the world over half have been secular. What over 95% of suicide attacks around the world [are about] is not religion, but a specific strategic purpose - to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly and this is, in fact, a centrepiece of al-Qaida's strategic logic, which is to compel the United States and western countries to abandon military commitments on the Arabian peninsula.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/arc...e_bombers.html