International Journal on Criminology Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 2016 | Page 64

International Journal on Criminology
Failure, which often occurs in ordinary suicide, is not an option for a
candidate determined to commit a suicide attack. When normal suicide aims to expose
psychological distress, failure is sometimes planned, consciously or unconsciously,
by the subject. For the suicide terrorist, real suicide is the failure. For that person, the
action is not suicide: he or she hopes for a better life and death is only a preliminary
step. Mental conditioning is such that the candidate is already living in the beyond.
Failure destroys this state of mind and makes any repetition unimaginable.
Operational Data
Suicide Attack: Global Strategy, Personal Message
As we have seen, the personality of the candidate for suicide merges with the
group, by identification or projection. However, this fusion paradoxically does not
have the same meaning for this candidate and his or her sponsors, even if the discourse
and justifications appear to be the same. The candidate’s message is addressed to a
microsociety: family, neighborhood. The message of the sponsors is aimed at national
and international opinion as well as their own troops.
The content of the messages can be similar, though addressed at different
contexts: “you cannot imagine what I am capable of”; except that for the suicide
attacker, the “I am” is conjugated in the present and for the sponsors, in the present
and the future. The suicide attacker is thus the tool of a global approach. The sponsor
makes the adversary culpable for the death of others: “by your faults, there are still
more deaths,” the message of certain targeted actions should be explained by analyzing
the context of their occurrence and their localization and succession in time and space.
Attacks, Tools of Communication
Sponsors supervise the official discourses that a spectacular act can contradict,
even at the price of the death of the suicide attacker or other innocents. Since
communication is an integral part of the war, attention should be paid to the public
statements on terrorism, which can appear as a provocation and provoke a violent
response:
• “They are crazy”;
• “They are teenagers indoctrinated by adults”;
• “It is a residue of terrorism.”
It is equally dangerous to not call a terrorist organization by the name it gives
itself. Terrorists believe that responding to official statements with an attack discredits
them better than a thousand statements. These “speech-attacks” expose the “cracks”
in the official narrative and reinforce the credibility of the sponsors in the eyes of their
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