On April 3, the terrorist explosion in St Petersburg’s underground train station claimed 13 lives. Russia’s anti-terrorist authorities soon found that this indiscriminate massacre was a suicide attack, executed by a 22-year-old Russian (of Kyrgyz background) named Akbar Jalilov.
Seeing such events unfold live, following Europe’s latest jihadist atrocities, this provoked me to profile some categorical and specific insights to explain suicide bombings, and attackers like Jalilov himself.
Jalilov’s suicide mission against Russian metro commuters symbolises the typical character of suicide bombers as intentionally committed perpetrators. People engaged in suicide attacks blow themselves up to impose psychological distress on audiences watching such slaughter beyond the immediate victims. Fuelled by militant ideologies, ‘human smart bombs’ believe in delivering the lasting, but unconventional means of killing and maiming targets in self-styled ‘martyrdom operations’.
The attack in St Petersburg’s metro is proof that suicide bombings continue to be effective, inspirational and motivational for Islamist foreign fighters coming back from Syria and planning similar jihadist revenge attacks around Europe.
Over time, traditional terror tactics have been outdone by the increasing resort to suicide attacks from potential militants. Bruce Hoffmann, American expert in international terrorism, says young militants like Jalilov execute such suicide tactics as “a rational and calculated choice, consciously embraced as a deliberate instrument of war”. Lone-wolf militants and foreign fighters are slowly recognising the practicality of carrying out suicide bombings against well-protected targets, including politically exposed persons, civilian, military, and diplomatic infrastructure in democratic societies.
Jihadist suicide attacks are becoming simple and cheap, but more shocking
Taking examples from traditional terrorist groups like Hamas, Al Qaeda, and Sri Lanka’s Tamil LTTE rebels, suicide bombings have become categorised according to the numerical impact of people killed from a suicide terrorist’s unique mission.
High-impact suicide attacks, like 9/11, involve the certain death of suicide bombers to wreak mass murder and carnage on a pervasive scale. Low-impact suicide attacks, including the Tamil LTTE’s 1991 assassination of India’s Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, is selective and disruptive, but spectacular when killing individual targets way beyond personal protection.
Like Jalilov’s recent attack in St Petersburg’s metro station, medium-impact suicide bombings aim to cause mayhem and massacre against limited numbers of people in enclosed locations. Academics in international terrorism studies fear that European jihadist leaderless cells can combine these types to commit “multi-casualty revenge suicide attacks”, in response to western military anti-Isis interventions in Syria and Iraq.
These repercussions can become flexible, notably when suicide bombers disguise themselves as innocent-looking civilians who evade detection, infiltrate, interact and mix with crowds before committing multi-level terrorist outrages.
Mia Bloom, another American suicide terrorism expert, highlights the “gender difference”. By taking example from Russia’s Chechen Black Widows, Bloom explains how a cultural taboo element sees “women as less threatening, but more difficult for police to search, therefore enabling jihadist shadikas (Chechnya’s Brides of Allah) to get through security points easier than men”.
Recent incidents of female suicide attacks, ranging from Palestinian rejectionist groups to the Kurdish PKK, can also raise the threat of female jihadist lone wolves to ‘cloak’ themselves as innocent pregnant mothers, transforming the revolutionary womb into an exploding one.
Jalilov’s suicide attack in St Petersburg suggests four qualities: pure destruction, intended pain, strategic demoralisation, and the escalation of human costs (besides fear) on Putin’s personal bill for his Russian airstrikes into Syria.
Rashmi Singh, an Indian expert on Hamas and suicide terrorism, is sceptic that such elements require technological sophistication, excessive spending, and complicated planning to commit these actions.
As Europe’s latest jihadist attacks demonstrate, Isis continues to inspire lone wolves and foreign fighters to prepare suicide attacks out of economic cost-effectiveness, and logistical simplicity. St Petersburg’s terrorist atrocity became effective because jihadist suicide attacks are becoming simple and cheap, but more shocking, deadly, and increasingly difficult to stop.
Besides recent atrocities in London and Stockholm, Jalilov’s suicide bombing exploited Europe’s present failure in preventing jihadi terrorist developments. British terrorism expert Andrew Silke concludes how European security agencies, political institutions and also member states should learn that: “Every terrorist attack has lessons to teach. In too many minds the only acceptable response is revulsion and condemnation. An open and cool understanding must always be part of the responsible and professional mind-set in confronting the adversary. Amid the carnage and rubble of atrocities, we must not encourage the luxury of a simple and demonised foe.”
Samuel Bezzina is an independent researcher in terrorism and political violence.