BENGALURU: What goes on inside the mind of a suicide bomber like Dr Umar Un Nabi, 35, who blew up his white Hyundai i20 car outside Red Fort on November 10?
He was trained for fidayeen (suicide bomb) attack allegedly by the Pakistan based Masood Azhar-led Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) "much ahead of the April 22 terror attack in Pahalgam”, said highly placed sources.
Umar's video, retrieved from his mobile phone, shows him justifying suicide bombing as martyrdom. It is a key exhibit in the investigation and a critical clue into the making of the jihadist. A young man from a financially vulnerable background rising against odds to become a medical doctor after years of hard work and diligence was an assurance to the rest of his family that things will start looking up once he scales his career up.
Yet, Umar drove an explosive laden car into the heart of India's capital and detonated it, accidentally or otherwise, killing 15 in the vicinity and injuring several others on that autumn evening.
Suicide bombing, its real estate and archaeology are disturbing and alarmist. "It is a complex phenomenon involving ‘suicide’ and ‘terrorism’ requiring multi-dimensional approach to address the deadly terror tactics. Behaviour is the product of biological, cognitive, affective, social, cultural and religious processes," stated Suresh Bada Math, Professor of Psychiatry, National Institute of Mental Health & Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), Dr Nitin Anand, also from NIMHANS and Maria Christine Nirmala from Knowledge Management in an MNC, India in their research paper on 'Terrorism and Human Behaviour' published in 'Terror and Suicide' by Nova Science Publishers, New York.
Countering the possibility of co-relation between mental illness and suicide bombers, the researchers argued that there is none.
"Terrorism is a form of learned behaviour either voluntarily or through mental manipulation. There are no reports or studies to suggest that terrorists or suicide bombers suffer from any kind of severe mental illness or antisocial personality or show higher rates of any kind of psychopathology. Usually their effect remains euphoric and sometimes blunted during the attack. This could also be because of the use of various drugs to abet such a heinous act," Bada Math and others stated while adding that there are no "born terrorists."
A review of literature on the phenomenon of suicide bombing shows it is "instrumental in the context of war, not in the context of psychopathology or any mental illness. Hence, psychological profiling of suicidal terrorists has till date not been successful. Similarly another review on suicide bombing reported that such terrorists are not truly suicidal and should not be viewed as a subgroup of the general suicidal population. Thus refuting the psychopathology or mental illness in them," they added.
Born on February 24, 1989, Umar had completed his MD in Medicine from Government Medical College (GMC), Srinagar, and later served as a senior resident at GMC, Anantnag before moving to Delhi.
"He was psychologically assessed during his tenure at Anantnag. It was found that he had very strong and inflexible ideological beliefs and had the potential to take extreme steps in fulfilling his radical religious ideology. While he was moved out of GMC, his extremist ideological bent of mind confirmed his membership with Jaish," said sources.
Where, when, why and how Umar switched from becoming a life saviour to a suicide bomber is subject of intense investigation by multiple agencies in the country, which are trying to get to the bottom of the malaise and the threat it poses to vulnerable youth.
There are many theories on factors that motivate people to become suicide bombers. Among them is the "quest for significance theory" given by Arie Kruglanski, Edward Orehek, and Jocelyn Belanger, among others.
"A suicide bomber imagines to achieve a sublimated immortality in people’s collective memory by attaining 'martyrdom’," stated Adil Rasheed, Research Fellow and coordinator of Counter-Terrorism Centre at Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA), New Delhi.
"Many of the suicide bombers are educated, yet frustrated ideologues, with inflated sense of self and delusions of changing the course of history through their reprehensible violence," he added.
"The perception that educated people do not conduct suicide attacks is unfounded. The Japanese Kamikaze attackers in World War-II, the 9/11 hijackers and suicide bombers, many of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) or Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) walking bombs, etc., prove that it is not the uneducated or dispensably misguided elements who carry out suicide attacks. In fact, more sophisticated terror operations require more educated and sophisticated attackers. Many of such suicide attackers are specialists or tech savvy, having specialisations in fields associated with their mode of warfare," Rasheed told this newspaper.
Terrorist attacks depend on the "oxygen of publicity to spread their message of hate and terror, but a suicide attack delivers a more shocking impact on the airwaves of publicity. Suicide attacks cause sufficient cognitive dissonance in impressionable minds. It is human even for the most upright opponent of terrorism to briefly wonder whether there was something 'noble' about the atrocity perpetrated by the suicide attacker, as the killer was so convinced about his or her cause and reason for the act," explained Rasheed.
"Human beings are differentiated from animals by their ability to think. This cognitive ability helps us to form our own set of ideas in our life. Each individual has his/her own set of ideologies, which may or may not be held firmly but which supports an individual in their conceptualisation of life and the world in a broader context. These ideologies are often subject to change based on reasoning, socialisation, personality and other learning processes. However the degree of conviction on an ideology depends upon the amount of affect invested or associated tone of feeling with the idea. This associated tone of feeling gets into limelight when ‘an abnormal threat perception’ is created," stated Bada Math et al.
"This abnormal threat perception raises alarm about the survival of the ideology and subsequently threatens self-identity, leading to a series of behaviours to save the ideology and thereby the identity," they added.
There are a lot of subprocesses that are involved in an individual becoming a terrorist. "It requires a process where an individual adapts an ideology more as a mechanism to channelise his/her frustrations, cope with feelings of alienation, powerlessness or shame. It could also be a result of an experience being a victim of terrorist attacks and hence creating a need for revenge etched because of the experience or feeling of being disenfranchised. The above could drive an abnormal threat perception which might lead to the path of choosing extremism as a means to bring about liberation from the 'problem’," stated Bada Math, Anand and Nirmala.
Mental manipulation through propagation of abnormal threat perception is the basis for radicalisation by a terrorist organisation.
"Indoctrination popularly referred to as ‘brain washing’ or ‘coercive persuasion’, is almost similar to cult indoctrination but differs in the cognitive manipulation. During the whole process various learning theories such as classical conditioning, operant conditioning and social learning theories are utilized for training. This process of learning is engineered in such a way that unlearning becomes difficult. This is made possible through effectively controlling the sources of learning from the external world by the organisations. Information from the external world is considered negative, destructive and lethal," they further explained.
"Only a small minority of those who feel alienated, frustrated, humiliated and isolated from the society will ever embrace terrorism or even support those who do. There is no single pathway to terrorism; it is a process of adapting the ideology, controlling and channeling the emotions, and modifying the behaviour to achieve the target," the researchers opined.
The question now is how to get terrorists to change their behaviour about violence. How to wean them back from a fundamentalist ideology to liberal one?
"Terrorism cannot be defeated by military or law or by increasing security. It requires a multidimensional approach, which includes strategies to eliminate the root cause of terrorism from various dimensions such as ideological, social, political, religious, economical, educational and cultural aspects. This can be achieved through an approach similar to public health (community medicine) strategies such as Primordial (promote liberal ideology), Primary (preventive), Secondary (curative) and Tertiary (rehabilitative)," added Bada Math and others.
