Intelligence services around the world are tearing up their psychological profiles of potential suicide bombers after last week's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The people who hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed three of them into key symbols of US prestige were not poor and uneducated youths, brainwashed into giving up their lives by promises of sexual ecstasy in a martyr's paradise and a demonization of those they call their oppressors.
"We need to change the profile of the would-be suicide bomber. All our previous assumptions are no longer valid," said Yonah Alexander of the International Center for Terrorism Studies, a private institute in northern Virginia.
"The traditional profile was of a young, fairly uneducated person. But now the entire world is the frontline of this battle and everybody is a potential actor," he said.
Last week's hijackers, unlike many of the Palestinian suicide bombers who have carried out a series of attacks in Israel in the past year, were not transported to the location of the attack minutes before the action. These were educated, sophisticated men who planned their attack for years and who blended well into American society.
They bought first-class tickets using credit cards and giving frequent flyer numbers. They drove sedans, reside in middle-class neighborhoods and dressed like businessmen.
They had tasted some of the material riches of western life, yet were able to maintain their determination to die for several years while planning the operation.
"It means either that such people are being recruited from an expanded reservoir of volunteers including middle class and perhaps also secular people or that the planners are getting state help in tapping volunteers," said James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank.
"The implications are chilling. It's going to be much more difficult to find the needles of the haystack," he said.
Until the 1980s, intelligence agencies worldwide acted on the assumption that armed militants, though ready to risk their lives to attack their enemies, wished to live after their attacks so as to enjoy and benefit from their accomplishments.
That assumption was shattered by the Oct. 23, 1983, suicide bombings of barracks occupied by US and French peacekeeping troops in Beirut, killing 241 American and 58 French servicemen.
Subsequently, suicide attacks spread from the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent, where they took the lives of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993.
Still, security services concluded that it was relatively difficult to recruit potential suicide attackers and that many other participants were needed to plan and carry out a suicide attack, most of whom did not want to die and could therefore be attacked, punished and deterred.
In Israel, most suicide recruits appear to have been picked out of religious schools, separated from their families and instructed over a period of months and years of the rewards that will await them in paradise if they agree to sacrifice their lives.
They are told they will become national heroes and their families will be given lifelong pensions after their deaths.
But for each person who volunteered to die, there had to be those who planned the attacks, selected the targets, gathered the necessary intelligence, did the recruiting, provided the "spiritual training," prepared the explosives and transported the suicide bombers to the target areas.
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