Last year on these pages I wrote about an ageing man in Karachi who had travelled to Egypt to fight against the Israeli military during the 1967 Egypt-Israel war.
After the war (which had lasted just six days and saw the Israelis wiping out the Soviet-backed Egyptian forces), the man had travelled to Jordan where he joined Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). He was soon sent to a village on the Lebanon-Israel border to mount guerrilla attacks against Israeli border guards.
During the planning of one such attack, the PLO squad he was part of split when there arose a possibility that the attack might cause civilian casualties. He told me that the majority of the men in his squad were against killing civilians and refused to take part in the attack which was eventually aborted. The man returned to Pakistan and set up a tea stall on Karachi’s I.I. Chundrigar Road.
Disturbed, confused and angry youth are easy recruits for militant groups promising them an identity in return for total obedience to a charismatic leader
The reason I have briefly repeated this story here is to contextualise the mutation of the idea of modern Muslim militancy and/or how drastically it has changed in the last four decades or so.
Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, James Lutz, in his 2005 book Terrorism: Origins & Evolution, wrote that most European left-wing and Palestinian guerrilla groups, between the 1960s and late 1970s, largely avoided inflicting civilian casualties because they wanted the media and the people to sympathise with them.
This is not to suggest that civilian deaths were always entirely avoided; it is however true that many militant groups often suffered splits within their ranks on this issue. The most well-known split in this context (and regarding Muslim militancy) was the one between Yasir Arafat and Abu Nidal in the PLO in 1974. Arafat had decided to abandon armed militancy and chart a more political course. Nidal on the other hand not only wanted to continue pursuing militancy but wanted to intensify it even further. He formed the violent Abu Nidal Organisation (ANO) which, by the 1980s, had become a notorious mercenary outfit for various radical Arab regimes in Libya, Iraq and Syria.
Even the anti-Soviet ‘mujahideen’ in Afghanistan — the forerunners of devastating ‘Islamist’ outfits such as Al-Qaeda — were conscious of receiving good press and public sympathy by avoiding civilian casualties. In spite of being heavily indoctrinated by CIA and Saudi-funded clerics in Afghanistan and Pakistan to embrace death as a religious duty, the mujahideen did not use suicide bombings, not even against Soviet forces.
The first-ever suicide bombing involving Muslim militants took place in Beirut in 1983 when a member of the Hezbollah drove a truck laden with explosives into a compound full of US military personnel. Yet, it was not until the 1990s, when so-called Islamic militants, many of who had never used violence against civilians during the Afghan insurgency, began to attack soft civilian targets in various Muslim-majority countries.