as opposed to setting bombs and walking away like Timothy McVeigh did?
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Tags: AlQaeda's, Bombers, effective, from, standpoint, strategic, suicide
as opposed to setting bombs and walking away like Timothy McVeigh did?
Tags: AlQaeda's, Bombers, effective, from, standpoint, strategic, suicide
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 24th, 2011 at 11:34 am and is filed under News. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
It actually is because it gives them the element of surprise, also it gives them an advantage before the opposing enemy have time to respond.
Sadly yes, its a pretty backstabbing type of warfare but it works for them because it kills mass amounts of people at once and the bomber becomes a martyer in their religion.
Different strokes for different folks, in the case of terrorism, whatever suits the terrorists would be effective with their goal of terrorism.
No, suicide bombers tend to blow themselves up in crowded marketplaces. They tend to only kill civilians which makes the local populace turn against them. Not to mention it guarentees the death of a devoted follower, even if it is a dumb one. This is why for the most part Al Qaeda has dropped the use of suicide bombings, not saying they dont happen, but its much less frequent than originally.
What you are discussing is a tactical – not strategic perspective.
Suicide bombers provide a tactical advantage because they are the poor man’s equalivalent to a smart bomb.
From a strategic perspective – strategies based on suicide attacks have always failed. Look at the Japanase Kamikazes of WWII for an example. Every kamakaze attack resulted in the death of an expensively trained pilot.
The Al Queda strategy of suicide attacks failed in Iraq because they were a public relations disaster. Instead of increasing the perception of Al Queda might – they created the impression that they were a bunch of cowards who sent other people to certian death for little or no result.
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Suicide bombers have the ability to target someone or something specifically. In addition to that, if the target of opportunity doesn’t present itself, they can simply move to a secondary target and so on. And bombs are hard to detect on a person these days. Setting bombs is harder in a sense that the target of opportunity may not present itself. In this case of Timothy McVeigh, he bombed a building that has a routine schedule so planting the bomb is easier. Planting bombs take a lot of planning.