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Nightline Daily E-Mail
October 9, 2003
TONIGHT'S SUBJECT: A suicide bombing in Baghdad. Another in Israel. This follows a deadly suicide attack in Haifa over the weekend, that led Israel to strike inside Syria. Why are these attacks so effective, and why would someone volunteer to be a bomber? And how can they be stopped?
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It's almost become part of the background noise of our lives these days. Turn on the television or the radio, or glance through a paper, and the phrase "suicide bombing" is sure to surface pretty quickly. There was a big one today in Baghdad, an attack on a police station. There was another in Israel today that initial reports say wounded two people. Of course, there was the big one over the past weekend in Haifa, carried out by a woman, something that is still rare but becoming less so. And I think that a lot of our assumptions about these attacks, and the bombers, may be wrong. For a long time, I think that a lot of people assumed that the bombers were driven by religious fervor, the desire for martyrdom. But increasingly that appears to not be the case. Iraq, one of the more secular of the Arab countries, is seeing more and more suicide attacks. I don't think that every one of them is driven by religion. And the more we learn about the bombers in Israel, it appears that religion is not always the motivating factor. In fact, these may be more political in nature.
What drives people to do that? I'm not sure we'll ever really understand it. But ABC News correspondent John Yang sat down with five Palestinian women in the wake of Saturday's attack to try to get a better understanding of what is motivating the bombers, and how they are viewed by the population. But can they be stopped? Certainly some of them can, but not all. You can't search every person, you can't have metal detectors everywhere, or all life would really grind to a halt. Part of the Israeli response has been to build a wall around the Palestinian territories, to try to keep the bombers from coming into Israel. Will it work? It appears that the wall around Gaza has been at least partially effective, although there are always ways around it. But the wall is more controversial. It has cut communities in half, divided families from their fields, and may in fact end up as a de facto border. President Bush has expressed unhappiness with the wall, and there is talk of holding back American loan guarantees for Israel in the amount that is being spent on the wall. We'll have a report on the wall, and all of its implications, from ABC News correspondent Hillary Brown. And we'll also take a look at all of the developments over there that sort of got lost in all of the hoopla over the California recall election. But will we ever really understand why someone would strap explosives on their body and go off to kill strangers? I doubt it.
Leroy Sievers and the Nightline Staff
Nightline Offices
Washington, D.C.
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