Who Is Carrying out the Suicide Bombing Attacks in Iraq?
For Iraqis to carry out suicide martyrdom operations is somewhat peculiar because of their secular orientation. As stated by former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency analyst Judith Yaphe, “the real question is the suicide bombers, that’s not strictly an Iraqi thing.”[31] Moreover, some members of the Iraqi National Congress have claimed that Iraqis do not undertake suicide bombings due to their culture, insinuating that the suicide bombings must be the work of foreign Jihadis that have infiltrated Iraq.[32] However, when looking at all other areas in the Middle East in which suicide bombing tactics have been utilized extensively, it appears they all have one thing in common: the perpetrators of the suicide bombing are intimately familiar with the areas which they target. During the onset of the tactic of suicide bombing in Lebanon in the early 1980s, members of the Shi’a militias AMAL, Lebanese Islamic Jihad, and later Hizbullah who carried out more than 30 suicide bombings against Isra
