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All it takes to make a suicide attacker

15 May 2004

IT IS hard to imagine a worse public relations disaster for the US-led coalition in Iraq than the images of American soldiers abusing their Iraqi prisoners in the very prison where Saddam Hussein’s henchmen abused theirs. Yet in the long run, the political fallout we are now seeing in the US and the UK could be the least of the consequences.

As numerous studies have confirmed, a major reason why organisations turn to terrorism is the perception that their homeland is being occupied by a foreign power. This is especially true for suicide terrorism, which almost without exception has only…

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