Mumbai Killers Took Several Pages out of the Terrorist Playbook

By Brigitte L. Nacos
In spite of the large number of victims, the gunmen hijacking a fishing boat and their coming ashore aboard a dinghy, the singling out of American and British hostages, and the murdering of hostages in cold blood, nothing was terribly new about the Mumbai terrorism. While reporters and analysts were eager to find something “new” and “unique” about the horrific attacks, every single aspect of the latest terrorist nightmare in the midst of a huge metropolis was already part of the how-to-do textbook of modern terrorism. To be sure, terrorists prefer to surprise their targets with new modes of attack. But apart from 9/11, when terrorist hijackers flew airliners into the two World Trade Center towers and into the Pentagon, and the post-9/11 wave of hostage-holders' torturing and decapitating their western hostages in Pakistan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, terrorists have stuck to the pages in the playbook of this sort of political violence. If there was anything new about the Mumbai case, it was the utilization of so many proven tactics at the same time. In the following, I review some of the most obvious factors in the Mumbai attacks and compare them to past cases.

The Number of Victims: If reports are true that the terrorist team wanted to kill at least 5,000 persons, they aimed at a new record and would have trumped the number of victims of the 9/11 attacks by about 2,000. As it is, the number of dead and injured victims was not even a record for the Mumbai area because it was lower than the 209 killed and more than 700 injured in seven simultaneous bomb explosions on commuter trains in Mumbai on July 11, 2006. The point here is not to minimize what happened last week but rather to put it into historical perspective.

Maritime Terrorism: According to the Indian Navy, the terrorists hijacked a fishing boat, killed the captain (and perhaps his missing crew), and reached Mumbai aboard a rubber dinghy with knapsacks full of arms and ammunition. Although maritime terrorism comprises only a tiny fraction of all terrorist incidents, speedboats, dinghies, container ships, and cruise ships have been either utilized to launch attacks or as targets themselves in the past.

The first case of modern-day maritime terrorism occurred in 1961 when the “Santa Maria” with 600 passengers and 300 crew members aboard was taken by Portuguese exile Henriques Galvao and two dozen of his followers during a cruise in the southern Caribbean. The hijackers had boarded the luxury ship in Venezuela and Curaçao disguised as passengers and used their suitcases to bring weapons aboard. Once at high sea, they killed one officer, injured several others, overpowered the unarmed crew, and forced the captain to change the ship’s route. By taking command of an ocean-liner, owned by a Lisbon company, the hijackers hoped to draw the world’s attention to their opposition to the authoritarian Estado Novo regime in Portugal and the Franco rule in Spain. After 11 days, Galvao and his men surrendered to the Brazilian navy—they had accomplished their publicity goal.

The most stunning maritime attack occurred in 2000, when an explosive-laden skiff with two suicide terrorist abroad detonated next to the USS Cole, killing 17 sailors and injuring 39.   

In the past, maritime terrorism was quite rare—probably because terrorists recognized the limited chances for news coverage in such cases. But in the Internet age, terrorists have learned to report their own deeds by posting video-tapes on the Internet sites. Thus, given the new communication means and the recent successes by Somali pirates, one wonders whether maritime terrorism, too, becomes more fashionable in terrorist circles.

Nationality and Religion of Targets: While new with respect to terrorism in India, terrorists have singled out targets and hostages according to their nationality and religion. The hijackings of airplanes beginning in the late 1960s involved most of the time American, British, and Israeli airliners and sometimes the planes of other countries with many Americans aboard. Typically, flight attendants were forced to collect passengers’ passports to identify their nationality. Without religion listed on the documents, terrorists often searched for “Jewish sounding names.”

Personalized Terrorism: There were many reports about the latest Mumbai attacks being particularly barbaric because they were not anonymous but involved “personalized terrorism.” According to one account, this incident “was unlike the many strikes of the last many months, bombs left in thronging markets or trains or cars: acts of shrinking cowardice. The new men were not cowards. They seemed to prolong the fight as long as they could. They killed face to face; they wanted to see and speak to their victims; they could taste the violence they made.”

Unfortunately, person-to-person terrorism has been with us for a long time. Just think of the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in June 1985, when a young U.S. Navy diver, Robert Stethem, was brutally killed by the Lebanese terrorists. Or think of the hijacking of the cruise ship “Achille Lauro” in October 1985, when the Palestinian terrorists murdered wheelchair-bound New Yorker Leon Klinghoffer and threw his body overboard. He was singled out because he was Jewish. Or think of the brutal killing of several of the Lebanon hostages in the 1980s by Hezbollah terrorists and the more recent beheading of Daniel Pearl and other American and British citizens by Al Qaeda connected terrorists.

Again, every single ingredient of the Mumbai terrorism has been part of modern terrorism's playbook for decades. However, it was the combination of several modes of attack--including, besides those discussed above the exchange of fire with security forces--that makes this latest incident a particularly frightening and  threatening one.

Comments

[Eric Chen]

The enemy is ambitious, intelligent, equipped, funded, and he evolves. I recommend the analysis by John Robb at his Global Guerillas blog, who often focuses on innovation and adaptation and system/nodal based strategies and vulnerabilities.

His most recent 4 posts are about the Mumbai attacks: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/

[Brigitte]

Thanks, Eric, I second your recommendation