Executive Protection

The Executive Protection community has already witnessed the implications of suicide bomber attacks against protected persons for several years. I don’t mean just the attack Benazir Bhutto, who’s death by a suicide bomber has had a profound impact on Pakistan and the region. We saw how effective a suicide bomber targeting a VIP could be with the attack on Raj Ghandi in the early nineties. We saw it and subsequently experienced when Shah Masood, the leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance was killed by Al Qaeda operatives two days before 9-11 as part of the overall Al-Qaeda attack strategy for 9-11.

This disturbing report on Al-Qaida efforts to recruit children as suicide bombers contains at least two critical observation from the perspective of preventing suicide bomber attacks on VIPs. First, the authors note the tactical advantage a child possess operating as a suicide bomber. As female suicide bombers have demonstrated the world over, children would not typically rise to the level of suspicion, or perceived threat as the classic, but sometimes erroneous portrait of a male suicide bomber. This presents a real challenge when you look at options for tactically neutralizing a suicide bomber. How many of us are willing to make that call based on instinct alone?

The second element in this article worth noting is the three day stalk of the target by the child suicide bomber. One of the primary security concerns surrounding a suicide bomber is the bomber’s ability to adjust the attack based on a real-time assessment of security surrounding the target. If operational conditions don’t favor the bomber, the bomber has the ability to delay the attack or as demonstrated in the near simultaneous attacks that occurred against in hotels in Jordan, select another equally attractive target instantly. In the Jordanian attacks, one of the suicide bombers was turned away from his primary target yet he moved to another adjacent location and still managed to kill innocent people. While the bomber was not successful in achieving his goals at the intended target, the bomber still succeeded in creating casualties and achieving a victory in the form of creating the ensuing fear and publicity that terrorist attacks generate.