A poll conducted by an Iraqi university research team on behalf of the British government and reported by British newspapers showed that 45% of Iraqis support suicide bombers who attack coalition troops in Iraq. In some areas this rises to 65%. Iraqis are angry at the damage done to their country by the invading forces, and the decrease in standard of living, in freedom of movement and in safety and security which it has brought. Many Iraqis hope that if the coalition forces can be encouraged to leave, the country can return to normal.
This is in line with the findings of Robert Pape discussed in this article in The American Conservative. Pape has compiled a database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980.
The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.
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