Fidayeen Strategy

A terror strategy of full-frontal “self-sacrifice” (i.e., suicide) attack.

In the wake of the November attacks on Mumbai, Reuters noted that

a massive city can be reduced to mayhem if a group of men is well-enough armed and prepared to die. Rather than hijacking planes as in September 11, or smuggling delicately wired car bombs into a city, the Mumbai gunmen chose a frontal style of armed assault, killing more than 100 people, wounding around 250 and causing immense panic.

Sumantra Bose, writing for the BBC, explained, that “the fidayeentechnique - a rudimentary form of ‘shock and awe’ warfare - was introduced into Kashmir by Pakistani radical organisations that entered the Kashmir insurgency from the mid-1990s onwards.” And, although fidayeenattacks “have died down in Kashmir since India-Pakistan relations thawed from 2004″ the use of these tactics in Mumbai “shows that this technique has now found a new and even more dangerous theatre in which to operate.”

Writing in the Pakistan Daily Times, Ejaz Haider gave a brutal assessment of the risks of fidayeen attacks:

Take a pause, marvel at the simplicity of what has happened and then shudder at the cost it has extracted from a state and society, across a whole range of activities. A few gunmen, carrying automatic weapons and grenades, held hostage India’s biggest city and by a simple enough plan, something that would be obvious to anyone bent upon making a violent statement. It takes one person running amok with a rifle to go out and kill twenty odd people before being shot dead or committing suicide. The incident shakes up a society for years.