| Abstract: | What strategic logics underlie terrorist groups’ use of linked suicide attacks? Are the goals that groups seek to achieve when sending linked bombing teams somehow inherently different than when sending individual suicide bombers? To answer these questions, this article introduces three typologies of linked suicide bomber detonation profiles—simultaneous, sequential, and nonproximate—and theorizes why terrorist groups might view each type of linked suicide bombing to be preferable to deploying a single suicide bomber. Improvements resulting from using an individual attacker include: ensuring a higher likelihood of successfully hitting a given target (simultaneous detonations); causing more casualties than a single bombing (sequential-wave detonations); and engendering wider-spread shock and awe (nonproximate detonations). Drawing on an original dataset detailing the entirety of Boko Haram’s suicide bombing efforts from 2011 to 2017, we then examine the extent to which these linked bombing typologies do actually appear to successfully lead to an improvement over the deployment of single suicide bombers. While we find that sequential-wave and nonproximate suicide bombings demonstrate evidence of hypothesized improvements over the deployment of single suicide bombers, our data show that deploying simultaneous suicide attackers does not lead to higher efficacy at targeting when compared to the deployment of individual bombers. In attempting to account for this fact, we argue that Boko Haram’s simultaneous detonation teams likely fail to show an improvement over single-bomber attacks because they tend to be composed of what we call “unenthusiastic and under-trained” bombers: teams of often uncommitted women, and sometimes children, which it deploys in tandem in a bid to avoid individual defection and increase the likelihood of at least one detonation in an attack. We conclude by suggesting what the process of linked bombing reveals about both terrorist groups in general and Boko Haram specifically. |
