The kill-and-be-killed Islamist terrorist has ended the classic hostage siege
In the aftermath of the July 2 Dhaka terrorist attack where 28 persons were killed by a six-member Islamic State (IS) affiliated group, a milestone went by unnoticed.
July 4 marked the 40th anniversary of "Operation Thunderbolt" when over 100 Israeli commandos flew into the capital of Uganda and rescued 90 airline passengers held by seven Palestinian terrorists.
It was the most spectacular hostage rescue in the history of counter-terrorism not only because of the extreme distances involved - the rescue forces flew over 4,000 kilometres in near-total secrecy - but also because of the low fatalities.
The Israelis lost one commando - task force leader Colonel Yonatan "Yonni" Netanyahu (present Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's older brother), and only three hostages were killed.
It also outlined what was then a given in most hostage situations - the perpetrators were prepared to swap the civilians for a list of demands. Civilian hostages were bargaining chips, usually to ensure the release of jailed terrorists. The plan was to have everyone - civilians and terrorists - walking away unscathed. Such situations gave counter-terrorist forces a very critical resource to plan operations: time.
Skilled hostage negotiators involved in parleys with the terrorists bought more time.
The week-long hijacking of the Air France jet, diverted to Uganda, gave Israeli commandos several days to rehearse their entire operation. They could source the blueprints of the airport terminal where the passengers were held hostage, build a mock-up in Israel and practice their intervention with clockwork precision.
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| 28 persons were killed by terrorists in Dhaka on July 2. |
When the Israeli air force C-130s landed at Entebbe Airport in complete secrecy, they were on the ground for exactly 90 minutes during which commandos fought their way into the airport terminus, killed the terrorists and even destroyed 11 fighter aircraft of the Ugandan air force.
During the siege of the Iranian Embassy in May 1981, the UK's elite Special Air Services (SAS) got five days to construct mock-ups and practice their entry into the building in South Kensington. When the SAS finally moved in, the operation lasted 17 minutes and 19 of the 20 hostages were rescued alive.
This has changed with the advent of Islamist terrorism. The violent act of capturing hostages and executing them with the utmost brutality is the norm. Violence, it would seem, has become an end in itself.
There are no long-drawn negotiations, no care for the well-being of the hostages and, consequently, no time for the counter-terrorist forces to prepare themselves.
Terrorists are brainwashed to accept death in the course of their mission. They come to kill and be killed.
This has been known in the subcontinent for over a decade since groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba began spreading their suicide attacks across the hinterland, and years before the Pakistani Taliban stormed a school in Peshawar on December 16, 2014 brutally murdering 132 school children.
The ten terrorists who landed in Mumbai on the night of November 26, 2008, slaughtered 166 hotel guests, restaurant-goers and train commuters without mercy.
This exchange between a police interrogator and the captured Ajmal Kasab, handcuffed to a hospital bed on November 28, illustrates what security forces are up against:
Policeman: What kind of people did they tell you to kill?
Kasab: Just ordinary people, no one in particular.
Policeman: After completing your job today, where were you planning to go?
Kasab: We were all going to die and go to heaven.
When Bangladeshi security forces stormed the Holey Artisan café on July 2 using armoured personnel carriers, they could rescue only 13 hostages. Twenty hostages - Italians, Japanese and an Indian girl - had been brutally murdered by the six brainwashed IS-affiliated terrorists in the course of the ten-hour standoff.
Suicide attacks like these have ominous consequences for counter-terrorist missions entrusted with the delicate task of extricating civilian hostages. The success of counter-terrorist missions are predicated on the numbers of hostages rescued.
Casualties could make the difference between victory and abject failure. The Entebbe, for instance, could easily have been a disaster if the terrorists had tossed a grenade among the hostages.
The new wave of terror now tells us that the time for intervention has shrunk from weeks and days to hours and minutes. This has huge implications for a densely-populated country like India and whose meagre counter-terrorist forces simply cannot be omnipresent.
The National Security Guard (NSG) based in Manesar, Haryana and Delhi, has created hubs in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata to be able to respond swiftly. But India's cities with gridlocked traffic means commando units could waste hours reaching the scene of a terrorist act.
The best response would be to empower the first responder - the local police. Urban police units need to create small Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) units dispersed across cities, one per police zone (a police precinct headed by a deputy commissoner of police) to immediately respond to an attack.
These units of not more than a dozen commandos, need to be well equipped with assault rifles, body armour, bomb disposal equipment and at least one armoured vehicle.
A successful intervention by such local responders will then allow the build-up of specialised units like the NSG to end the situation in hours and not days.
These SWAT units could also be used to respond to multi-site attacks like the one in Mumbai 26/11. Complacency is an unaffordable luxury when faced with this new threat.