Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Friday, March 29th, 2024

Ideology Based Terrorism: How Terrorists Kill Everyone Indiscriminately

Fifty people were killed and 72 others injured in a blast which targeted a gathering that marked Eid Milad-u-Nabi (SAWS) in capital Kabul on Tuesday evening. Thus, it is not the first time the terrorists groups attack the civilians and kill them. However, killing the religious scholars on the Birthday of the Holy Prophet of Islam is one of the incidents that shocked different groups of the Afghan society. The angry reactions of the different groups of the society even made the Taliban spokesperson to deny the groups statement indicating that the Taliban members conducted the suicide bombing.
This incident and the alike has made social scholars to pose the question what drives a person to engage in abhorrent and extreme violence, apparently in the service of some ideology? In an effort to understand the choice to participate in political violence, we often speak of radicalization. At its most basic, radicalization is a process best summed up as what goes on before the bomb goes off . Radicalization is a process that (sometimes) culminates in an individual’s participation in terrorism and is often associated with an extreme ideology.
Notably, despite this association, having extreme ideas is not a necessary precursor for involvement in political violence. Social scholars argue that one’s motivation for involvement is complex, multi layered and oftentimes unknowable. While the notion of motivation itself is a relatively straightforward one - motivation refers to the drive or desire to behave a certain way - identifying an individual’s motivation or more accurately motivations for any behavior is unfortunately often an exercise in speculation.
We can only know why people do what they do if they tell us. Understanding why people behave in a certain way is based on an individual’s ability to participate in introspection - the process of reflecting on and interpreting one’s own mental and emotional processes. Apart from introspection, understanding the drivers for our behavior is also reliant on on social factors such as the perceived acceptability of our behavior, as well as how the passage of time impacts on our own reflections on that behavior. 
Apart at all from the complexity around understanding and interpreting motivation, when considering why people engage in terrorism and political violence, we need to reflect on how the reasons an individual joins a violent organization are very different from why an individual stays involved in a terrorist organization. 
Anyway, remaining involved with a terrorist group often has little to do with those motivating factors that encouraged their initial participation. The power of the group becomes salient for an individual as they build relationships with other members and increase their commitment to the group itself. It is often the case that remaining involved with a terrorist group is linked to the interpersonal dynamics of the group and a creeping commitment to the organization, rather than any ideological reasons.
Despite the limited role of religious ideology in radicalization, the new recruits ultimately incorporate an extreme ideology into their own justification for participation in political violence after spending time on the ground interacting with jihadi group members. In effect, they use the ideology to retrospectively explain their motives for joining the terrorist organization.
Therefore, ideology is used as a justification means for the terrorists to justify their cruel acts. As a result one may conclude that, terrorism is political violence as a tool to ensure the interests of a group, organization country or alliance. Based on this, the terrorists kill different group of people by the means of ideology to ensure the political interests of a specific group. Thus, the motive behind killing and wounding tens of Islamic scholars by the Terrorist group of the Taliban was due to the pressures of the United Sates on our neighboring country due to lack of taking enough measures to destroy the safe heavens on the Taliban in its teritory. As the Terrorist group of Taliban is a religious-political tool in the hands of certain countries, it only acts according to the orders it receives from its bosses and kill the people indiscriminately to ensure the interests of its founders.