When talking about the Assassins these days, there is an almost irresistible temptation to become Paul Harvey: "Imagine a vicious band of Islamic terrorists whose reach spans continents, and who kill whenever and wherever they want. From their lairs in the Middle East, they send out teams of ruthless killers with no fear of death. Authorities all over the world issue warnings against imminent attacks. These Muslim fanatics seemingly have the ability to strike anywhere, any time..." But that's about as long as I want to withhold information that should have been revealed in the first paragraph. Of course we are talking about the Assassins, that 13th-century Islamic sect whose name remains with us today. It's not too much of a stretch to say that they really were as feared in medieval Europe as al- Qaeda is today. The parallels are pretty much inescapable, and the differences are much less significant than the similarities. No, I don't believe that Osama bin Laden modeled his organization after the Assassins. Bin Laden would certainly have disapproved of the Assassins' eagerness to murder Muslims and infidels alike, and anyway I'm one of those people who is convinced that Osama chose as a role model the Hari Seldon character from Isaac Asimov's Foundation, but that's another story. Al-Qaeda shares the same motivations and lives in the same intellectual world as the Assassins; it is completely unsurprising that they look so similar. Their story has been told many times, but the best historical monograph on the Assassins, as with most things Islamic, is by Bernard Lewis. I recommend that work for further reading because the Assassins are not really my subject here. Or at least, most of their history isn't. I'm more interested in the sequence of events in the year 1256, when the vast Mongol army of Hulegu, grandson of Genghis Khan, made ready to annihilate the Assassin presence in Persia, Mesopotamia, and Syria, bearing with it, per Robert Marshall's Storm from the East (1993), the very latest in siege engineering, gunpowder from China, catapults that would send balls of flaming naphtha into their enemy cities, and divisions of rigorously trained mounted archers led by generals who had learnt their skills at the feet of Genghis Khan and Subedei. According to other sources, Hulegu brought no less than a thousand Chinese engineers just to operate the catapults. The Assassins, it was said, had planned to send 400 dagger-wielding fedayeen to murder the Mongol Khan Mongke (brother of Hulegu), and once the Mongols heard this, the Assassins' fate was basically sealed. The Mongols first sought out the primary Assassin fortress of Alamut in Persia and carted their artillery onto the mountainsides around it. After a brief, devastating barrage destroyed the walls of the fortress, the Assassins' Old Man of the Mountain, one Rukn ad Din, gave up. The standard Mongol pillage and slaughter followed. But as for Rukn ad Din, again according to Marshall, Hulegu took him prisoner, transported him to every Assassin castle they confronted, and paraded him before each garrison with the demand for an immediate surrender. Some obliged, as at Alamut; while others, like Gerdkuh, had to be taken by force... As the slaughter continued, Rukn ad Din begged Hulegu to allow him to go to Qaraqorum where he would pay homage to the great Khan and plead for clemency. Hulegu agreed, but when he got to Qaraqorum Mongke Khan refused to see him. It was effectively a sentence of death. On the journey back his Mongol escorts turned on the Grand Master and his attendants, who were 'kicked to a pulp'. I mention this not to take any pleasure in the story, but to point out the really interesting thing here: The Assassins' very reason for being was to convince people to go out to die in the commission of murder. But when it came down to it, their leadership was as afraid to die as the next person. And here we have another parallel to the present situation. We know from the story of John Walker Lindh--who was offered the opportunity but declined--that al-Qaeda is forever on the prowl for operatives for "martyrdom operations." But I don't get the impression that there is a very large number of takers-not if they have to use dim-witted losers like Richard Reid for their one-shot-only shoe- bomb trick. (Obviously I'm not talking about the Palestinians here. There is no lack of Palestinians who want to blow themselves up, but their pathology is uniquely rooted in their situation and has not, at least in recent years, left that environment. The September 11th hijackers were from four different Arab countries, none of them Palestine.) The larger point here is a philosophical one--that nearly everyone prefers life to death. The Assassins demonstrated long ago that there is a certain art in convincing people to kill themselves. This particular art rests upon the elaborate maintenance of a vivid belief system, and also on the unfettered ability to set the scene, to choose the time and place for attacks. When these criteria fail, the natural tendency to self-preservation takes over. When the Mongols scaled the mountainsides around Alamut with their war machines, it was the end. Without the initiative, the Assassins were lost, and their world crumbled with shocking acceleration. 200 Assassin castles--their entire presence in Persia- -went down in a remarkable two years. Some of their minor castles in Syria escaped the Mongols' attention and survived for decades, but the power of the Assassins was broken forever. But I suspect that the craven selfishness of Rukn ad Din and the Assassin leadership, so unexpected in the worlds of Islam and Christendom, did not come as such a surprise to the Mongols. What the Mongols may have lacked in civilization, they made up in, among other things, an understanding of human nature. Their quickness to exploit ad Din's cowardice leads me to believe that they gave little thought to reputation and much thought to the more immanent patterns of human behavior. Human behavior, as Solzhenitsyn says, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth. People tend to look out for their own lives, no matter what their advance publicity says. We saw this in Afghanistan in November of 2001, and we will see it demonstrated again. In the end, the reviews were all positive; no one missed the Assassins. Muslim and Western historians were almost an echo of each other in saying that in this case the Mongols performed a great service to mankind. What did they do? They took the Muslim fanatics who so terrified Europe and, well, kicked them to a pulp. Back to Table of Contents -- Against the Odds vol. 1 no. 3 Back to Against the Odds List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2002 by LPS. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com * Buy this back issue or subscribe to Against the Odds direct from LPS.