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The Cult of the Suicide Bomber
By Robert Fisk
14/03/08 "The
Independent" -- - Khaled looked at me with a broad
smile. He was almost laughing. At one point, when I told him
that he should abandon all thoughts of being a suicide bomber -
that he could influence more people in this world by becoming a
journalist - he put his head back and shot me a grin,
world-weary for a man in his teens. “You have your mission,” he
said. “And I have mine.” His sisters looked at him in awe. He
was their hero, their amanuensis and their teacher, their
representative and their soon-to-be-martyred brother. Yes, he
was handsome, young - just 18 - he was dressed in a black
Giorgio Armani T-shirt, a small, carefully trimmed Spanish
conquistador’s beard, gelled hair. And he was ready to immolate
himself.
A sinister surprise. I had travelled to Khaled’s home to speak
to his mother. I had already written about his brother Hassan
and wanted to introduce a Canadian journalist colleague, Nelofer
Pazira, to the family. When Khaled walked on to the porch of the
house, Nelofer and I both realised - at the same moment - that
he was next, the next to die, the next “martyr”. It was his
smile. I’ve come across these young men before, but never one
who so obviously declared his calling.
His family sat around us on the porch of their home above the
Lebanese city of Sidon, the sitting room adorned with coloured
photographs of Hassan, already gone to the paradise - so they
assured me - for which Khaled clearly thought he was destined.
Hassan had driven his explosives-laden car into an American
military convoy at Tal Afar in north-western Iraq, his body (or
what was left of it) buried “in situ” - or so his mother was
informed.
It’s easy to find the families of the newly dead in Lebanon.
Their names are read from the minarets of Sidon’s mosques (most
are Palestinian) and in Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, the Sunni
“Tawhid” movement boasts “hundreds” of suiciders among its
supporters. Every night, the population of Lebanon watches the
brutal war in Iraq on television. “It’s difficult to reach
‘Palestine’ these days,” Khaled’s uncle informed me. “Iraq is
easier.”
Too true. No one doubts that the road to Baghdad - or Tal Afar
or Fallujah or Mosul - lies through Syria, and that the movement
of suicide bombers from the Mediterranean coasts to the deserts
of Iraq is a planned if not particularly sophisticated affair.
What is astonishing - what is not mentioned by the Americans or
the Iraqi “government” or the British authorities or indeed by
many journalists - is the sheer scale of the suicide campaign,
the vast numbers of young men (only occasionally women), who
wilfully destroy themselves amid the American convoys, outside
the Iraqi police stations, in markets and around mosques and in
shopping streets and on lonely roads beside remote checkpoints
across the huge cities and vast deserts of Iraq. Never have the
true figures for this astonishing and unprecedented campaign of
self-liquidation been calculated.
But a month-long investigation by The Independent, culling four
Arabic-language newspapers, official Iraqi statistics, two
Beirut news agencies and Western reports, shows that an
incredible 1,121 Muslim suicide bombers have blown themselves up
in Iraq. This is a very conservative figure and - given the
propensity of the authorities (and of journalists) to report
only those suicide bombings that kill dozens of people - the
true estimate may be double this number. On several days, six -
even nine - suicide bombers have exploded themselves in Iraq in
a display of almost Wal-Mart availability. If life in Iraq is
cheap, death is cheaper.
This is perhaps the most frightening and ghoulish legacy of
George Bush’s invasion of Iraq five years ago. Suicide bombers
in Iraq have killed at least 13,000 men, women and children -
our most conservative estimate gives a total figure of 13,132 -
and wounded a minimum of 16,112 people. If we include the dead
and wounded in the mass stampede at the Baghdad Tigris river
bridge in the summer of 2005 - caused by fear of suicide bombers
- the figures rise to 14,132 and 16,612 respectively. Again, it
must be emphasised that these statistics are minimums. For 529
of the suicide bombings in Iraq, no figures for wounded are
available. Where wounded have been listed in news reports as
“several”, we have made no addition to the figures. And the
number of critically injured who later died remains unknown. Set
against a possible death toll of half a million Iraqis since the
March 2003 invasion, the suicide bombers’ victims may appear
insignificant; but the killers’ ability to terrorise civilians,
militiamen and Western troops and mercenaries is incalculable.
Never before has the Arab world witnessed a phenomenon of
suicide-death on this scale. During Israel’s occupation of
Lebanon after 1982, one Hizbollah suicide-bombing a month was
considered remarkable. During the Palestinian intifadas of the
1980s and 1990s, four per month was regarded as unprecedented.
But suicide bombers in Iraq have been attacking at the average
rate of two every three days since the 2003 Anglo-American
invasion.
And, although neither the Iraqi government nor their American
mentors will admit this, scarcely 10 out of more than a thousand
suicide killers have been identified. We know from their
families that Palestinians, Saudis, Syrians and Algerians have
been among the bombers. In a few cases, we have names. But in
most attacks, the authorities in Iraq - if they can still be
called “authorities” after five years of catastrophe - have no
idea to whom the bloodied limbs and headless torsos of the
bombers belong.
Even more profoundly disturbing is that the “cult” of the
suicide bomber has seeped across national frontiers. Within a
year of the Iraqi invasion, Afghan Taliban bombers were blowing
themselves up alongside Western troops or bases in Helmand
province and in the capital Kabul. The practice leached into
Pakistan, striking down thousands of troops and civilians,
killing even the principal opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto.
The London Tube and bus bombings - despite the denials of Tony
Blair - were obviously deeply influenced by events in Iraq.
Academics and politicians have long debated the motives of the
bombers, the psychological make-up of the men and women who
cold-bloodedly decide to undertake the role of suicide
executioners; for they are executioners, killers who see their
victims - be they soldiers or civilians - before they flick the
switch that destroys them. The Israelis long ago decided that
there was no “perfect” profile for a suicide bomber, and my own
experience in Lebanon bears this out. The suicider might have
spent years fighting the Israelis in the south of the country.
Often, they would have been imprisoned or tortured by Israel or
its proxy Lebanese militia. Sometimes, brothers or other family
members would have been killed. On other occasions, the example
of their own relatives would have drawn them into the vortex of
suicide-by-example.
Khaled is - or was, for I no longer know if he is alive, since I
met him a few weeks ago- influenced by his brother Hassan, whose
journey to Iraq was organised by an unknown group, presumably
Palestinian, and whose weapons training beside the Tigris river
was videotaped by his comrades. Hassan’s mother has shown me
this tape - which ends with Hassan cheerfully waving goodbye
from the driver’s window of a battered car, presumably the
vehicle he was about to ram into the American convoy at Tal
Afar.
None of this addresses the issue of religious belief. While
there is evidence aplenty that the Japanese suicide pilots of
the Second World War were sometimes coerced and intimidated into
their final flights against US warships in the Pacific, many
also believed that they were dying for their emperor. For them,
the fall of cherry blossom and the divine wind - the “kamikaze”
- blessed their souls as they aimed their bombers at American
aircraft carriers. But even an industrialised dictatorship like
Japan - facing the imminent collapse of its entire society at
the hands of a superpower - could only mobilise 4,615
“kamikazes”. The Iraq suicide bombers may already have reached
half that number.
But the Japanese authorities encouraged their pilots to think of
themselves as a collective suicide unit whose insignia of
imminent death - white Rising Sun headbands and white scarves -
prefigured the yellow headbands imprinted with Koranic script
that Hizbollah guerrillas wore when they set out to attack
Israeli soldiers in the occupied zone of southern Lebanon. In
Iraq, however, those who direct the growing army of suiciders do
not lack inventiveness. Their bombers have arrived at the scene
of their self-destruction dressed as car mechanics, soldiers,
police officers, middle-aged housewives, children’s
sweet-sellers, worshippers and - on one occasion - a “harmless”
shepherd. They have carried their bombs in Oldsmobiles, fuel
trucks, garbage trucks, flat-bed trucks, on donkeys and
bicycles, motor-bikes and mopeds and carts, minibuses,
date-vendors’ vans, mobile recruitment centres and lorries
packed with chlorine. Incredibly, there appears to be no
individual central “brain” behind the bombings - although
“groupuscules” of bombers obviously exist. Inspiration,
imitation and the globalised influence of the internet appear
sufficient to empower the bombers of Iraq.
On an individual level, it is possible to see the friction and
psychological trauma of families. Khaled’s mother, for instance,
constantly expressed her pride in her dead son Hassan and, in
front of me, she looked with almost equal love at his
still-living brother. But when my companion urged Khaled to
remain alive for his mother’s sake - reminding him that the
Prophet himself spoke of the primary obligation of a Muslim man
to protect his mother - the woman was close to tears. She was
torn apart by her love as a mother and her religious-political
duty as the woman who had brought another would-be martyr into
the world. When my friend again urged Khaled to remain alive, to
stay in Sidon and marry - eerily, the muezzin’s call to prayer
had begun during our conversation - he shook his head.
Not even a disparaging remark about those who would send him on
his death mission - that they were prepared to live in this
world while sending others like Khaled to their fate - could
discourage him. “I am not going to become a ’shahed’ [martyr]
for people,” he replied. “I am doing it for God.”
It was the same old argument. We could produce a hundred good
ways - peaceful ways - for him to resolve the injustices of this
world; but the moment Khaled invoked the name of God, our
suggestions became irrelevant. Rationality - humanism, if you
like - simply withered away. If a Western president could invoke
a war of “good against evil”, his antagonists could do the same.
But is there a rational pattern to the suicide bombings in Iraq?
The first incidents of their kind took place as American troops
were actually advancing towards Baghdad. Near the Shia town of
Nasiriyah, an off-duty Iraqi policeman, Sergeant Ali Jaffar
Moussa Hamadi al-Nomani, drove a car bomb into an American
Marine roadblock. Married, with five children, he had been a
soldier in Iraq’s 1980-88 war with Iran and had volunteered to
fight the Americans after Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait. Shortly
afterwards, two Shia Muslim women did the same.
In its dying days, even Saddam Hussein’s own government was
shocked. “The US administration is going to turn the whole world
into people prepared to die for their nations,” Saddam’s
vice-president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, warned. “All they can do
now is turn themselves into bombs. If the B-52 bombs can now
kill 500 or more in our war, then I’m sure that some operations
by our freedom fighters will be able to kill 5,000.” Ramadan
even referred to “the martyr’s moment of sublimity” - an
al-Qa’ida-like phrase that ill befitted a secular Baathist - and
it was clear that the vice-president was almost as surprised as
the Americans. But only two days after the US occupation of
Baghdad, a woman killed herself while trying to explode a
grenade among a group of American troops outside the capital.
Throughout the five years of war, suicide bombers have focused
on Iraq’s own American-trained security forces rather than US
troops. At least 365 attacks have been staged against Iraqi
police or paramilitary forces. Their targets included at least
147 police stations (1,577 deaths), 43 army and police
recruitment centres (939 deaths), 91 checkpoints (with a minimum
of 564 fatalities), 92 security patrols (465 deaths) and
numerous other police targets (escorts, convoys accompanying
government ministers, etc). One of the recruitment centres - in
the centre of Baghdad - was assaulted by suicide bombers on
eight separate occasions.
By contrast, suicide bombers have attacked only 24 US bases at a
cost of 100 American dead and 15 Iraqis, and 43 American patrols
and checkpoints, during which 116 US personnel were killed along
with at least 56 civilians, 15 of whom appear to have been shot
by American soldiers in response to the attacks, and another 26
of whom were children standing next to a US patrol. Most of the
Americans were killed west or north of Baghdad. Suicide attacks
on the police concentrated on Baghdad and Mosul and the Sunni
towns to the immediate north and south of Baghdad.
The trajectory of the suicide bombers shows a clear preference
for military targets throughout the insurgency, with attacks on
Americans gradually decreasing from 2006 and individual attacks
on Iraqi police patrols and police recruits increasing over the
past two years, especially in the 100 miles north of Baghdad.
Just as the Islamist murderers of Algeria - and their military
opponents - favoured the fasting month of Ramadan for their
bloodiest assaults in the 1990s, so the suicide bombers of Iraq
mobilise on the eve of religious festivals. There was a
pronounced drop in suicide assaults during the period of
sectarian liquidations after 2005, either because the bombers
feared interception by the throat-cutters of tribal gangs
working their way across Baghdad, or because - a grim
possibility - they were themselves being used in the sectarian
murder campaign.
The most politically powerful attacks occurred inside military
bases - including the Green Zone in Baghdad (two in one day in
October 2004) - and against the UN headquarters (in which the UN
envoy Sergio de Mello was killed) and the International Red
Cross offices in Baghdad in 2003. By December 2003, British
officials were warning that there were more “spectacular”
suicide bombings to come, and the first suicide assault on a
mosque took place in January of the following year when a bomber
on a bicycle blew himself up in a Shia mosque in Baquba, killing
four worshippers and wounding another 39.
Scarcely a year later, another suicider attacked a second Shia
mosque, killing 14 worshippers and wounding 40. In February
2004, a man blew himself up on a bus outside the Shia mosque at
Khadamiyah in Baghdad, killing 17 more Shia Muslims. Only a few
days earlier, a man wearing an explosives belt killed four at
yet another Shia mosque in the Doura district of Baghdad. The
suicide campaign against Shia places of worship continued with
an attack on a Mosul mosque in March 2005, killing at least 50,
two more attacks in April that killed 26, and another in May in
Baghdad.
While Shia mosques were being targeted in a deliberate campaign
of provocation by al-Qa’ida-type suiciders, markets and
hospitals frequented by Shia Muslims were also attacked. Almost
all the 600 Iraqis killed by suicide bombs in May 2005 were
Shias. After the partial demolition of the Shia mosque at
Samarra on 22 February 2006, the “war of the mosques” began in
earnest for the suicide bombers of Iraq. A Sunni mosque was
blown up, with nine dead and “dozens” of wounded, and two Shia
mosques were the target of suicide bombers in the same week. In
early July 2006, seven suicide killers blew themselves up in
Sunni and Shia mosques, leaving a total of 51 civilians dead.
During the same period, a suicide bomber launched the first
attack of its kind on Shia pilgrims arriving from Iran.
Bombers were to attack the funerals of those Shia they had
killed, and even wedding parties. Schools, university campuses
and shopping precincts were also now included on the target
lists, most of the victims yet again being Shia. Over the past
year, however, an increasing number of tribal leaders loyal to
the Americans - including Sattar Abu Risha, who publicly met
President Bush on 13 September 2007, and former insurgents who
have now joined the American-paid anti-al-Qa’ida militias - have
been blown apart by Sunni bombers.
Only about 10 of the suicide bombers have been identified. One
of them, who attacked an Iraqi police unit in June 2005, turned
out to be a former police commando called Abu Mohamed
al-Dulaimi, but the Americans and the Iraqi authorities appear
to have little intelligence on the provenance of these killers.
On at least 27 occasions, Iraqi officials have claimed to know
the identity of the killers - saying that they had recovered
passports and identity papers that proved their “foreign” origin
- but they have never produced these documents for public
inspection. There is even doubt that the two suicide bombers who
blew themselves up in a bird market earlier this year were in
fact mentally retarded young women, as the government was to
allege.
Indeed, nothing could better illustrate the lack of knowledge of
the authorities than the two contradictory statements made by
the Americans and their Iraqi protégés in March of last year.
Just as David Satterfield, US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice’s adviser on Iraq, was claiming that “90 per cent” of
suicide bombers were crossing the border from Syria, Iraq’s
Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, was announcing that “most” of
the suiciders came from Saudi Arabia - which shares a long,
common border with Iraq. Saudis would hardly waste their time
travelling to Damascus to cross a border that their own country
shared with Iraq. Many in Baghdad, including some government
ministers, believe that the nationality of the bombers is much
closer to home - that they are, in fact, Iraqis.
It will be many years before we have a clearer idea of the
number of bombers who have killed themselves in the Iraq war -
and of their origin. Long before The Independent’s total figure
reached 500, al-Qa’ida’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was boasting of
“800 martyrs” among his supporters. And since al-Zarqawi’s death
brought not the slightest reduction in bombings, we must assume
that there are many other “manipulators” in charge of Iraq’s
suicide squads.
Nor can we assume the motives for every mass murder. Who now
remembers that the greatest individual number of victims of any
suicide bombing died in two remote villages of the Kahtaniya
region of Iraq, all Yazidis - 516 of them slaughtered, another
525 wounded. A Yazidi girl, it seems, had fallen in love with a
Sunni man and had been punished by her own people for this
“honour crime”: she had been stoned to death. The killers
presumably came from the Sunni community.
One of George Bush’s most insidious legacies in Iraq thus
remains its most mysterious; the marriage of nationalism and
spiritual ferocity, the birth of an unprecedentedly huge army of
Muslims inspired by the idea of death.
©independent.co.uk
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