AT WAR

Heart of Darkness
From Zarqawi to the man on the street, Sunni Arabs
fear Shiite emancipation.

BY FOUAD AJAMI
Wednesday, September 28, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

The remarkable thing about the terror in Iraq is the
silence with which it is greeted in other Arab lands.
Grant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi his due: He has been
skilled at exposing the pitilessness on the loose in
that fabled Arab street and the moral emptiness of so
much of official Arab life. The extremist is never
just a man of the fringe: He always works at the outer
edges of mainstream life, playing out the hidden
yearnings and defects of the dominant culture. Zarqawi
is a bigot and a killer, but he did not descend from
the sky. He emerged out of the Arab world's sins of
omission and commission; in the way he rails against
the Shiites (and the Kurds) he expresses that fatal
Arab inability to take in "the other." A terrible
condition afflicts the Arabs, and Zarqawi puts it on
lethal display: an addiction to failure, and a desire
to see this American project in Iraq come to a bloody
end.

Zarqawi's war, it has to be conceded, is not his
alone; he kills and maims, he labels the Shiites
rafida (rejecters of Islam), he charges them with
treason as "collaborators of the occupiers and the
crusaders," but he can be forgiven the sense that he
is a holy warrior on behalf of a wider Arab world that
has averted its gaze from his crimes, that has given
him its silent approval. He and the band of killers
arrayed around him must know the meaning of this great
Arab silence.





There is a cliché that distinguishes between cultures
of shame and cultures of guilt, and by that crude
distinction, it has always been said that the Arab
world is a "shame culture." But in truth there is
precious little shame in Arab life about the role of
the Arabs in the great struggle for and within Iraq.
What is one to make of the Damascus-based Union of
Arab Writers that has refused to grant membership in
its ranks to Iraqi authors? The pretext that Iraqi
writers can't be "accredited" because their country is
under American occupation is as good an illustration
as it gets of the sordid condition of Arab culture.
For more than three decades, Iraq's life was sheer and
limitless terror, and the Union of Arab Writers never
uttered a word. Through these terrible decades, Iraqis
suffered alone, and still their poetry and literature
adorn Arabic letters. They need no acknowledgment of
their pain, or of their genius, from a literary union
based in a city in the grip of a deadening autocracy.
A culture of shame would surely see into the shame of
an Arab official class with no tradition of
accountability granting itself the right to hack away
at Iraq's constitution, dismissing it as the handiwork
of the American regency. Unreason, an indifference to
the most basic of facts, and a spirit of belligerence
have settled upon the Arab world. Those who, in Arab
lands beyond Iraq, have taken to describing the Iraqi
constitution as an "American-Iranian constitution,"
give voice to a debilitating incoherence. At the heart
of this incoherence lies an adamant determination to
deny the Shiites of Iraq a claim to their rightful
place in their country's political order.

The drumbeats against Iraq that originate from the
League of Arab States and its Egyptian apparatchiks
betray the panic of an old Arab political class afraid
that there is something new unfolding in Iraq--a
different understanding of political power and
citizenship, a possible break with the culture of
tyranny and the cult of Big Men disposing of the
affairs--and the treasure--of nations. It is pitiable
that an Egyptian political class that has abdicated
its own dream of modernity and bent to the will of a
pharaonic regime is obsessed with the doings in Iraq.
But this is the political space left open by the
master of the realm. To be sure, there is terror in
the streets of Iraq; there is plenty there for the
custodians of a stagnant regime in Cairo to point to
as a cautionary tale of what awaits societies that
break with "secure" ways. But the Egyptian autocracy
knows the stakes. An Iraqi polity with a modern social
contract would be a rebuke to all that Egypt stands
for, a cruel reminder of the heartbreak of Egyptians
in recent years. We must not fall for Cairo's claims
of primacy in Arab politics; these are hollow, and
Iraq will further expose the rot that has settled upon
the political life of Egypt.

Nor ought we be taken in by warnings from Jordan, made
by King Abdullah II, of a "Shia crescent" spanning
Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. This is a piece of
bigotry and simplification unworthy of a Hashemite
ruler, for in the scheme of Arab history the
Hashemites have been possessed of moderation and
tolerance. Of all Sunni Arab rulers, the Hashemites
have been particularly close to the Shiites, but
popular opinion in Jordan has been thoroughly
infatuated with Saddam Hussein, and Saddamism, and an
inexperienced ruler must have reasoned that the Shiite
bogey would play well at home.

The truth of Jordan today is official moderation
coupled with a civic culture given to
anti-Americanism, and hijacked by the Islamists. In
that standoff, the country's political life is
off-limits, but the street has its way on Iraq. Verse
is still read in Saddam's praise at poetry readings in
Amman, and the lawyers' syndicate is packed with those
eager to join the legal defense teams of Saddam
Hussein and his principal lieutenants. Saddam's two
daughters reside in Jordan with no apologies to offer,
and no second thoughts about the great crimes
committed under the Baath tyranny. Those who know the
ways of Jordan speak of cities where religious
radicalism and bigotry blow with abandon. Zarqa, the
hometown of Abu Musab, is one such place; Salt, the
birthplace of a notorious suicide bomber, Raad
al-Banna, who last winter brought great tragedy to the
Iraqi town of Hilla, killing no fewer than 125 of its
people, is another. For a funeral, Banna's family gave
him a "martyr's wedding," and the affair became an
embarrassment to the regime and the political class.
Jordan is yet to make its peace with the new Iraq.
(King Abdullah's "crescent" breaks at any rate: Syria
has no Shiites to speak of, and its Alawite rulers are
undermining the Shiites of Iraq, feeding a jihadist
breed of Sunni warriors for whom the Alawites are
children of darkness.)





It was the luck of the imperial draw that the American
project in Iraq came to the rescue of the Shiites--and
of the Kurds. We may not fully appreciate the
historical change we unleashed on the Arab world, but
we have given liberty to the stepchildren of the Arab
world. We have overturned an edifice of material and
moral power that dates back centuries. The Arabs
railing against U.S. imperialism and arrogance in Iraq
will never let us in on the real sources of their
resentments. In the way of "modern" men and women with
some familiarity with the doctrines of political
correctness, they can't tell us that they are
aggrieved that we have given a measure of self-worth
to the seminarians of Najaf and the highlanders of
Kurdistan. But that is precisely what gnaws at them.
An edifice of Arab nationalism built by strange
bedfellows--the Sunni political and bureaucratic
elites, and the Christian Arab pundits who abetted
them in the idle hope that they would be spared the
wrath of the street and of the mob--was overturned in
Iraq. And America, at times ambivalent about its
mission, brought along with its military gear a
suspicion of the Shiites, a belief that the Iraqi
Shiites were an extension of Iran, a community
destined to build a sister-republic of the Iranian
theocracy. Washington has its cadre of Arabists reared
on Arab nationalist historiography. This camp had a
seat at the table, but the very scale of what was at
play in Iraq, and the redemptionism at the heart of
George Bush's ideology, dwarfed them.

For the Arab enemies of this project of rescue, this
new war in Iraq was a replay of an old drama: the fall
of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258. In the received
history, the great city of learning, the capital of
the Abbasid Caliphate, had fallen to savages, and an
age of greatness had drawn to a close. In the legend
of that tale, the Mongols sacked the metropolis, put
its people to the sword, dumped the books of its
libraries in the Tigris. That river, chroniclers
insist, flowed, alternately, with the blood of the
victims and the ink of the books. It is a tale of
betrayal, the selective history maintains. A minister
of the caliph, a Shiite by the name of Ibn Alqami,
opened the gates of Baghdad to the Mongols. History
never rests here, and telescopes easily: In his call
for a new holy war against the Shiites, Zarqawi
dredges up that history, dismisses the Shiite-led
government as "the government of Ibn Alqami's
descendants." Zarqawi knows the power of this
symbolism, and its dark appeal to Sunni Arabs within
Iraq.

Zarqawi's jihadists have sown ruin in Iraq, but they
are strangers to that country, and they have needed
the harbor given them in the Sunni triangle and the
indulgence of the old Baathists. For the diehards,
Iraq is now a "stolen country" delivered into the
hands of subject communities unfit to rule. Though a
decided minority, the Sunni Arabs have a majoritarian
mindset and a conviction that political dominion is
their birthright. Instead of encouraging a break with
the old Manichaean ideologies, the Arab world beyond
Iraq feeds this deep-seated sense of historical
entitlement. No one is under any illusions as to what
the Sunni Arabs would have done had oil been located
in their provinces. They would have disowned both
north and south and opted for a smaller world of their
own and defended it with the sword. But this was not
to be, and their war is the panic of a community that
fears that it could be left with a realm of "gravel
and sand."





In the aftermath of Katrina, the project of reforming
a faraway region and ridding it of its malignancies is
harder to sustain and defend. We are face-to-face with
the trade-off between duties beyond borders and duties
within. At home, for the critics of the war, Katrina
is a rod to wave in the face of the Bush
administration. To be sure, we did not acquit
ourselves well in the aftermath of the storm; we left
ourselves open to the gloatings of those eager to see
America get its comeuppance. Even Zarqawi weighed in
on Katrina, depicting a raid on the northern town of
Tal Afar by a joint Iraqi-American force as an attempt
on the part of "Bush, the enemy of God" to cover up
the great "scandal in facing up to the storm which
exposed to the entire world what had happened to the
American military due to the wars of attrition it had
suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Those duties within have to be redeemed in the manner
that this country has always assumed redemptive
projects. But that other project, in the burning
grounds of the Arab-Muslim world, remains, and we must
remember its genesis. It arose out of a calamity on
9/11, which rid us rudely of the illusions of the
'90s. That era had been a fools' paradise; Nasdaq had
not brought about history's end. In Kabul and Baghdad,
we cut down two terrible regimes; in the neighborhood
beyond, there are chameleons in the shadows whose ways
are harder to extirpate.

We have not always been brilliant in the war we have
waged, for these are lands we did not fully know. But
our work has been noble and necessary, and we can't
call a halt to it in midstream. We bought time for
reform to take root in several Arab and Muslim realms.
Leave aside the rescue of Afghanistan, Kuwait and
Qatar have done well by our protection, and Lebanon
has retrieved much of its freedom. The three larger
realms of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria are more
difficult settings, but there, too, the established
orders of power will have to accommodate the yearnings
for change. A Kuwaiti businessman with an unerring
feel for the ways of the Arab world put it thus to me:
"Iraq, the Internet, and American power are
undermining the old order in the Arab world. There are
gains by the day." The rage against our work in Iraq,
all the way from the "chat rooms" of Arabia to the
bigots of Finsbury Park in London, is located within
this broader struggle.

In that Iraqi battleground, we can't yet say that the
insurgency is in its death throes. But that call to
war by Zarqawi, we must know, came after the stunning
military operation in Tal Afar dealt the jihadists a
terrible blow. An Iraqi-led force, supported by
American tanks, armored vehicles and air cover, had
stormed that stronghold. This had been a transit point
for jihadists coming in from Syria. This time, at Tal
Afar, Iraq security forces were there to stay, and a
Sunni Arab defense minister with the most impeccable
tribal credentials, Saadoun Dulaimi, issued a
challenge to Iraq's enemy, a message that his soldiers
would fight for their country.

The claim that our war in Iraq, after the sacrifices,
will have hatched a Shiite theocracy is a smear on the
war, a misreading of the Shiite world of Iraq. In the
holy city of Najaf, at its apex, there is a dread of
political furies and an attachment to sobriety. I went
to Najaf in July; no one of consequence there spoke of
a theocratic state. Najaf's jurists lived through a
time of terror, when informers and assassins had the
run of the place. They have been delivered from that
time. The new order shall give them what they want: a
place in Iraq's cultural and moral order, and a decent
separation between religion and the compromises of
political life.

Over the horizon looms a referendum to ratify the
country's constitution. Sunni Arabs are registering in
droves, keen not to repeat the error they committed
when they boycotted the national elections earlier
this year. In their pride, and out of fear of the
insurgents and their terror, the Sunni Arabs say that
they are registering to vote in order to thwart this
"illegitimate constitution." This kind of saving
ambiguity ought to be welcomed, for there are
indications that the Sunni Arabs may have begun to
understand terror's blindness and terror's ruin.
Zarqawi holds out but one fate for them; other doors
beckon, and there have stepped forth from their ranks
leaders eager to partake of the new order. It is up to
them, and to the Arab street and the Arab
chancelleries that wink at them, to bring an end to
the terror. It has not been easy, this expedition to
Iraq, and for America in Iraq there has been
heartbreak aplenty. But we ought to remember the
furies that took us there, and we ought to be consoled
by the thought that the fight for Iraq is a fight to
ward off Arab dangers and troubles that came our way
on a clear September morning, four years ago.

Mr. Ajami teaches International Relations at Johns
Hopkins University.

Endgame in Iraq



Even a brief visit to the southern Iraqi port of Umm Qasr leaves me convinced that we are entering the endgame here. The coming Iraqi votes, in October over the new constitution and in December over a new parliament, are going to tell America whether it is worth staying here or not for much longer. Despite all the shameful blunders of Donald Rumsfeld, Iraq, at the end of the day, was always going to be what the Iraqis decided to make of it. And the Iraqi majority _ the Shi'ites and Kurds who make up roughly 80% of this country _ have spoken. They want an Iraq that will be decentralised and will allow each of their communities to run its own affairs and culture _ without fear of ever again being dominated and brutalised by an oil-backed Sunni minority regime in Baghdad. Equally important, both the Kurds and the Shi'ites have made it clear that they have no interest in telling the Sunnis how to live, and will cut them a slice of Iraq's oil revenue and maintain Iraq's basic Arab identity.

So now we know what kind of majority the Kurds and Shi'ites want to be, the question is what kind of minority the Iraqi Sunnis want to be. Do they want to be the Palestinians and spend the next 100 years trying to mobilise the Arab-Muslim world to reverse history and restore their ``right'' to rule Iraq as a minority _ a move that would destroy them and Iraq. Or do they want to embrace the future? I know the Sunnis are terrified by Iran's influence in this southern region, but, as the Brits who run the Basra area will tell you, the Iraqi Arab Shi'ites here are obsessed with not being dominated by Iran. That attitude would only be enhanced if Iraqi Sunnis, rather than allowing or abetting the murders of Shi'ites, would instead embrace the new constitution and let the US cut the Sunnis an even fairer slice of the pie.

``We have a lot of overlapping interests with the Sunnis of Iraq,'' a senior US official in Baghdad said. Indeed, in the latter stages of the constitutional negotiations in Iraq, the US ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, was basically acting as the Sunnis' lawyer in dealings with the Kurds and Shi'ites. The problem was that the Sunnis never knew when to say yes, ``that's enough,'' and the US got fed up with their demanding much more than their due. Do the Iraqi Sunnis understand their own interests, and does the Sunni world have any moral centre? Up to now the Sunni Arab world has stood mute while the Sunni Ba'athists and jihadists in Iraq have engaged in what can only be called ``ethnic cleansing'': murdering Shi'ite civilians in large numbers because they are Shi'ites in hopes of restoring a Sunni-dominated order in Iraq that is un-restorable. A fatwa has just been issued against a female Indian tennis player who is Muslim, condemning her for her short skirts, but no fatwa has been issued by Sunni clerics condemning al-Zarqawi's butchering of children and teachers. Some courageous Sunnis have begun to speak out. ``One of the most bizarre phenomena of recent times has been the refusal of Arab governments to condemn terrorist acts in Iraq or to commiserate with the victims,'' Abdul Rahman al-Rashed wrote in the Saudi daily Asharq Al Awsat. ``Take the most recent atrocities in which more than 200 Iraqis lost their lives in two days of carnage: No Arab government raised its voice in condemnation, although most of them shrilly objected when the new Iraqi Constitution failed to mention that the country was part of the Arab nation. The official Arab position vis-a-vis Iraq has always been spineless.''

So, folks, we are faltering in Iraq today in part because of the Bush team's incompetence, but also because of the moral vacuum in the Sunni Arab world, where the worst are engaged in murderous ethnic cleansing and the rest are too afraid, too weak, too lost or too anti-Shi'ite to do anything about it. Maybe the cynical Europeans were right. Maybe this neighbourhood is just beyond transformation. That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won't, then we are wasting our time. We should arm the Shi'ites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind. We must not throw more good American lives after good American lives for people who hate others more than they love their own children.

Thomas L Friedman is a New York Times columnist.

rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/ter/ter100605_bush.rm?

Presdent Bush last speech about Iraq.
خطاب الرئيس بوش الاخير حول محاربه الارهاب و التزامه بتحرير العراق
مذكرا بحقيقه الاسلام كدين سلام " يجب التفريق بين الارهاب و الاسلام"

October 5, 2005
Sinbad vs. the Mermaids
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Aboard U.S.S. Chosin

I never sleep well on warships.

So it was no surprise to me that I woke up at 5 a.m. the other day in my
tiny guest bunk on the U.S.S. Chosin, which commands the U.S. Navy task
force off the coast of Iraq. As I walked laps around the deck in the predawn
light, my mind kept coming back to the incredible clash I had witnessed
between the political culture of the U.S. Navy and the political culture of
both the Iraqis on land and the Arab fishermen in the Persian Gulf.

Iraq is a multiethnic society that had to be held together by a dictator's
iron fist. What Iraqis are struggling with today is whether they can forge
their own social contract in which Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis can live
together - without an iron fist. That is critical because virtually every
Arab state today is a mix of religions and ethnicities held together by a
hard or soft fist. If Iraqis can find a way to live together, any people out
here can, and democracy has a future. If the Iraqis can't, probably no one
can, and we can look forward to dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab
world - with all the pathologies they bring - forever. But change is hard.

When the Iraqi Navy drops you off on the Chosin, a guided-missile cruiser,
two things just hit you in the face: one is the diversity of the U.S. Navy -
blacks, whites, Hispanics, Christians, Jews, atheists, Muslims, all working
together, bound by a shared idea, not an iron fist. To be sure, it took
America a good 150 years after independence to embrace pluralism and women's
rights, and we're still working at it. Nevertheless, America today is so
different from anything in this part of the world. The Iraqi Navy is all
men, and almost all Shiites. We are like Martians to them.

Mustapha Ahansal is a Moroccan-American sailor who acts as the Chosin's
Arabic translator when it boards ships in the gulf to look for pirates or
terrorists. "The first time I boarded a boat," he told me, "we had six or
seven people - one Hispanic, one black person, a white person, maybe a woman
in our unit. Their sailors said to me, 'I thought all Americans were white.'
Then one of them asked me, 'Are you in the military?' ... It shocks them
actually. They never knew that such a world actually exists, because they
have their own problems. I was talking to one of their higher-ups in their
Coast Guard and he said: 'It is amazing how you guys can be so many
religions, ethnic groups... and still make this thing work and be the best
in the world. And here we are fighting north and south, and we are all
cousins and brothers.' "

The other thing that hits you on the Chosin is that many officers are women
- so you hear women's voices all day long giving orders over the ship's
loudspeaker and radio. And because the local Arab fishermen also hear this
chatter, many of them probably think the Chosin is an all-female ship! The
110-foot U.S. Coast Guard cutter Monomoy, alongside the Chosin, has a female
deputy captain, who often leads the landing parties that inspect boats in
the gulf; one of the Navy's fast patrol boats, also alongside the Chosin,
had a female captain. "Being a female boarding officer is a huge asset
because they are so curious they want to talk to us more, so we can learn
more things," said Renya Hernandez, the 24-year-old female exec officer of
the Monomoy.

Nagga Haizlip is an Iranian-American sailor who translates into Farsi for
the Chosin when it confronts Iran's Revolutionary Guard Navy. Dressed in
navy fatigues, she told me: "If I call [the Iranians] on bridge-to-bridge
radio they will not want to talk to me. ... They will say, 'I want to speak
to a man.' " As for the Iranian fishermen: "They don't understand I am
actually in the U.S. Navy. That surprises them. ... It is different from
their culture. They ask how do people get along [on the Chosin] and how do
they live together? They are curious."

In trying to bring some democracy to Iraq, we are not just challenging the
dictatorial-tribal political order here, but the male-dominated culture as
well. In effect, we are promoting two revolutions at once: Jefferson versus
Saddam and Sinbad versus the Little Mermaids - who turn out to be captains
of ships. Succeeding in this venture, to stem the drift of the Arab world
toward Islamo-fascism and autocracy, is so much more important than the war
critics have ever allowed. But it is also so much more difficult than the
Bush team ever understood or prepared for - even though it was warned. The
Bush team's greatest sin was not thinking that this war was important. It
was thinking that it would be easy.

Because, as any ship captain on the gulf will tell you, we are sailing right
into the prevailing winds.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1692606,00.html


Are you ready? Tomorrow you will be in Paradise . . .
Nasra Hassan
What motivates a suicide bomber? Our correspondent talks to a young Muslim who survived his intended 'martyrdom' and describes the terrorists' rigorous training



AT DAWN, when the three men heard the morning call to prayer from a mosque in the village below their hideout in the hills, they knelt and uttered the traditional invocation to Allah that Muslim warriors make before setting off for combat. They put on clean clothes, tucked the Koran into their pockets, and began the long hike over the hills and along dry riverbeds to the outskirts of Jerusalem.
In the Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem, they walked in silence so that their accents, the guttural vernacular of Gaza, would not arouse suspicion. It was June 1993, and they were members of the Palestinian fundamentalist group Hamas. Along the way, they stopped to pray at every mosque. At dusk, they boarded a bus that was heading toward West Jerusalem, filled with Israeli passengers. When the driver thwarted their attempt to hijack the vehicle, they tried to detonate the homemade bombs they were carrying.



The bombs failed to go off, so they pulled out guns and began firing wildly. The shots injured five passengers, including a woman who later died. The young men fled the bus, hijacked a car at a red light, and forced the driver to take them toward Bethlehem. Israeli security forces stopped them at a military checkpoint, and in a gun battle two of the young men and their hostage were killed. The third hijacker, whom I will call S, was struck by a bullet in the head; he lay comatose for two months in Israeli hospitals. Finally, he was pronounced brain-dead, and the Israelis sent him back to his family in the Gaza Strip to die.

But S recovered, and when we met, five years later, he told me his version of the events. By then, he was married and the father of three sons. Each of them had been named for shaheed batal — “martyr heroes”.

In Gaza, S is celebrated as a young man who “gave his life to Allah” and whom Allah “brought back to life”.

He was polite as he welcomed me into his home. The house was surrounded by a high cement wall that had been fortified with steel. We sat down in a large, simply furnished room whose walls were inscribed with verses from the Koran. On one wall was a poster showing green birds flying in a purple sky, a symbol of the Palestinian suicide bombers.

S had just turned 27. He is slight, and he walked with a limp, the only trace of his near-death. He invited his wife to join us, and he answered my questions without hesitation.

I asked him when, and why, he had decided to volunteer for martyrdom. “In the spring of 1993, I began to pester our military leaders to let me do an operation,” he said. “It was around the time of the Oslo accords, and it was quiet, too quiet. I wanted to do an operation that would incite others to do the same. Finally, I was given the green light to leave Gaza for an operation inside Israel.”

“How did you feel when you heard that you’d been selected for martyrdom?” I asked.

“It’s as if a very high, impenetrable wall separated you from Paradise or badWord,” he said. “Allah has promised one or the other to his creatures. So, by pressing the detonator, you can immediately open the door to Paradise — it is the shortest path to Heaven.”

S was one of 11 children in a middle-class family that, in 1948, had been forced to flee from Majdal to a refugee camp in Gaza, during the Arab-Israeli war that started with the creation of the State of Israel. He joined Hamas in his early teens and became a street activist.

In 1989, he served two terms in Israeli prisons for intifada activity, including attacks on Israeli soldiers. One of his brothers is serving a life sentence in Israel.

I asked S to describe his preparations for the suicide mission. “We were in a constant state of worship,” he said. “We told each other that if the Israelis only knew how joyful we were they would whip us to death! Those were the happiest days of my life.”

“What is the attraction of martyrdom?” I asked.

“The power of the spirit pulls us upward, while the power of material things pulls us downward,” he said. “Someone bent on martyrdom becomes immune to the material pull. Our planner asked, ‘What if the operation fails?’ We told him, ‘In any case, we get to meet the Prophet and his companions, inshallah.’

“We were floating, swimming, in the feeling that we were about to enter eternity. We had no doubts. We made an oath on the Koran, in the presence of Allah — a pledge not to waver. This jihad pledge is called bayt al-ridwan, after the garden in Paradise that is reserved for the prophets and the martyrs. I know that there are other ways to do jihad. But this one is sweet — the sweetest. All martyrdom operations, if done for Allah ’s sake, hurt less than a gnat’s bite!”

S showed me a video that documented the final planning for the operation. In the grainy footage, I saw him and two other young men engaging in a ritualistic dialogue of questions and answers about the glory of martyrdom. S, who was holding a gun, identified himself as a member of al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, which is one of two Palestinian Islamist organisations that sponsor suicide bombings. (Islamic Jihad is the other group.) “Tomorrow, we will be martyrs,” he declared, looking straight at the camera. “Only the believers know what this means. I love martyrdom.”

The young men and the planner then knelt and placed their right hands on the Koran. The planner said: “Are you ready? Tomorrow, you will be in Paradise.”



SINCE 1982, I have been an international relief worker. In 1996 I was posted to the Gaza Strip during one of the most vicious cycles of suicide bombings. To understand why certain young men voluntarily blow themselves up in the name of Islam, I began, without official sponsorship, to research their backgrounds and the beliefs that had led them to such extreme tactics.

I was warned that my interest in trying to understand the suicide missions was dangerous. But eventually, when the people who were observing me had assured themslves of my credentials — an important one was that I am Muslim and from Pakistan — I was allowed to meet members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad who would help me. “We are agreeing to talk to you so that you can explain the Islamic context of these operations,” one man told me. “Even many in the Islamic world do not understand.”

From 1996 to 1999, I interviewed nearly 250 people involved in the most militant camps of the Palestinian cause: volunteers who, like S, had been unable to complete their suicide missions, the families of dead bombers, and the men who trained them.

None of the suicide bombers — they ranged in age from 18 to 38 — conformed to the typical profile of the suicidal personality. None of them was uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed. Many were middle-class and held paying jobs. Two were the sons of millionaires. They all seemed entirely normal members of their families. They were polite and serious, and in their communities were considered to be model youths. Most were bearded. All were deeply religious.

I was told that to be accepted for a suicide mission the volunteers had to be convinced of the religious legitimacy of the acts they were contemplating, as sanctioned by the divinely revealed religion of Islam. Many of these young men had memorised large sections of the Koran and were well versed in the finer points of Islamic law and practice. But their knowledge of Christianity was rooted in the medieval crusades, and they regarded Judaism and Zionism as synonymous.

Most of the men I interviewed requested strict anonymity. The majority spoke in Arabic and they all talked matter-of-factly about the bombings, showing an unshakeable conviction in the rightness of their cause and their methods. When I asked them if they had any qualms about killing innocent civilians, they would immediately respond, “The Israelis kill our children and our women. This is war, and innocent people get hurt.”

They were not inclined to argue but they were happy to discuss, far into the night, the issues and the purpose of their activities. One condition of the interviews was that, in our discussions, I not refer to their deeds as “suicide”, which is forbidden in Islam. Their preferred term is “sacred explosions”. One member of al-Qassam said: “We do not have tanks or rockets, but we have something superior — our exploding Islamic bombs.”

My contacts told me that, as a military objective, spreading fear among the Israelis was as important as killing them. Anwar Aziz, an Islamic Jihad member who blew himself up in an ambulance in Gaza, in December 1993, had often told friends: “Battles for Islam are won not through the gun but by striking fear into the enemy’s heart.”

Military commanders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad remarked that the human bomb was one of the surest ways of hitting a target. A senior Hamas leader said: “The main thing is to guarantee that a large number of the enemy will be affected. With an explosive belt or bag, the bomber has control over vision, location, and timing.”

As today’s weapons of mass destruction go, the human bomb is cheap. A Palestinian security official pointed out that, apart from a willing young man, all that is needed are such items as nails, gunpowder, a battery, a light switch and a short cable, mercury (readily obtainable from thermometers), acetone, and the cost of tailoring a belt wide enough to hold six or eight pockets of explosives. The most expensive item is transportation to a distant Israeli town. The total cost of a typical operation is about US $150 (£85). The sponsoring organisation usually gives between $3,000-$5,000 (£1,700- £2,830) to the bomber’s family.

I met an imam affiliated with Hamas, a youthful, bearded graduate of the prestigious al Azhar University in Cairo. He explained that the first drop of blood shed by a martyr during jihad washes away his sins instantaneously. On the Day of Judgment, he will face no reckoning. On the Day of Resurrection, he can intercede for 70 of his nearest and dearest to enter Heaven; and he will have at his disposal 72 houris, the beautiful virgins of Paradise. The imam took pains to explain that the promised bliss is not sensual.

There is no shortage of willing recruits for martyrdom. Hamas and Islamic Jihad generally reject those who are under 18, who are the sole wage-earners in their families, or who are married and have family responsibilities. If two brothers ask to join, one is turned away.

The planners keep a close eye on the volunteer’s self-discipline, noting whether he can be discreet among friends and observing his piety in the mosque. During the week before the operation, two “assistants” are delegated to stay with the potential martyr at all times. They report any signs of doubt, and if the young man seems to waver, a senior trainer will arrive to bolster his resolve.

A planner for Islamic Jihad said that his organisation carefully scrutinises the motives of a potential bomber: “We ask this young man, and we ask ourselves, why he wishes so badly to become a human bomb. What are his real motives? Our questions are aimed at clarifying first and foremost for the boy himself his real reasons and the strength of his commitment. Even if he is a long-time member of our group and has always wanted to become a martyr, he needs to be very clear that in such an operation there is no drawing back. Preparation bolsters his conviction, which supports his certitude. It removes fear.”

A member of Hamas explained the preparation: “We focus his attention on Paradise, on being in the presence of Allah, on meeting the Prophet Muhammad, on interceding for his loved ones so that they, too, can be saved from the agonies of badWord, on the houris, and on fighting the Israeli occupation and removing it from the Islamic trust that is Palestine.”

I asked one planner about the problem of fear. “The boy has left that stage far behind,” he said. “The fear is not for his own safety or his impending death. It does not come from lack of confidence in his ability to press the trigger. It is awe, produced by the situation. He has never done this before and, inshallah, he will never do it again. It comes from his fervent desire for success, which will propel him into the presence of Allah. It is anxiety over the possibility of something going wrong and denying him his heart’s wish. The outcome, remember, lies in Allah’s hands.”

Al-khaliyya al-istishhadiyya, which is often mistranslated as “suicide cell” — its proper translation is “martyrdom cell” — is the basic building block of operations. Generally, each cell consists of a leader and two or three young men. When a candidate is placed in a cell, usually after months, if not years, of religious studies, he is assigned the lofty title of al-shaheed al -hayy, “the living martyr”. He is also referred to as “he who is waiting for martyrdom”.

Each cell is tightly compartmentalised and secret. Cell members do not discuss their affiliation with their friends or family, and even if two of them know each other in normal life, they are not aware of the other’s membership in the same cell. (Only the leader is known to both.) Each cell, which is dissolved after the operation has been completed, is given a name from the Koran or from Islamic history.

The young men undergo intensified spiritual exercises, including prayers and recitations of the Koran. Usually, the trainer encourages the candidate to read six particular chapters of the Koran: Baqara, Al Imran, Anfal, Tawba, Rahman, and Asr, which feature such themes as jihad, the birth of the nation of Islam, war, Allah’s favours and the importance of faith.

Religious lectures last from two to four hours each day. The living martyr goes on lengthy fasts. He spends much of the night praying. He pays off all his debts, and asks for forgiveness for actual or perceived offences.

In the days before the operation, the candidate prepares a will on paper, audiocassette or video, sometimes all three. The video testaments, which are shot against a background of the sponsoring organisation’s banner and slogans, show the living martyr reciting the Koran, posing with guns and bombs, exhorting his comrades to follow his example, and extolling the virtues of jihad.

The wills emphasise the voluntary basis of the mission. “This is my free decision, and I urge all of you to follow me,” one young bomber, Muhammad Abu Hashem, said in a recorded testament before blowing himself up, in 1995, in retaliation for the assassination of Fathi Shiqaqi.

The young man repeatedly watches the video of himself, as well as the videos of his predecessors. “These videos encourage him to confront death, not fear it,” one trainer told me. “He becomes intimately familiar with what he is about to do. Then he can greet death like an old friend.”

Just before the bomber sets out on his final journey, he performs a ritual ablution, puts on clean clothes, and tries to attend at least one communal prayer at a mosque. He says the traditional Islamic prayer that is customary before battle, and he asks Allah to forgive his sins and to bless his mission. He puts a Koran in his left breast pocket, above the heart, and he straps the explosives around his waist or picks up a briefcase or a bag containing the bomb. The planner bids him farewell with the words “May Allah be with you, may Allah give you success so that you achieve Paradise.”

The would-be martyr responds, “Inshallah, we will meet in Paradise.”

Hours later, as he presses the detonator, he says, “Allahu akbar” — “Allah is great. All praise to Him.”

The operation doesn’t end with the explosion and the many deaths. Hamas and Islamic Jihad distribute copies of the martyr’s audiocassette or video to the media and to local organisations as a record of their success and encouragement to other young men. His act becomes the subject of sermons in mosques, and provides material for leaflets, posters, videos, demonstrations, and extensive coverage in the media. Graffiti on walls in the martyr’s neighbourhood praise his heroism. Aspiring martyrs perform mock re-enactments of the operation, using models of exploding cars and buses. The sponsoring organisation distributes cassettes of chants and songs honouring the good soldier.

The bomber’s family and the sponsoring organisation celebrate his martyrdom with festivities, as if it were a wedding. Hundreds of guests congregate at the house to offer congratulations. The hosts serve the juices and sweets that the young man specified in his will. Often, the mother will ululate in joy over the honour that Allah has bestowed upon her family.

But there is grief, too. I asked the mother of Ribhi Kahlout, a young man in the Gaza Strip, who had blown himself up in November 1995, what she would have done if she had known what her son was planning to do. “I would have taken a cleaver, cut open my heart, and stuffed him deep inside,” she said. “Then I would have sewn it up tight to keep him safe.”


Nasra Hassan works in Vienna. She has compiled a database of more than 200 profiles of Muslim suicide bombers and has just completed a book on the subject. A version of this article originally appeared in The New Yorker

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051115/ap_on_...m4yBHNlYwNmYw--


Four Americans wer killed in the Amman attacks.. why the American media didn't pay attention to .. Very simple..

They were Arab Americans including the famous Syrian-American film director of "The Message" Islamic movie..

In support to our freinds at Iraq the model.. Please show your support

http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/

My condolences to you and yours. Nothing I can say will dull your pain. God be with you.

What seems to be what is missing in everthing I read in the news is the absolute condemnation of the Terrorists who are killing more civillians that soldiers. These terrorists and homicide bombers don't really care who they kill and they are too cowardly to stand up and fight like men, or to participate in the legitimate processes of forming a government. If they want to get the US out of there they should participate in forming the government not try to kill it's chances.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-Soccer.html?hp



Bombings Mar Soccer Celebrations in Baghdad
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 25, 2007
Thousands of soccer fans in Baghdad celebrated the Iraqi team’s victory over South Korea in the Asian Cup semifinals. More Photos >
BAGHDAD (AP) -- The dream run of Iraq's national soccer team captivated an otherwise despairing nation. But even in its moment of joy -- the Iraqis are in the Asian Cup finals for the first time ever -- violence struck Wednesday.

Two suicide bombings killed at least 50 cheering, dancing, flag-waving Iraqis celebrating their national triumph. More than 130 other revelers were wounded.

The attacks bore the hallmarks of Sunni militants who have fueled the violence tearing at the fragile fabric of Iraq for nearly four years. But these bombings, in parked cars less than an hour apart in separate corners of Baghdad, appeared designed to gain attention rather than target a particular sect.

An ice cream parlor was the backdrop for the first attack, at about 6:30 p.m. A suicide attacker exploded his car in a crowd of people cheering near the al-Riwad shop in the predominantly Sunni Mansour neighborhood in west Baghdad, according to the Interior Ministry. At least 30 people were killed and 75 wounded, the ministry said.

The second suicide car bombing took place in the midst of dozens of vehicles filled with revelers near an Iraqi army checkpoint in the eastern district of Ghadeer, where an uneasy mix of Sunnis, Shiites and Christians live. At least 20 people died and nearly 60 were wounded, the ministry said.

The barbarity of Wednesday's bombings will be remembered for what they abruptly ended.

Qusai Bilal, a 35-year-old Sunni grocer in Ghadeer, was watching the unusual sight of a street party outside his store. Young people danced and waved flags when tragedy struck.

''A huge blast occurred and, in a second, converted the glorious scene to a black one,'' he said.

Ahmed Sattar, who makes a living selling kebabs on a sidewalk grill in the district, asked what could motivate the attacker.

''I can't imagine what I had seen,'' said the 28-year-old Shiite. ''The terrorist changed the happiness to sorrow, sadness. The place of joy was converted to a massacre in a matter of seconds. I'm wondering why.''

University student Ahmad Mudhar, a Shiite, and his 7-year-old brother were celebrating in Mansour, waving the Iraq flag and singing along with hundreds of other revelers. After the bomber struck, the brothers walked home shaken and heartbroken.

''Even during the moments of happiness, the powers of evil and terrorism cause tragedy,'' Mudhar said. Iraqis, he predicted, would return to the streets in celebration ''to shame the terrorists'' if Iraq wins the cup.

The revelers were celebrating Iraq's semifinal win over South Korea in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday. Iraq won a tense penalty shootout 4-3 after the two sides played to a scoreless draw in 90 minutes regulation and 30 minutes extra time.

Iraq will now play Saudi Arabia on Sunday in Jakarta, Indonesia for the championship.

The casualties from the two suicide attacks were not the day's only soccer tragedies.

Celebratory gunfire that filled the Baghdad sky with bullets within seconds of the victory killed at least three people and wounded 19, according to initial police reports.

State Iraqiya television, perhaps eager not to diminish Iraqi joy, withheld the news of any deaths for at least four hours.

Five people had also been killed in the gunfire celebration after Sunday's quarterfinal win over Vietnam and the surprise 3-1 triumph over Australia in the group stages.

After Wednesday's victory, thousands danced, beat drums and sang. Traffic was snarled in much of the capital as cars, Iraqi flags flying from their windows, moved slowly through choking crowds of fans on foot. Motorists honked their horns and young people sprayed water on each other.

Police and soldiers joined in the celebrations, firing their assault rifles in the air, ignoring an appeal against gunfire from the military chiefs.

The successful run in the Asian Cup led many here to see the mixed sectarian team as proof the country could unite despite years of sectarian violence.
Politicians wasted no time in trying for propaganda gain, heaping praise on ''The Lions of the Two Rivers'' as a symbol of the Iraqi unity, ignoring their own failure to bridge the sectarian divide in Iraq that many see as a result of narrow political agendas.

Nouri al-Maliki, the embattled Shiite prime minister, led all others.

After the quarterfinal win over Vietnam, he appeared on television and spoke to the team: ''Today you flew high the Iraqi flag. You created happiness with the participation of all Iraqis.'' He dispatched a close adviser to represent him in Wednesday's semifinal clash in Kuala Lumpur.

Spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told state television the prime minister was trying to speak to the players individually to congratulate them.

''Our eyes were filled with tears by the victory,'' said al-Dabbagh.

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, proudly announced that he was the first to congratulate the team on its victory. A statement issued by his office said the team's victory ''was a source of pride for Iraqis of all sects.''