The New York Times has a story up on their website today about recruits for jihad in Iraq, and in particular the young men of Jordan who are volunteering to strap on explosives and blow themselves and others to kingdom come in the name of their faith. It’s worth a look:
Abu Ibrahim, a lanky 24-year-old, was on [a suicide bomb] mission when he left this bleak city north of Amman for Iraq last October. But he made it only as far as the border before he was arrested, and is now back home in a world he thought he had left for good — biding his time, he said, for another chance to hurl himself into martyrdom.
“I am happy for [his friends who died carrying out suicide attacks in Iraq] but I cry for myself because I couldn’t do it yet,” said Abu Ibrahim, who uses this name as a nom de guerre. “I want to spread the roots of God on this earth and free the land of occupiers. I don’t love anything in this world. What I care about is fighting.” […]
Interviews with Abu Ibrahim and relatives of the other men show that rather than having been individually recruited by an organization like Mr. Zarqawi’s, they gradually radicalized one another, the more strident leading the way. Local imams led them further toward Iraq, citing verses from the Koran to justify killing civilians. The men watched videos depicting tortured and slain Muslims that are copied from Internet sites. […]
“Most of the young people here in Zarqa are very religious,” an Islamist community leader said. “And when they see the news and what is going on in the Islamic countries, they themselves feel that they have to go to fight jihad. Today, you don’t need anyone to tell the young men that they should go to jihad. They themselves want to be martyrs.”
The anger is palpable on the streets of Zarqa. “He’s American? Let’s kidnap and kill him,” one Islamist activist said during an interview with a reporter before the host of the meeting dissuaded him.
The stories of the men from Zarqa help explain the seemingly endless supply of suicide bombers in Iraq, most of whom are believed to be foreigners. […]
The anger among militants in Zarqa, a mostly Sunni city, is now directed at Shiites as much as Americans, reflecting the escalation in hostility between the two branches of Islam since Shiites gained dominance in the new Iraqi government. “They have traditions that are un-Islamic and they hate the Sunnis,” said Ahmad Khalil Abdelaziz Salah, an imam whose mosque in Zarqa was attended by some of Zarqa’s bombers.
Asked to name his targets, Abu Ibrahim said: “First, the Shiites. Second, the Americans. Third, anywhere in the world where Islam is threatened.”
(cont.)
What can you say? They heard and answered the call Bush made. They aren’t in it for the money like the contractors, or because they were duped by recruiters into joining the US military. They are religious zealots, who have turned to violent extremism as a direct result of hearing stories of slaughter coming from Iraq, like these:
There is plenty of news that is omitted by the media, and will be hidden from the public for years, or for lifetimes. I remember being in Al Asad and sitting around drinking with the military as they talked about their missions and killing Iraqis. They told stories about how they were ordered to shoot and kill anything that moved, and they had no qualms admitting that they had killed innocent people. They would shrug it off saying that it is War and that innocent people will die.
The Iraq War has been a human catastrophe in so many ways, but the longest lasting effect may be the tremendous anger and hatred that many in the Muslim world now have for Americans, and, as the article indicates for their fellow co-religionists. This enmity and hatred will last for generations, and will eventually result in more terror attacks in America.
All that fighting them “over there” has done is give these angry young Arab men a reason to fight us “over here.” Before Iraq, Al Qaeda was an outlaw organization, and Osama bin Ladin merely an outsized criminal. After Iraq, Bin Ladin has become the symbol, and Al Qaeda the vanguard, of an increasingly radicalized movement which has metastasized into a cancer that threatens to devour the Middle East in the years since we deposed Saddam Hussein’s regime.
That’s the mission Bush accomplished. Helluva job, Dubya. Helluva job.
What a waste.
It seems the terrorist recruiting is going much better than ours!
Anglo-American-Israeli imperialism and suicide bombers are two sides of the same coin. When we see suicide bombers, we should be seeing ourselves in the mirror. Suicide bombing would never have developed as a tactic if the English, Israelis, and Americans hadn’t stolen from the Arabs and destroyed their lives. It is called asymmetric warfare.
Without the threat of suicide bombers Israel would have to make piece. They don’t want piece, so they need suicide bombers, so they encourage and enable them.
Without insurgents in Iraq the US would have to withdraw. They want to stay in Iraq, so they need insurgent angry young man, so they encourage and enable them.
Needless to say the same goes for 9/11.
That reminds me of the French playwright Jean Genet’s point in The Balcony that the police need criminals, in order to be police.
It reminds me more of what happened on May Day in LA under your own eyes so to speak. From the Unapologetic Mexican:
Of course it’s not asymmetric warfare. Most of the suicide bombers are killing civilians, by definition non-combatants, and thus the “warfare” is one-sided and in effect an illegitimate mass slaughter. To wage a war you have to wage a war against an enemy that is able and ready to defend itself, most of those civilians that are killed and deliberately targeted are not a part of that equation.
Asymmetric warfare is usually understood as a certain tactics used against a superior opponent, the civilians are not a warring party and thus the term asymmetric warfare is not an appropriate term.
Roadside bombs used against military personnel in war are somewhat different and not that clear since military personnel are trained for warfare and must expect violent resistance when entering into a war zone.
I don’t understand your point. The only way I can make sense out of your post is that you are trying to defend Anglo-American-Israeli imperialism.
Since it is easier for an insurgency to hit soft civilian targets than hard targets belonging to the occupier, sometimes insurgents will kill their own civilians as part of a strategy of making things so bad as to make the general public and/or the local puppet government turn against the occupier. I am not saying that this tactic is morally justifiable.
Of course, a lot of the killing of civilians going on in Iraq is sectarian violence, which doesn’t fall under asymmetric warfare.
My general point still holds that the root cause of suicide bombing is British, American, and Israeli imperialism, so that the blame for that violence must rest with those countries.
Well if the only sense you could make out of my comment was that I was defending what you call “Anglo-American-Israeli” without me mentioning the UK, the US or Israel at all in the comment you have a very good imagination.
“My general point still holds that the root cause of suicide bombing is British, American, and Israeli imperialism, so that the blame for that violence must rest with those countries.”
I have heard this apology for why certain groups kill civilians a hundred times before, but it doesn’t make it more true. The ones that decide to kill civilians have to bare the sole responsibility for their actions, period. If we were to follow your argument, some people could go around blowing up other people because what their government- or a government in their part of the world did, and thus be an excuse for any mad man around to kill and maim. Terrorism and killing civilians through suicide attacks are the sole responsibility of the perpetrators and not the victims.
Now when we analyze the root causes for terrorism anger exacerbated by big powers foreign policy must be taken into account of course, but the responsibility rests with the perpetrators.
Over a million Iraqi civlians have died as a result of US military policy – over 500,000 children as a direct, predictable result of pre-invasion sanctions and bombings which targeted civlian infrastructure such as water treatment facilities, and according to the Lancet, over 600,000 after the invasion.
That’s terrorism. THAT’S TERRORISM.
If it is a deliberate targeting it is terrorism, I’m just not convinced it is deliberate. Still, the war in Iraq is not just in my opinion.
Correction, a form of terrorism. As you know the term terrorism is disputed.
My general point still holds that the root cause of suicide bombing is British, American, and Israeli imperialism, so that the blame for that violence must rest with those countries.
What you are saying here is that the victims are to be blamed for what their governments have done. It is like saying that a girl is to be blamed for what her parents have done or to say that a boy are entitled to rape a girl in anger for what here parents have done to/said about him and that they are to be blamed for the rape. The whole idea is outrageous in my opinion.
Actually, most of the civilians who are getting killed are the Palestinians, and a majority of them are Palestinian children, at the hands of Israeli terrorist invaders.
See my comment above.
Funny how the Bush admin keeps complaining ever so loudly about “foreign fighters” allegedly entering IRaq through Iran and Syria and yet we don’t hear a single complaint about the actual fighters who are actually entering through Jordan and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait … which incidentally all happen to be US puppet regimes. Gee, ya think that’s just coincidence?