Wait a minute. Isn't poverty supposed to cause terrorism? Of course, over the years we have presented here study after study showing that jihad terrorists are generally better educated and more affluent than their peers. Their motivations are religious and ideological. But no one wants to face the implications of that, so they ignore the data and indulge instead in fantasy-based analysis and fantasy-based policymaking. Unfortunately for those analysts and policymakers, reality always wins out in the end.
"Suicide bombers head to Iraq from Damascus," by Hala Jaber and Ali Rifat in the TimesOnline (thanks to all who sent this in):
IN a small flat in Damascus, a young man in jeans and T-shirt draws frequently on a Gauloises cigarette as he describes how he dressed his brother in a suicide belt and watched him blow up some American soldiers at a drinks stall in Iraq.
The young man calls himself Ahmed. He is 23 and he has a degree in chemistry. He knows all about explosives.
Last year, he says coolly, he took 15kg of TNT, packed it into pouches with some nails and strapped the bomb to his 19-year-old brother’s waist....
Ahmed had borrowed a drinks stall used by American convoys on the road that winds north from Baghdad past Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikrit. His brother was instructed to grab some bottles of cola in his free hand and head for a group of soldiers taking a break from their journey.
“Go sell them some Pepsi,” Ahmed told him gently. “We will meet in heaven, you and I, and that’s a promise.”
Ahmed says his brother kissed him, turned and walked away without a moment’s hesitation.
Did he not long to call his brother back, I ask? The question brings tears to his eyes.
“He had a smile on his face,” Ahmed replies. “He knew he was crossing to a better place where he would meet his maker as a martyr.”
The emotion passes and Ahmed talks with steady self-assurance about his plans to follow his brother’s example. He, too, will take Americans with him when he dies, he says. His ambition is to blast some CIA men to smithereens.
The flat where we met was rented by a handler in Damascus, the Syrian capital, who channels aspiring “martyrs” to insurgent groups such as Ahmed’s....
So who are these bombers and why do they do it? How are they organised? And how much impact are they really making on a war that is sucking ever larger numbers of suicidal volunteers from across the Middle East into Iraq’s vortex of violence.
We tracked down three bombers in our search for answers. The first interviews of their kind with men passing through Syria on their way to die in Iraq, they confounded expectations.
These were no psychopathic loners from the ghetto, but articulate, middle-class men in their twenties and early thirties who had come from good homes and gone to university. One was a newly married accountant.
Yet all had reached the chilling conclusion that killing “sinners” would transport them to paradise. None had the slightest inkling that they might be exploited by Al-Qaeda and other battle-hardened groups which will probably use these fresh-faced idealists for no higher purpose than to sustain the most brutal sectarian conflict of our age....
Abu Ibrahim’s radicalization came in two stages. “I had no Islamic inclinations at the start of the war,” he said softly. But when he sat with his parents watching television as the first bombs of the Shock and Awe campaign fell on the country next to his, the strength of his reaction took him by surprise.
“I felt a tightening in my chest and a feeling of personal offence and injury, as though every Iraqi woman was my mother, wife or sister, every little boy my young brother and every old man my father,” he said. “I spent all night crying in my bed, and in the morning I left the house and applied for a passport.”
He had decided to fight in Iraq. His mother gave her blessing, saying she wished for Allah to accept him as a martyr if need be but that she would never forgive him if he became a prisoner.
His father, however, was so strongly opposed that he hid Abu Ibrahim’s passport. Abu Ibrahim stole it back and joined about 400 fellow fighters in the north of the country.
He described with bitterness how he witnessed the defeat of Saddam’s forces near Mosul and then found himself detained, just as his mother had feared.
Now came the second part of his transformation into a jihadi. In prison he met Sunni clerics from Saudi Arabia and other countries. These were followers of the Wahhabi tradition of Islam which casts Shi’ite Muslims as heretics. They were also supporters of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. They idolized Osama Bin Laden and lauded the September 11 attacks on America.
According to Mohammed Hafez, a visiting professor at the University of Missouri and author of Suicide Bombers in Iraq, the Strategy and Ideology of Martyrdom, the influence of the Saudi Wahhabis is key to any understanding of the phenomenon. His study of 139 suicide bombings found that 53 were carried out by Saudis, compared with 18 by Iraqis, seven by Syrians and four by Jordanians.
The Saudis had already fought foreign jihads in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya, Hafez said. In Iraq they exploited the culture of martyrdom established by Palestinian suicide bombers. The targeting of so many Shi’ites has been consistent with their beliefs.
“Wahhabi tradition sees the ascendancy of Shia as [a] worse evil than occupation by infidels, because Shia are heretics and apostates,” said Hafez.
So it was that if the black-bearded Abu Ibrahim went ahead with his journey as planned last week, he was bound for Al-Qaeda in Iraq; and regardless of his determination to slaughter American soldiers, the chances were that he would end up being directed towardsa Shi’ite target instead.
He had no regrets about his impending death: “There is nothing stronger than my love for God and seeking martyrdom,” he said brightly.
As for his wife, he had already thought of his last message to her: “If Allah accepts my martyrdom, then I shall ensure that you are one of those I name to be salvaged and brought to heaven when your time comes.”...
“These are what I call the ‘violent intellectuals’,” said Professor Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, Washington. “They are well educated and highly motivated, two important attributes that ensured success in their education and then business and which will also be useful in ensuring their success as suicide bombers.”
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