Page 2 of 2 The world's worst suicide
bombers By Brian Glyn Williams
representatives spoke of a bomber
who entered a Kabul Internet cafe in 2005. Instead
of setting off his bomb in the middle of the cafe
where it would do the most damage, he went into a
bathroom to set it off, killing only two people.
[7] There are many such examples of Afghan suicide
bombers seemingly with a conscience or reluctance
to inflict mass casualties.The possibility that a
number of them are doing it simply for
payments
for
their families might explain this. [8]
Research in the Pashtun areas to the
southeast of Kabul reveals an even more disturbing
trend than the employment of suicide bombers who
are mentally unsound, using drugs or working
solely for money: the use of child bombers.
Afghanistan's child bombers Villagers interviewed for this study - living
in front-line provinces such as Khost, Paktika and
Paktia - have reported that Taliban recruiters
were active in their areas. Many parents have lost
their young, impressionable sons to those who prey
on them. [9]
Parents often learn of their
tragic fates only when the Taliban arrive at their
homes to hand out their sons' "martyrdom
payments". Villagers are, of course, outraged by
such tactics, but there is often little recourse
in light of the Taliban's dominance in the
countryside.
In one case, a powerful
tribal chieftain in Khost province who discovered
that his son had been recruited by Taliban
commander Jalaluddin Haqqani for a "martyrdom
operation" managed to get him back (after
threatening to attack the Taliban with his tribe);
unfortunately, this is an exception, as is the
recent case of a captured 14-year-old suicide
bomber who was personally pardoned by President
Hamid Karzai. The president announced, "Today we
are facing a hard fact, that is, a Muslim child
was sent to a madrassa [seminary] to learn
Islamic subjects, but the enemies of Afghanistan
misled him toward suicide and prepared him to die
and kill." [10]
Such recruitment for
madrassa training of young bombers is even
more widespread on the Pakistani side of the
border. There have been several widely reported
instances of the Taliban recruiting schoolchildren
to be suicide bombers in the Federally
Administered Tribal Areas and in North-West
Frontier Province.
In one notorious
instance, Taliban soldiers arrived at the Oxford
High English medium school in Tank and began to
recruit young boys by asking them to fulfill their
"jihad duty" and engage in an "adventure".
According to witnesses, "The militants came to
town with a mission, and wanted to convert us to
their cause. 'They said that jihad was obligatory
and those who heed the call are rewarded,' the
principal said. 'As many as 30 students from each
of the four government schools in Tank enlisted.'
A similar number have also joined from private
schools. The ages of those taken are between 11
[and] 15 years."
According to one of the
teachers involved, the students who were recruited
without their parents' permission were
subsequently trained as suicide bombers. The age
of these bombers would explain why one of the
courses in Taliban suicide camps teaches students
how to drive a car.
In a similar case
quoted by the United States' MSNBC cable network
in March, two Pakistani teenagers who left school
to train as suicide bombers without their parents'
permission claimed, "We were told to fight against
Israel, America and non-Muslims," said Muhammed
Bakhtiar, 17, explaining why he wanted to become a
suicide bomber. "We are so unhappy with our lives
here. We have nothing. We read about jihad in
books and wanted to join ... We wanted to go to
the Muridke madrassa so we would have a
better life in the hereafter."
While
Mullah Nazir, a powerful Taliban leader in
Pakistan's Waziristan provinces, recently made an
unprecedented request for the Taliban to stop
recruiting children, a recent video of a
suicide-bomber ceremony in the region would seem
to indicate that his appeal has been honored in
the breach.
In the video that was obtained
by the American Broadcasting Co (ABC), boys as
young as 12 are shown "graduating" from a
suicide-bombing camp run by Mullah Dadullah
Mansour, the successor to his brother, the
recently slain Mullah Dadullah.
As
disturbing as this video is, it pales in
comparison to the discovery Afghan security
officials recently made in eastern Afghanistan. In
an incident that caused tears of fury among
villagers, a six-year-old street urchin approached
an Afghan security checkpoint and claimed that he
had been cornered by the Taliban and fitted with a
suicide-bomber vest. They had told him to walk up
to a US patrol and press a button on the vest that
would "spray flowers". Fortunately, the
quick-thinking boy instead asked for help, and the
vest was removed.
While this case is
obviously an extreme example, it fits the trend
and certainly goes a long way in helping to
explain why almost half of Taliban suicide bombers
succeed in killing only themselves. Many Taliban
bombers come from small backwater villages and
have to be taught how to drive on strange roads,
travel beyond their locale or country, and then
hit fast-moving, armored coalition convoys with
improvised explosives. Even at the best of times,
suicide bombing is a task that involves
considerable resolve, determination and focus, and
a degree of intelligence. Clearly, such vital
ingredients are often missing in the Afghan
context, where many of the bombers appear to be as
much victims as perpetrators.
Commenting
on the bombers' failure rate, US military
spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Fitzpatrick
explained the lack of ambiguity that US military
personnel have about the bombers who commit
suicide instead of suicide bombings. "Certainly
there are a fair number of failed attempts, and
that's okay. I hope they don't get better."
While some have engaged in relativism in
efforts to compare the coalition's "collateral
damage" losses from close air support to the
Taliban's "collateral damage" from suicide
bombing, the coalition clearly has the moral high
ground when the enemy has resorted to deploying
children as "living weapons".
Notes 1. The bomber who
killed 20 people in a mosque in Kandahar in 2005
was an Arab. The bomber in the Spin Boldak bombing
of 2006 that killed 26 civilians was also said to
be an Arab, and the Taliban later denied
responsibility for the unusually bloody bombing.
Similarly, al-Qaeda leader Abu Laith al-Libi has
been accused of being the mastermind behind the
February large-suicide bombing at Bagram Air Field
during Vice President Dick Cheney's visit that
killed 22 civilians. Most recently, National
Directorate of Security officials this month
arrested an Arab member of al-Qaeda who was
planning to use suicide bombers to assassinate
Afghan officials. 2. Author interviews, Kabul,
April 2007. 3. In one case, a mullah drove a
vehicle-borne improvised device into a bus. Most
recently, the Kunduz bombing of May was carried
out by a mullah named Jawad from Baghlan
province. 4. Marc Sageman's excellent work has
more applications for elite, transnational
al-Qaeda-style bombers than the impoverished,
illiterate Afghans who seem to make up the
majority of the bombers in recent years. 5.
Author interview in National Directorate of
Security headquarters, Kabul, April 2007. 6.
Story relayed to the author by Craig Harrison,
director of UN security in Afghanistan, United
Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA)
compound, Kabul, April 2007. 7. The media
erroneously reported that the bomber had set the
bomb off in the middle of the cafe. 8. As in
other "zones of jihad", including Chechnya and
Iraq, it appears that Arab financiers are offering
payments ranging from US$11,000 to $23,000 for
those who carry out bombings. 9. Author's
findings while carrying out research in the region
in April 2007. 10. This story was conveyed to
the author in Gardez, Paktia province, by Tom
Gregg of the UNAMA, on the morning after a suicide
bomber hit the town. Local Pashtuns interviewed
after the bombing called the attack "obscene" and
"un-Islamic".
Dr Brian Glyn
Williams is assistant professor of Islamic
history at the University of
Massachusetts-Dartmouth.
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