There is no defence against these children of death
- From: jose <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2007 02:25:23 -0000
There is no defence against these children of death
Face to face with the first of the remote-controlled human bombsRobert
Baer
We are deep inside intelligence headquarters in Kabul. On the faded
sofa opposite is an extraordinary new weapon - a 17-year-old Pakistani
peasant boy called Farman Ullah. He is the world's first remotely
detonated human bomb.
Farman is from the wilds of northern Pakistan and his mission was to
blow up and kill the pro-Western Governor of Jalabad, an important
Afghan city close to the Pakistan frontier. "Even before you blow
yourself up, virgins come to the site of the explosion and wait to
take you to Paradise," he says, parroting the propaganda he learnt
from his Taleban indoctrinators.
The attack failed and Farman and another 17-year-old accomplice, Abdul
Quboshi, were captured. But Farman's fanatic certainty about his
scheduled appointment with the virgins of Paradise was not enough for
his Taleban trainers. Attached to Farman's suicide bomb vest was a
radio transmitter. If Farman's nerve failed or something went wrong,
Abdul Quboshi's job was to press the detonator. As Farman told me:
"The Taleban said God himself would ignite the vest. I did not have to
do anything."
Farman may have thought God was taking him to Paradise but the real
initiator was almost certainly a high-frequency radio signal.
Farman wanted to blow people up. He was a willing killer. But he was
also a victim of the cult of the suicide bomber. Both he and Abdul
were schoolboys, innocents, who for a thin dream of glory volunteered
to fight and die in a holy war, a jihad.
Farman could not read the Koran and when I asked him he had no idea
where Iraq was, or Palestine, though he did tell me that President
Musharraf of Pakistan was "a Jew".
When I asked Farman why he wanted to kill the Governor he said
"because he was an infidel and worked with the Americans". That was
justification enough for the Governor to die. Farman believed that
Afghanistan had been invaded by Christian foreigners who were raping
Muslim women and killing innocent Muslims.
This deadly, vengeful child is every Western intelligence chief's
ultimate nightmare. A programmed human bomb that cannot be reasoned
with. And against whom there is little real defence. The suicide
bomber. But a weapon that we must find some way to neutralise.
I used to work for the CIA in the Middle East. In the CIA I saw
terrible things but Farman's indoctrination was a new twist in the
depths of human depravity; recruiting an ignorant child for his own
remotely-controlled death. In the CIA my job was to stop terrorist
organisations from attacking the United States and its interests. I
used to recruit agents inside those terrorist organisations to gain
intelligence.
And I know personally about the cost of intelligence failures. Six of
my CIA colleagues died in the first suicide-bomb attack on a Western
target in the bombing of our Beirut embassy in April 1983.
I've left the CIA but for the past three years I've gone back on the
intelligence trail to investigate the cult of the suicide bomber. That
journey has taken me through Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel
and on to the grim back streets of Leeds, where the suicide bombers of
July 7, 2005, came from. Along the way I have interviewed dozens of
members of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Western
intelligence chiefs and failed suicide bombers and their families.
The lessons learnt are complex but there is an answer. The cult of the
suicide bomber will burn itself out. This cult of death will one day
burn itself out and perish from the face of the earth.
But we will not defeat that cult by intelligence or military means
alone. It is simply impossible. Across the Islamic world, even through
the internet in some British Asian teenager's bedroom, it is all too
easy to join the cult of the bomber. You don't need a gun or an RPG,
just a keyboard and an ISP connection.
Within minutes you can be electronically downloading the poisonous
propaganda that Farman was inculcated with by his Taleban controllers
in the lawless border regions of Waziristan. You can share beheading
video files with your new internet friends. And listen to Osama bin
Laden's warped interpretation of the Koran that portrays the West as
an aggressor and calls upon all Muslims to join in a "defensive jihad"
to protect Muslim lands against Crusader invaders.
To stop suicide bombing we must first recognise the kind of war we are
facing. This is a war of belief, of ideology. The key concept in
suicide bombing is not martyrdom but this notion of jihad - of what
constitutes a righteous holy war. In the Koran there are many
different interpretations of jihad, some personal and some charitable
- alms to the poor. But bin Laden and the Taleban rely upon just one
Koranic verse that declares jihad a religious obligation on all
Muslims if another Muslim land has been invaded.
For this "defensive jihad" to work the West must be clearly identified
as the aggressor. In this warped morality the 7/7 attacks are a
justifiable act of war in revenge for the invasion of Iraq.
Bin Laden's world view is false. And there are many, many Islamic
scholars who disagree with his theology and the killing of civilians.
And it is obvious that the vast majority of the Muslim faith reject
the cult of the suicide bomber. But it is that silent army of fathers,
brothers, sisters and mothers who are the only real weapon against
another generation of Farmans. It is only when this majority engages
in a counter-ideological war that suicide bombing will finally die
out. As one former Mujahidin commander told me: "You cannot make Allah
happy by killing civilians."
But this is an ideological battle that will be won, or lost, at the
local mosque, at the family dinner table or between friends across the
Islamic world. Suicide bombing will be defeated not by a gun or a
fancy scanner but by the religious principles of Koran itself.
.
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