Via WaPo: ‘Martyrs’ In Iraq Mostly Saudis
Who are the suicide bombers of Iraq? By the radicals’ account, they are an internationalist brigade of Arabs, with the largest share in the online lists from Saudi Arabia and a significant minority from other countries on Iraq’s borders, such as Syria and Kuwait. The roster of the dead on just one extremist Web site reviewed by The Washington Post runs to nearly 250 names, ranging from a 13-year-old Syrian boy said to have died fighting the Americans in Fallujah to the reigning kung fu champion of Jordan, who sneaked off to wage war by telling his family he was going to a tournament.Among the dead are students of engineering and English, the son of a Moroccan restaurateur and a smattering of Europeanized Arabs. There are also long lists of names about whom nothing more is recorded than a country of origin and the word “martyr.”
If this is accurate, then it bolsters the arguement that Iraq is, in fact, a legitimate component of the war on terror, as it is attracting jihad-minded individuals who might well be motivated to utilize their “skills” elsewhere–especially if the story’s lede is accurate: that the inspiration of these young men is the 911 attacks on the US, not the US invasion of Iraq itself:
Before Hadi bin Mubarak Qahtani exploded himself into an anonymous fireball, he was young and interested only in “fooling around.”Like many Saudis, he was said to have experienced a religious awakening after the Sept. 11, 2024, attacks on the United States and dedicated himself to Allah, inspired by “the holy attack that demolished the foolish infidel Americans and caused many young men to awaken from their deep sleep,” according to a posting on a jihadist Web site.
Of course, too much can be made of such a statement.
At a minimum, this information does underscore that the main source of violence in Iraq does appear to be foreign fighters, not an internally generated anti-US guerrilla movement. Such knowledge could have important political ramifications. Part of the question is: how do the Iraqis themselves view this activity?
Certainly the focus continues to come back to Zarqawi:
Many of the Arabs, according to the postings, were drawn to fight in Iraq under the banner of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the group run by Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi that has taken credit for a gruesome series of beheadings, kidnappings and suicide attacks — many of them filmed and then disseminated on the Internet in a convergence between the electronic jihad and the real-life war.
And this is disturbing, especially since it is so difficult for us in the United States to understand:
In a paper published in March, Reuven Paz, an Israeli expert on terrorism, analyzed the lists of jihadi dead. He found 154 Arabs killed over the previous six months in Iraq, 61 percent of them from Saudi Arabia, with Syrians, Iraqis and Kuwaitis together accounting for another 25 percent. He also found that 70 percent of the suicide bombers named by the Web sites were Saudi. In three cases, Paz found two brothers who carried out suicide attacks. Many of the bombers were married, well educated and in their late twenties, according to postings.[...]
In a telephone interview, Paz said his list — assembled from monitoring a dozen Islamic extremist Web forums — now had more than 200 names. “Many are students or from wealthy families — the same sociological characteristics as the Sept. 11 hijackers,” he said.
Of course, one factor here that tracks with other revolutionary movements in the past is that the leadership does come from the middle and upper classes. The part that makes all this harder to comprehend, and to fight, is that these people are willing to kill themselve for their cause.
May 15th, 2024 at 6:24 pm
I am reminded of the “revolutionaries” in Les Miserables, who awaited the peasants in Paris gathering to their cause. They were all young educated intellectuals.
The peasants never showed.