Monday, November 28, 2005
The Making of Suicide Bombers
An Iraqi Woman Comments
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I found and started reading "Baghdad Burning", the Riverbend Blog, soon after the beginning of the war in 2003. The author is eloquent, passionate and incisive in her posts from Baghdad. Baghdad Burning is listed among the links under "Magnets" on the left-hand side of my page. Her November 25th post is so moving that I decided to copy most of it here.
- I try to imagine what would happen to me, personally, should this occur. How long would it take for the need for revenge to settle in? How long would it take to be recruited by someone who looks for people who have nothing to lose? People who lost it all to one blow. What I think the world doesn’t understand is that people don’t become suicide bombers because- like the world is told- they get seventy or however many virgins in paradise. People become suicide bombers because it is a vengeful end to a life no longer worth living- a life probably violently stripped of its humanity by a local terrorist- or a foreign soldier.
- I hate suicide bombers. I hate the way my heart beats chaotically every time I pass by a suspicious-looking car- and every car looks suspicious these days. I hate the way Sunni mosques and Shia mosques are being targeted right and left. I hate seeing the bodies pile up in hospitals, teeth clenched in pain, wailing men and women…
- But I completely understand how people get there.
- One victim was holding his daughter. "The gunmen told the girl to move then shot the father," said a relative.
- Would anyone be surprised if the abovementioned daughter grew up with a hate so vicious and a need for revenge so large, it dominated everything else in her life?
- Or three days ago when American and Iraqi troops fired at a family traveling from one city to another, killing five members of the family.
- "They are all children. They are not terrorists," shouted one relative. "Look at the children," he said as a morgue official carried a small dead child into a refrigeration room.
- Who needs Al-Qaeda to recruit 'terrorists' when you have Da’awa, SCIRI and an American occupation?
