What motivates suicide bombers?

'In September 2007 when American forces raided an Iraqi insurgent camp in the desert town of Singar near the Syrian border they discovered biographies of more than seven hundred foreign fighters. The Americans were surprised to find that 137 were Libyans and 52 of them were from a small Libyan town of Darnah. The reason why so many of Darnah’s young men had gone to Iraq for suicide missions was not the global jihadi ideology, but an explosive mix of desperation, pride, anger, sense of powerlessness, local tradition of resistance and religious fervor. A similar mix of factors is now motivating young Pashtuns to volunteer for suicide missions in Pakistan and Afghanistan.


...The actions of the US prison guards at Abu Ghraib played on what it meant to be an honorable, self-respecting subject in Iraqi society. The disciplinary practices humiliated the prisoners, but were also felt and seen as humiliating to all Iraqis. In the months following the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, daily suicide bombing attacks in Iraq increased dramatically.'


Apparently these suicide bombers who were influenced by photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib did not know that Iraqis were treated much worse at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons between 1980 and 2003.  Or maybe it's just OK for Muslims to kill other Muslims. 


PS: Photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib were released a few months after Saddam was captured and just weeks before the first hearing of the special tribunal to try Saddam:

Supreme Court overturns order to release photos of detainee abuse

Considering how militant Arabs and Muslims reacted to photos of abuse by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib, and considering that non-Iraqi Arabs and Muslims (and western journalists) in general never seemed to care or even know of crimes at Abu Ghraib before 2004, I think today's decision by the Supreme Court was a good one.

'The Supreme Court on Monday set aside a lower court’s order that called for the release of photographs of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan being abused by American military personnel. The high court told the lower court to re-examine the issue.'

Justice in America

You may have read about the Massachussets man named Tarek Mehanna who wanted to kill Americans at a US shopping mall and US soldiers in Iraq. He is probably one of the many Arab Americans who was influenced by 3arab jarab who portrayed US soldiers as murderers of innocent Iraqis, not realizing that Arabs led by Saddam Hussein had been murdering Iraqis for more than two decades prior to the US invasion of Iraq. He may have been moved by images of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, not knowing that Arabs led by Saddam had been torturing, raping, and murdering innocent Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons for 24 years before 2003. I'm glad he was arrested before he killed anybody.

"If convicted, Mehanna faces up to 15 years in prison on the charge of material support of terrorism."

This morning I happened to be watching an excellent documentary (on IFC) about New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws and an African American man who was convicted of possession and sentenced to 15 years to life in state prison.

So the man who conspired to murder Americans may be given a lighter sentence than a man who received a package of cocaine in the mail. And they call this justice? In America?

Pics of abuse at Abu Ghraib were AQ recruitment tool

"Pictures from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib have been among al Qaeda's most widely used and most potent recruitment tools in the post-9/11 era. Since early 2002, not a day has passed without Guantánamo being mentioned somewhere on the jihadi Internet. Outrage over Abu Ghraib was the single most important motivation for foreign jihadists going to Iraq in 2004 and 2005."

It's too bad our Arab brothers did not see the pictures of Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib before 2003.

PS: One of Saddam's Mukhabarat was waterboarded: 'The man was Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam’s secret police organizations, Windrem reports. “His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.” Duelfer, “the man in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials,” is quoted as saying: “To those who wanted or suspected a relationship, he would have been a guy who would know, so [White House officials] had particular interest.” Duelfer doesn’t cite Cheney’s office, but Windrem writes that “two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard came from the Office of Vice President Cheney.”

PPS: I don't think anybody should feel too bad about waterboarding this scum bag.

"Human Rights" Groups Shocked

President Obama, a graduate of Harvard Law School, has for now denied terror suspects the right to trial. Human Rights groups are shocked. Angry Arabs are naturally angry.

Iraqis are not as outraged. Iraq Pundit writes in "Pity the Poor Murderer":

Look, I agree Gitmo should be closed. But I could not be more sick and tired of this argument that these guys are turned into killers as a result of their incarcertation. So very many men of my family and friends of my family and even a few women were imprisoned by the Baathists in Iraq. Okay, I have never been to Gitmo, but I will take a wild guess and say that the conditions in Iraq's prisons were at least as bad as Gitmo's and most likely dramatically worse. (According to a recent Pentagon report prepared at the request of the Obama White House, Gitmo satisfies Geneva Convention standards.) My relatives who were jailed did not shoot anyone. They were arrested for thinking the wrong thing by Baathist standards. I can't say this clearly enough: None of them turned into a murderer upon release from prison after years--in at least one case, more than a decade.

Needless to say, I agree with Iraq Pundit. Human Rights groups did not raise the same fuss about the rights of Iraqi civilians before 2003.

In other news that relates to human rights, Abu Ghraib has been reopened. Our Arab "brothers" do not seem happy about this bit of news either. The BBC article that Ustath As3ad linked to states that Abu Ghraib "became notorious for detainee abuse by US forces in 2004." I guess the BBC is just being honest, since Abu Ghraib did not gain notoriety for abuse of Iraqi innocents prior to 2003. Thus far I have read only one article that mentions torture and murder at Abu Ghraib before 2003: "Under Saddam Hussein, tens of thousands of Iraqis were thrown behind bars here. There were horrific stories of torture, abuse, execution without trial."

Amnesty International was one of the few human rights groups that published extensively on crimes by Saddam's regime, but the media and our Arab "brothers" never paid attention, never seemed as shocked as they are by the "abuse" at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo by Americans. The pre-2003 lack of attention will no doubt be blamed on Ronald Reagan, naturally.

Pre-2003 Torture & Murder at Abu Ghraib

An Iraqi reporter named Suadad al Salhy has been hired by the New York Times. On her blog she wrote: 'The Iraqi government has announced that it will rehabilitate Abu Ghraib prison, turning part of it into a museum of torture. However the Shiite-led post-war government in Baghdad said that it will focus on the “crimes” of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni regime, and not American torture post-2003.'

I commented that this is appropriate, since the crimes of Saddam Hussein's regime at Abu Ghraib were much more horrific and lasted much longer than American torture at Abu Ghraib. I find it strange that the author put the word "crimes" in quotes. Many Sunni Arabs and even some Iraqis do not know of or refuse to believe the stories of torture and murder that took place at Abu Ghraib and many other prisons in Iraq prior to 2003. This is just another symbol of the division between Shia and Sunni Arabs. Maybe I shouldn't blame those who are ignorant of Saddam's crimes, since the Arab press did not report them.

The Thieves of Baghdad

I spent Saturday night with my parents and three of my father’s siblings, along with their children in a nice suburb of London. It was the biggest gathering of close relatives since last summer, when my cousin’s (mom’s side) wife declared that America brought Al Qaeda to Iraq, and warned me with great sternness that it is blasphemous to defend infidels. There are some religious people in my extended family. Some of them are religious and educated at the same time. My uncles – my father’s brothers - and my aunt’s children are religious, yet quite educated and successful. Many of them are doctors and dentists. For as long as I can remember, one of my cousins, Majeed, a pediatrician who is closer to my dad’s age than mine, possessed a great intensity and unique emotional flare, much like my father. They both have a great sense of humor. They even look alike. In my first post I wrote about Majeed’s brother, who was murdered by Saddam’s regime in 1980. Until last year I had not spent much time with Majeed, and I was surprised last summer to see him married with children – three of them, aged 16 to 19! Majeed is married to E, an engineer and niece of Jiddu, whom I wrote about in October 2007. It was good to spend more time with Majeed and his wonderful family this weekend. After a long night of eating delicious food and catching up, we had to spend the night there because it was so late.

The next morning, after E served us breakfast, she told us her story, which I will summarize here. E, like so many Iraqis, escaped Iraq long before 2003. The current conflict in Iraq may have eclipsed what happened to Iraqis during Saddam’s long reign of terror and intimidation, and certainly the media’s coverage of Iraq in the last five years has been much greater than all the media's coverage of Saddam’s atrocities. This is why I believe it is important to document these crimes, to remind people of what took place in Iraq before 2003.

Madrasat Rahibat

As a thirteen year old in the early 1970s, E attended Madrasat Rahibat (Nuns’ School), a private school for well-to-do Baghdadis. In her class E remembers a girl, a Faili (Shia) Kurd, who one day debated another girl, Ilham, the daughter of Khairallah Tulfah, the Governor of Baghdad and uncle of Saddam Hussein. The Kurdish girl argued during Religion class that the Kurds who were killed by the Baathi regime were martyrs. Ilham disagreed, and she believed that the Kurds who were killed by the state were in fact traitors, not martyrs. E recalls how casual the debate was, and how their teacher, a Najafi woman, allowed the debate to proceed. The next morning, after E boarded the school bus, she noticed that her Kurdish friend was missing. When E arrived at school, her teacher was not there. E never saw her teacher again. Her Kurdish friend and her family also disappeared.

To digress, Ilham was later married to Haythem, son of Ahmed Hassan al Bakr. When Saddam became President, he forced the couple to divorce and he forced Ilham to marry his half brother. Saddam’s older half brother, Barzan, was already married to Ilham’s sister Ahlam.

Mass Graves

E’s cousins and their children (most of them older than E, in University and the Army) lived in Kerbala. During Saddam’s campaign to expel Iraqis of Iranian ancestry, and despite the fact that E’s ancestors had lived in Iraq for 700 years, her relatives in Kerbala were targeted for deportation to Iran. One of her uncles in Kerbala had a 15 year old son, who was separated from his parents after they were arrested – the Baathi authorities were afraid the kid would join the Iranian Army. The kid’s parents were driven to the Iranian border and dropped off there, just like God knows how many Iraqis were. The family of this boy waited anxiously for 24 years hoping Saddam’s regime would fall so they could be reunited with their son, their brother. In 2003 the boy’s older brother traveled to Iraq, where he learned that his little brother had been murdered and buried in a mass grave. Upon hearing this news, his father fell ill and suffered from a stroke. He finally died last year, after being paralyzed by the stroke.

The Thief of Baghdad

Khairallah Tulfah was also known as “Harami Baghdad” (The Thief of Baghdad). Uncle of Saddam Hussein, father of Sajida (Saddam’s wife), Khairallah Tulfah was appointed Governor of Baghdad in the 1970s and by 1980 he amassed a great fortune by usurping financial and real assets of Iraqis. E’s family had the misfortune of living next to Tulfah in the 1970s. In early 1980, during Saddam’s campaign to expel Iraqis of Iranian descent, E’s entire family was arrested one day while they were eating lunch – Saddam’s secret police walked into the home and told E’s family to gather their essentials. While the family gathered their essentials, Saddam’s “emen” (security) sat down and ate the dolma that E’s mother had prepared. Before E’s family was taken away, her mother called E’s older sister, who was married and living in a different part of town, and told her what was happening. E’s sister immediately took a taxi to her parents’ house, where she saw none of her family at home, and she saw Khairallah Tulfah standing in the street. She became angry and asked Tulfah how he could allow the police to take away his innocent neighbors. He had no response, but after a few hours he called the detention center and told them to release E’s family. This good natured act was not free.

When this happened to E’s family, her father was naturally furious and saddened by what had become of his country. He decided that he would send his children out of the country one by one, but he died just a few weeks later. Soon after E’s father died, Khairallah Tulfah sent an aide to E’s family to inform them that he wanted to be a “partner” in the sports clothing factory that E’s father had built into a successful business. E’s family felt they had no choice in the matter – they still felt under threat. E’s brother continued to run the factory, but Tulfah diverted all the factory’s profits to himself. Khairallah Tulfah freed E’s family, and then he stole their livelihood. After six months, Tulfah’s assistant informed E’s family that he wanted the factory all for himself, but because they were his neighbors, he offered to “sell” the factory back to E’s family for 100,000 dinars (more than $300k at the time!). E’s family raised the money by selling their jewelry and borrowing from relatives. They bought the business that Tulfah stole from them. E’s family understood they were buying their safety, their immunity from prosecution for being of "Iranian descent". Soon after they got their factory back, E escaped Iraq for Abu Dhabi in August 1980. Because of the long war with Iran and its economic effects, E’s family were unable to import material or spare parts, and eventually the factory was closed. Today it sits in Abu Ghraib collecting dust.

This conversation with E was surrounded by other discussions, of course, and many of those discussions had to do with the current situation in Iraq and the Iraqis who participated in thievery and injustice after 2003.

Shia Women in Saddam's Iraq

By Robert Fisk - 23 January 2004

'The women's faces are all veiled. They are mostly young. They are all Iraqi Shia Muslims. And their terrible fate - their vicious torture and deliberately cruel executions - should place their deaths on the list of barbarities for which Saddam Hussein could be tried, although almost all were put to death when the United States was supporting Saddam's regime.

For only now has a newly formed "Documentation Centre for the Female Martyrs of the Islamic Movement" at last produced the chronicle of these women's suffering. It is not for the faint-hearted.

Wives were forced to watch their husbands hanged before being placed in the electric chair, were burned with acid, tied naked to ceiling fans, sexually abused. In several cases, women were poisoned or used as guinea pigs for chemical substances at a plant near Samarra believed to be making chemical weapons.

Their names - along with the names of their torturers and executioners - are at last known. One man, Abu Widad, once boasted that he had hanged 70 female prisoners in one night at the Abu Ghraib jail outside Baghdad. In many cases, women were put to death for the crime of being the sisters or wives of a wanted man. Most were associated with the forbidden al-Dawa party, whose members were routinely tortured and killed by the Baathist government.

A typical entry in Imprisoned Memories: Red Pages from a Forgotten History - compiled by Ali al-Iraq in the Iranian city of Qum - reads as follows: "Samira Awdah al-Mansouri (Um Iman), born 1951, Basra, teacher at Haritha Intermediate School ... married to the martyr Abdul Ameer, a cadre of the Islamic movement military wing ... member of Islamic Dawa party ... Torturers: Major Mehdi al-Dulaymi who tortured while drunk, Lieutenant Hussain al-Tikriti, who specialised in breaking the rib cages of his victims by stamping on them ... Lieutenant Ibrahim al-Lamee who beat victims on their feet ... Um Iman was beaten ... hung by her hair from a ceiling fan and and suffered torture by electricity. Having spent two months in the prison cells in Basra without giving way, al-Dulaymi recommended she be executed for carrying unlicensed arms and belonging to the al-Dawa party."

In fact, Um Iman was transferred to the Public Security Division in Baghdad, where further torture took place over 11 months. She subsequently appeared before the Revolutionary Military Security Court, which sentenced her to death by hanging. She spent another six months in the Rashid prison west of Baghdad, until - when she might have hoped that her life would be spared - she was, on a Sunday evening, transferred to Abu Graib and executed by Abu Widad.

There are frequent accounts of women and children tortured in front of their husbands and fathers. In 1982, for instance, a Lieutenant Kareem in Basra reportedly brought the wife of an insurgent to the prison, stripped and tortured her in front of her husband, then threatened to kill their infant child. When both refused to talk, the security man "threw the baby against the wall and killed him".

Ahlam al-Ayashi was arrested in 1982 at the age of 20 because she was married to Imad al-Kirawee, a senior Dawa member. When he refused to give information to the security police, two torturers - named in the report as Fadil Hamidi al-Zarakani and Faysal al-Hilali - attacked Ahlam in front of the prisoner and his child, torturing her to death. Three of Ahlam's five brothers were executed along with her husband, and another brother was killed in the insurrection that followed the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. But her child Ala, who witnessed her mother's torture, was taken to Iran, where she married and is now about to enter university.

Awatif Nour al-Hamadani, 21, was betrayed by her own husband, who - under extreme torture - named his wife and several colleagues as gun-runners.

Awatif was pregnant but was set upon by a man called Major Amer who beat her with a metal chair and then sexually abused her. At her trial, Judge Mussalam al-Jabouri suggested that "a miniature gallows should be found for her baby daughter because she had sucked on her mother's hate-filled milk". Awatif was taken to be executed for the first time with two female colleagues and forced to watch the hanging of 150 men, 10 at a time; as their corpses were taken away, she recognised one of them as her husband. She was then returned to her cell. She was later executed in an electric chair.

Maysoon al-Assadi was an 18-year-old university student when she was arrested for membership of a banned Islamic organisation. During her interrogation, she was hanged by her hair and beaten on the soles of her feet and then sentenced to hang by Judge Awad Mohamed Amin al-Bandar. Her last wish - to say goodbye to her fiance - was granted, and the two married in the prison. But while saying goodbye to other prisoners, she made speeches condemning the leadership of the Iraqi regime, and the prison governor decided that she should be put to death slowly. She was strapped into the jail's electric chair and took two hours to die.

Salwa al-Bahrani, the mother of a small boy, had been caught distributing weapons to Islamic fighters in 1980.

She was allegedly administered poisoned yoghurt during interrogation by a doctor, Fahid al-Dannouk, who experimented in poisons that could be used against Iranian troops. Salwa died at home 45 days after being forced to eat the yoghurt.

The 550-page report is no literary work. Some of its prose is florid and occasionally appears to describe women's martyrdom as a fate to be emulated. Nor is this a work which will make easy reading for Americans anxious to use it as evidence against Saddam. The book repeatedly states that the chemicals used on women prisoners were originally purchased from Western countries. But the detail is compelling - the names and fates of at least 50 women are recorded, along with the names of their torturers - and the activities of the "Monster of Abu Ghraib", Abu Widad, have been confirmed by the few prisoners who survived the jail. He carried out executions between 8pm and 4am and would hit condemned men and women on the back of the head with a hatchet if they praised a murdered imam before they were hanged. In the end, 41-year-old Abu Widad was caught after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned man. He was hanged on his own gallows in 1985.'

Copyright: The Independent