Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 14:15:27 -0400 To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com> From: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com> Subject: Inside the mind of a suicide bomber Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"Inside the mind of a suicide bomber <http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,2873771%255E15574,00.html>
By GEOFFREY LEVY 16sep01
THEY will have died with smiles on their faces, knowing that at the very moment their own blood was spilled, all their earthly sins would be forgiven.
Their families will receive not the condolences of friends and acquaintances that accompany tragedy, but calls of congratulations from those anxious to share the pride and the glory of triumph.
It is tempting to compare the fanatical suicide terrorists who blitzed New York and put the United States under air attack on Tuesday with the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II.
But the kamikaze who went to "honourable" deaths crashed their aircraft into enemy warships.
They did not attack hospitals, children, those queuing for buses or, as on Tuesday, thousands of innocent civilians going about their business.
Inside the minds of Tuesday's suicide terrorists, reason had been entirely replaced not so much by a madness but by a chilling dedication and hatred.
Like the Arab suicide bombers who strap the charge to themselves to blow their Israeli enemies to hell in busy streets, so the young men will have been nurtured and groomed for this moment by holy men who recruited them as young as 10.
Religiously devout and believing totally in the importance of what they are doing, they will have learnt by heart every detail of the "Seven Rewards" that come to those who volunteer (all are "volunteers") to give their lives for the Islamic cause.
Number one of the Seven Rewards is the forgiveness of all sins. Two is that he will see his place reserved in Paradise. Three, that he will be "crowned with glory" with a holy stone, the Yaqutah. Four, that in Paradise he will have 72 of the most beautiful virgins as his wives. Five, that he will be spared the "suffering of the grave". Six, that he will be spared the horror of the Day of Judgment and any uncertainty about whether he goes to Paradise or not will be dispelled. And seventh, he will be allowed to take with him to paradise 70 members of his family.
No wonder the families smile, too. No wonder when Lebanese Hizbollah leader Sayed Hassan Nasrallah's own son was killed in a suicidal attack on Israeli soldiers he appeared on television laughing with pleasure, and wellwishers called on the phone.
The martyrs are inevitably young, frequently loners, always single and very devout. Many emerge from Palestinian refugee camps but a high proportion are from middle-class families.
For years their contact with imams will have brain-washed them into believing their finest moment will be when they give their life to the Islamic cause.
"For years since childhood the holy men would have imbued them with an irresistible desire to taste the beauty of martyrdom," says Professor Arel Marari, head of the political violence unit at Tel Aviv University.
They are also indoctrinated into absorbing an unshakeable belief that what they are being prepared for is an absolute necessity for the protection and preservation of Islam. To all intents and purposes, it is brainwashing, and its most important place is not the terrorist training camp but the mosque.
The military training - if any - comes much later. "They are not initially told they will be martyrs, but the seed of glory is planted and grows inside their mind," Professor Marari says.
For Tuesday's "martyrs", the call to give their lives would have been received in a mosque while at prayer. A single phrase planted in their mind as a call to arms, like a hypnotist's trigger word, would have been slipped by the imam into his sermon. In a single chilling moment they would have switched into martyr mode and felt nothing but pleasure and anticipation at being "chosen" to give themselves to Allah.
Their moment of martyrdom would have finally arrived. These calls never come just a day before the action, for the martyrs are permitted to make their own final preparations to "purify" themselves for Paradise. Some go into solitary confinement for up to a week for contemplation, prayer and reading the Koran.
In 1983, when a lone martyr drove a truckload of explosives into the US Marine compound in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen, one survivor was asked what he saw.
"All I remember is that the guy was smiling," he said.
The same look of detached serenity was on the face of the suicide bomber who walked into a cafe in northern Israel last month, looked a waitress in the eye and pointed to his chest.
"Do you know what this is?" he asked her. Then he lit the fuse on the explosives strapped to his body.
When the bomb detonated it blew him to bits and hurled customers and bystanders, injured and bloody, to the ground.
The bomber's head landed on a nearby table, a witness said.
Cafe owner Aharon Rozemon said he had watched the brief exchange unfold moments before 15 people were wounded in the second suicide bombing in Israel in three days.
"I saw a man dressed in a yellow shirt, I think, enter the cafe quickly," Mr Rozemon, bloodied and cut, told Israeli television from his hospital bed. "I had already figured out what was going on and grabbed a chair and threw it at him.
"At the same moment he lit the fuse, with a lighter I think, on his body and yelled 'Allahu Akbar!' (God is Great) and I managed to take two steps and hide behind a cement wall."
He said there had been no more than four people inside the cafe, other victims being caught by the blast outside.
The Islamic Jihad militant group claimed responsibility for the bombing, which came three days after another Palestinian killed 15 people and himself in a Jerusalem pizzeria.
It named the cafe bomber as 28-year-old Muhammad Mahmoud Nasr.
The cafe's crimson awning was shredded and chairs were strewn across its outside terrace. Shards of glass were blown over the road.
Israeli police cordoned off the area, wrapping tape around palm trees near the cafe. In front of the building is a children's play area.
Forensic experts guided sniffer dogs or donned protective boots and clothes to sift through the rubble.
A witness named Yehuda said he went to help the wounded. "We went inside and I saw . . . a severed head on the table. Apparently it was the bomber," he said.
Taxi driver Rami said he believed he might have driven the bomber to the site. He said he picked up an Arab wearing a yellow shirt, who became increasingly agitated and made repeated telephone calls in Arabic.
"He spoke with someone and told him he couldn't find the place. After he finished the conversation he told me to stop at the commercial centre," Rami said.
The driver said he became suspicious and frantically looked for an Israeli police car while trying not to raise his passenger's suspicions.
As the man got out of the car, Rami saw a policeman. But it was too late. "It was maybe five seconds from the second he got out until the explosion."
As Israel counted the cost of the attack, Palestinians hailed Muhammad Mahmoud Nasr as a hero.
Hundreds of mourners flocked to the family's modest one-room house in the West Bank town of Qabatia to offer support to Muhammad's father, who is paralysed, his mother and 12 siblings.
"I knew that he was an active Jihad member," the father said. "He left his work in order to struggle. I never felt afraid or worried about him because he was a real man, a hero. My son was a devout Muslim . . . He left his job with the Palestinian police after his friend, the martyr Iyad, was killed."
Israel's Deputy Minister for Internal Security, Gideon Ezra, suggested one way to discourage such attacks might be to "liquidate" the fathers of Palestinian suicide bombers.
"The would-be suicide bomber should know that his close relatives risk paying for his crime or even being liquidated," the hardline member of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Likud party said.
"Yes, the fathers should be liquidated to prevent the sons perpetrating suicide operations," said the former high-ranking official of the internal security service Shin Beth.
"The fathers know perfectly well what their sons are up to and they could stop them," he said after his interviewer accused him of advocating state terrorism.
But such is the helplessness confronting officials as they attempt to find a means of stemming the deadly tide of suicide killers.
Security forces arrested two members of the hardline Islamic Jihad movement within days of the two Israeli attacks as the would-be bombers were heading off to commit another nightclub bombing. Israel has already run into widespread international criticism for its policy of killing suspected Palestinian militants whom it says the Palestinian authorities have refused to arrest.
The campaign has killed nine members of the radical group Hamas in the past month, while two members of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement were killed by Israeli forces last month. Islamic militant groups say they are having trouble coping with a rush of young Palestinians volunteering for suicide bombings against Israel.
"My son was brilliant in everything and had a strong personality. He wanted to contribute to his country's liberation," explained Hussein al-Tawil, whose son injured 12 Israelis in a suicide attack in east Jerusalem last March.
Tawil, a member of the former communist People's Party, said "suicide operations have become a means for Palestinians to vent their disgust at several decades of occupation".
For Abu Mohammad, the alias of an Islamic Jihad official, "suicide operations have become a common phenomenon among young men seeking to respond with violence to rising Israeli violence".
"Our movement cannot cope with all the candidates for martyrdom," he said.
Abu Nemr, a member of another Muslim fundamentalist movement, Hamas, says the Palestinian population was "increasingly convinced of the usefulness of these suicide operations".
The movement "does not brainwash people. Suicide bombers do not kill for the sake of killing, they are defending their homeland and firmly believe it is the best and fastest way to liberation," he said.
"How can we speak of brainwashing when we see Nablus residents distributing sweets after the operation at the Sbarro pizzeria in west Jerusalem?" Nemr asked. "Were they also brainwashed by Hamas?"
The August 9 suicide attack in the centre of West Jerusalem that left 18 people dead and about 80 others injured was claimed by both Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The two militant movements have claimed responsibility for most of the suicide attacks.
Abu Mohammad said Islamic Jihad was open to Christians, who could join the movement without having to convert.
A Christian shopowner in Jerusalem said after waiting several hours at an Israeli army checkpoint: "If this sort of thing continues, I will also become a Hamas suicide attacker one day."
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