Iraq: Who Are These Suicide Bombers After All?

By

Saad S. Khan

Saad.S.Khan1@gmail.com

 

While the Iraqi politicians wrangle over the new constitution, the people around the world are looking askance at the level of violence which is being used for political ends in Iraq. From London to Bali, Iraq quagmire has become a headache for the man on the street, in the bus or under the subway, who feels insecure as long as foreign forces are in Iraq, irrespective of his own nationality or place of residence or the fact whether a contingent from his own country is in Iraq or not. The insurgents have shown the astounding capacity of striking anywhere any time, at will. The fact is that they have targeted countries that do not have a single soldier on Iraqi soil, like Pakistan, Indonesia, and more recently, Egypt. This does not, however, lend any credence to Tony Blair’s harangues de-linking the connection between London attacks and his pillion riding with Bush over Iraq. Blair thinks that any such linking is an “obscenity” and that it may be--- as are a host of other obscenities that are a part of human life and society as it is.

 

The remarkable vibrancy of terrorist networks in Iraq proper is mind-boggling. The analysts from around the world are joining heads but failing to decipher the contours of this insurgency. Who are these men? Who trains and finances them?  Where are their sanctuaries? Where do they make their bombs? Who is supporting them? How can they get away each time and why their purported leaders are enigmatic? The conventional view is that an insurgency can hardly sustain even by weeks if any of these elements is missing. Bereft of such favorable political and strategic milieu, neither the Viet Congs in Vietnam, nor the Contras in Al Salvador and least of all, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan could have been expected to operate, let alone, succeed.

 

The utter failure in Iraq of all counter-insurgency techniques, heretofore religiously followed, warrants a major revision of textbooks on strategy. Washington, Jerusalem and administrations around the world were caught unaware only for the first, or first few, times each, but gradually understood the modus operandi of the terrorists and took preemptive and security measures accordingly. And because of the vigilance, the bus riders of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv now feel as secure as the ones in Warsaw, for instance. In Iraq, with the highest post-World War concentration of troops, minus Palestine and the Indian-held Kashmir probably, the security apparatus appears helpless as the terrorists hit again and again with increasing ferocity and alarming impunity.

 

The estimates of the number of people killed in the ongoing civil war vary wildly from 15,000 to 150,000. Add to it the excess civilian mortality due to war and both extremes of the range stand trebled. The recent findings of the joint study of Iraq Body Count (IBC) with the Oxford Research Group puts the figure of non-combatant deaths to 25,000 since the ouster of Saddam Hussain. The US military puts its death toll to 1,700 servicemen and women while Iraq puts that of its security forces at 1,300.

 

The crucial and politically relevant statistics revealed by the study are that the US troops account for 37% of the non-combatant deaths, compared to 9% caused by the insurgents. The organized criminal mafias and ordinary thugs were responsible for another 36% while 11% have been attributed to “unknown agents”. The remainder may owe to the Iraqi security agencies, adept at killing own compatriots since the Saddam regime, which are still believed to be behind the abduction and assassination of British-born Iraqi social worker, Margaret Hassan, last year.

 

The question boils down to who are the insurgents; and if they are fanatic Muslims, is it that the Iraqis had become radicalized during Saddam’s secular authoritarian regime while the phenomenon could scarcely affect the Muslims of, say, Syria and Turkey? Iraq is producing suicide bombers in hundreds annually while the tally is in scores even in the ghettos of occupied Palestinian areas. There appear no known and verifiable circumstances, unique to Iraq that would explain the sheer quantum of human bombs.

 

The Western analysts are suggesting two plausible sources; the diehard militants associated with Jordan-born Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi and the pro-Saddam loyalists belonging to militant wing of the Baath Party of Iraq. Both conjectures cannot stand the test of close scrutiny. The Western mind has failed to see the political situation without the tinted glassed of deeply ingrained interpretations, as if the sanctity of erroneously held assumptions is dearer than the lives of soldiers. The concept of “benevolent dictatorship” does not appear to them as misnomer, although this is as ridiculous a phrase as the “loving murderer”. The West is embracing Mubarak and Karimov for the war against terror although these despots are part of the problem, not of the solution. Extending such underlying assumptions to Iraq implies that after quarter of a centur y of Saddam and his playboy sons’ tyranny, there are men in Iraq who would blow them up to vindicate Saddam. No, this is not the case, one only has to drop a picture of Saddam in a street in Baghdad, only to find it heaped in shit and spit, the following morning. The Iraqis are ordinary mortals with quotidian needs and desires of democracy, freedom, security and economic well being for them and their progeny, as anywhere else in Egypt or in the United Kingdom. A man sacrificing his life for Saddam is as likely to do it as an Englishman hanging himself to honor the 7/7 bombers.

 

Composition of Saddam’s Baath party militant wings overlapped with his armed forces, the so-called Republican Guards and his son-led Fidayeen-e-Saddam [literally: lovers of Saddam]. The last category were a motley of village strongmen, urban loafers and street thugs who identified themselves with the regime to avoid confronting the law. These thugs are still there, looting buses and extorting money from shops and are responsible, as noted above, for over a third of civilian deaths. They are ideologically rudderless and have no commitment to blow themselves up, although their stakes are in the continuance of lawlessness. Occasional criminal assistance to the insurgents cannot be ruled out but this symbiosis has no ideological underpinnings.

 

The bogey of Al Qaeda and of Zarqawi group is unrealistically been trumped up by media in the West, although there is no need for these two groups to feel uncomfortable at the unpaid for publicity. With the current momentum of the war against terror, one would be surprised if either of these groups has still retained a networking of more than fifty individuals. AlQaeda and Zarqawi group are simply brand names with franchise operations, neither commissioned nor controlled by any central authority, mushrooming all across the Muslim world. People in the Muslim world are now fed up with poverty, unemployment and the socio-political disempowerment. The absence of legitimate democratic mechanisms of channeling or expressing dissent in the wake of domestic, workplace and State violence against them, makes people turn to terrorism. And to haunt th e Americans, exacerbate the impact and to distract the law enforcement machinery, they claim responsibility as groups associated with Al Qaeda and the latter gladly owns the action. If Al Qaeda is the name of a hate ideology against the West, then every anti Western violence is definitely Al Qaeda, but if this is the name of a certain network, then one may be rest assured that not one Iraqi casualty goes to the (dis)credit of Al Qaeda while the Zarqawi and a handful of his band are responsible for less than 200 killings. Actually since fewer than a fraction of Iraqis watches the CNN, one can safely assume that most of the suicide bombers might not have heard Zarqawi’s name. So let us look elsewhere for the origin of these bombers.

 

It is now well known that Saddam Hussain had brutally suppressed his own people. During his reign, his forces massacred Kurds in the North, going to the extent of gassing the town of Halubja, exterminated whole localities of the Shiites during the Najaf uprising and eliminated countless Sunni political opponents as well. A safe guess of the number killed would be a figure of 100,000 or around. Another 400,000 people were killed in the Iran-Iraq war during 1980-88 and 50,000 people might have been killed during the 2003 Gulf War and as many during the subsequent ensuing civil war. Add the wild guess of 200,000 in excess mortality in the past decade due to sanctions, chronic food and medicine shortages, and (since 2003) mismanagement by the occupation authorities and insurgency-related causes. The biggest single manslaughter took place on 26 -27 February of 1991 when in the wake of defeat in the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussain ordered all his forces out of Kuwait and in a disorderly haste the Iraqi soldiers got hold of any motor vehicle and started running for their lives. In disregard of all laws, canons and customs of war, the US Air Force bombed them to death and the 120 km Kuwait Basra road was littered with corpses. The exact number of those killed on the road on that fateful day shall never be known but the myths running in Iraq suggest that of the 550,000 Iraqi troops occupying Kuwait, only 12,000 had returned alive.

 

The total number of those meeting a violent death in Iraq is anywhere between one to three million souls. In a traditional society like Iraq where even second cousins are considered part of the nucleus family and the whole tribe as an extended family, death of a person is treated as a personal loss by at least 40-70 people. If ‘A’ is killed in USA, his spouse, children, parents, a few close friends and may be the siblings will feel loss of a family member; in Iraq that feeling will extend to cousins and neighbors as well. With a 23 million population, every living Iraqi has experienced the grief of violent or unnatural death of a loved one, five times over. Quite naturally the society has been bruised and battered by the violence and the spirit of revenge is passing through the veins of most Iraqis. Since most Iraqis considered Saddam as t he US tout and even held it responsible for perpetuating the Iran-Iraq war and then obviously for the Iraqis killed in the two Gulf Wars (1991 & 2003), the hatred for America is writ large in the hearts and minds. America’s new found role of liberators may help them fool themselves but not the Iraqis. It is a common jobless Iraqi who pined over a friend disappearing since Saddam era, who lost an uncle in war with Iran and a cousin on the Iraq-Basra road on Feb. 27 massacre in 1991, who saw his neighbor’s daughter die of pneumonia due to medicine shortage, who has three under nourished kids to feed and two aged sisters to marry, and no job and no hope, who is killing the Americans. And this species, unfortunate for the Americans, is abundant in Iraq and probably accounts of 90% of insurgent attacks. The lesson: please do not murder a person, and if you do kindly do not try going to the deceased house masquerading as a Santa Clause.

 

The situation is no doubt complicated by the presence of Saudi, Yemeni and Egyptian militants who are venting their frustration over domestic political butchery by attacking the Americans in Iraq. The presence of Americans in their proximity is a God-sent opportunity to take revenge for the US support to Israel and to the regional poodle despots, or so they think. Iraq has become a rallying and galvanizing point for them and with the Iraqi law enforcement system already crumbled, these ideological fighters rule the roost outside Baghdad’s Green Zone. In fact, the whole of Iraq is their sanctuary and they do not want to go to fight isolated losing battles back home. But these are less than tenth of the insurgent strength.

 

As for their sources of funding, there are three; first, the rich Saudi philanthropists who hate the ruling dynasty and consider it their duty to purge foreign forces from the Saudi soil; second, the leaders of Baath party in Syria whose regime survival is contingent upon an early collapse of democracy in Iraq, which may follow as soon as the Americans withdraw, and the third organized Iraqi criminal gangs and smuggling mafia.

 

All the factions in the violence are happy as long as the Americans and the British machinery is geared to disrupting the Al Qaeda network (that does not exist), locating Zarqawi (who may well be dead), and finding Baath supporters (where there are none). The killers are ordinary young men, fond not of Bin Laden but of movies and girls, whose future had been stolen from them by the West’s support of Saddam Hussain. The research and analysis wings of the CIA and the MI6 need some overhaul!

 

The writer is an Oxford-published author and a widely read analyst on politics, law and governance in the Muslim world.

Iraq: Who are these suicide bombers after all?Saad S. Khan

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