Suicide Bombers Tip Afghan War By ALAN CULLISON August 1, 2008 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121755491353303263.html?mod=world_news_featu red_articles
PUL-E-CHARKHI, Afghanistan -- Earlier this year, Hamza turned 20 years old, and without a job or family where he lived in Pakistan, he confided to a friend that he was considering suicide. His friend had a suggestion: Kill himself along with some American soldiers across the border in Afghanistan. Hamza, who like many people in this part of Central Asia goes by one name, agreed. A few days later, he says, he was contacted by a stranger named Mohammed who took Hamza to a house in Bara. The town, near Pakistan's western border with Afghanistan, is part of a wider haven for militants allied with al Qaeda, according to the U.S. military. The house, Hamza says, was a training center of sorts for suicide bombers. [ Hamza] <http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/HC-GM446_Hamza_20080731215008.gif> There were explosive vests, and a computer that played DVDs with inspirational messages. One video purportedly showed an American soldier shooting a Quran with a pistol and then urinating on it. Hamza lived with six other young men as they learned how to use the vests and drive bomb-laden cars. "They were showing videos all the time of suicide attacks," Hamza said in an interview. "They didn't have much effect on me, because I had already decided to kill myself." Today Hamza is a resident of Pul-e-Charkhi prison, a squalid collection of cellblocks outside the Afghan capital of Kabul. He is alive to tell about his training only because his own mission, a truck bombing, went awry soon after he crossed the border into Afghanistan. Hamza's trajectory from depression to attempted mass murder mirrors a larger shift that is changing the war in Afghanistan and giving it a more vicious twist. It also provides a glimpse inside a suicide bombing network that Western diplomats and the Afghan military say Pakistan has allowed to flourish in its lawless border areas. Pakistan denies the charges. On Wednesday, Pakistani security forces attacked a militant stronghold in the North West Frontier province, and said it killed a senior Islamist commander and at least 25 other insurgents. Suicide attacks were virtually unheard of in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. That started to change after the U.S.-led occupation in 2001. Two were reported here in 2003; three in 2004. Then the numbers mushroomed: In 2006 there were 123 suicide attacks reported, a sevenfold increase from the year before, according to the United Nations. Last year 160 attackers blew themselves up, killing or injuring more than 1,700 people. So far this year, about 100 suicide attacks have occurred, making 2008 on track to outstrip last year in terms of fatalities. The rise of suicide bombings is one reason security is crumbling in Afghanistan seven years after NATO forces invaded. The attacks have forced Western aid workers and the military to retreat into bunkerlike fortresses. They have also undermined confidence in the central government led by U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai. Victims have included regional police chiefs, members of Parliament, and a large number of bystanders. With practice, they've grown more effective. A car bomb at the Indian Embassy earlier this month was one of the deadliest yet, killing 58 people with a blast so powerful that it stripped the needles off a pine tree in the embassy compound. When al Qaeda freely ran its own training camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s, its leaders worked up theological arguments to justify suicide attacks, but they never swayed local Afghans to partake in them. The locals' resistance was hardened partly by a deeply traditional social fabric, where village elders often gave the final word on right and wrong and settled disputes. Many were suspicious of Arab visitors. Suicide attacks were considered cowardly and un-Islamic. But that social fabric may be unraveling after decades of war in Afghanistan, the mass movement of refugees, and the expanding presence of radical groups such as al Qaeda in the Pakistani border region. In Afghanistan's rural villages and hamlets, where 70% of the population lives, insurgents are often a more constant presence than the Western troops who stop by on patrols. U.S. officials say Taliban insurgents and terror groups who cross over from Pakistan have been stepping up intimidation tactics and assassinating village elders who cooperate with the Karzai government. [Growing Threat] <http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AM429_AFGHAN_20080731192416.gif > "Afghanistan is still a very tribal society and still resistant to these ideas, but that is changing," says Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, a think tank in Singapore. For now, the vast majority of suicide attackers come from Pakistan because the old folkways of village life have come apart there more quickly, and important decisions no longer necessarily rely on the approval of elders, says Mr. Gunaratna. "That makes them more susceptible to new ideology like al Qaeda's." Shame Campaign Most of the bombers are young men who attended radical Islamist madrassas, or religious schools, in Pakistani border areas. Mr. Karzai has blamed Pakistan's spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, for supporting some of the madrassas and even planning some of the attacks, including the Indian Embassy bombing. Pakistan's government has denied any involvement. Mr. Karzai has been waging a shame campaign against the madrassas, accusing them of using their students as a form of cannon fodder for the jihadi cause. In April, police in Afghanistan arrested a 14-year-old boy as he approached a military checkpoint wearing an explosive vest. Mr. Karzai later appeared with him at a news conference where the boy explained he had attended a madrassa in Pakistan for six months of studying the Quran, after which his teachers dropped him off at the border and told him to blow himself up near U.S. troops. Mr. Karzai pardoned the boy and sent him back to his parents. "There are people inside Pakistan, who for whatever reason do not want a stable and prosperous Afghanistan," he told a radio station. But Mr. Karzai, whose own popularity has shrunk along with the reach of government authority, is not seen these days as a figure who can reverse the bombing trend. After a string of near-fatal assassination attempts, he seldom leaves Kabul and some say his influence is increasingly confined to the city limits. The suicide bombers in Afghanistan don't fit the profile of the middle-class Arabs who flew planes into New York and Washington in 2001. Rather, they are typically marginalized, have few options for a livelihood in the mountainous border region, can be easily persuaded to join the jihadi cause, and frequently aren't given sufficient training in their task. "If you look at the typical Afghan bomber involved in these operations, he is poor, he is uneducated, and he does not know what he is getting into," says Maj. Gen. Manan Farahani, who is in charge of antiterrorism for the Afghan government. "And that is why you get some poor results." Recruits are typically drawn in by five lofty promises: They will go to paradise immediately; receive a special audience with God; have their worldly sins be forgiven; take 70 relatives with them to heaven; and be given 72 virgins to marry, none of whom will ever grow old. In Kabul, those who fail as suicide bombers are brought to a dusty interrogation center surrounded by brick walls topped by razor wire. The windows are painted beige to make them opaque. More than 10 failed bombers have come through so far this year. Promises and Threats [Rahmat Khan, who was arrested in May wearing a suicide vest in the Afghan city of Khost. Mr. Khan says he received training in a Pakistani border town and was duped into the martyrdom operation.] <http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AM434A_AFGHA_20080731211625.jpg > Alan Cullison/WSJ Rahmat Khan, who was arrested in May wearing a suicide vest in the Afghan city of Khost. Mr. Khan says he received training in a Pakistani border town and was duped into the martyrdom operation. One such arrival in July was Rahmat Khan, 30. He was arrested in May wearing a suicide vest in the American-occupied Afghan city of Khost. In an interview, Mr. Khan said he was duped into the martyrdom operation, and only quit his job selling ballpoint pens from a pushcart in Pakistan after he was promised higher-paying employment working at a madrassa near the border. Until then, he had been making about $10 a month, he said. At the madrassa, he said mullahs began promising him a place in heaven if he blew himself up with a suicide vest. Then they threatened him with beatings when he had second thoughts. He said local Pakistani authorities were involved in the operation, and that he was escorted to the Afghan border by a minder, five soldiers and a police cruiser. Afghan police confirm that Mr. Khan told them the same story but they could not verify his claims. Mr. Khan said he grew anxious as another man escorted him to his target in Khost. He was sitting in a city park when a shoeshine boy spied a wire protruding from Mr. Khan's clothing. The boy alerted police, who tackled him. "I'm an uneducated man, and so was my father," said Mr. Khan, who says he can't read or write. "I can only say that I made a bad mistake." Jail guards say new arrivals usually contend they have been drugged, pushed or pressured into becoming bombers. The guards readily admit they beat the inmates to extract confessions and say it typically takes about 10 days for them to admit to volunteering. They said Mr. Khan, who had been there less than a week, may yet change his story. Trajectory to Terrorism Hamza, his hair now closely cropped and a thin beard covering his face, passed through the same detention center before arriving at Pul-e-Charkhi prison. He describes his own trajectory to terrorism without apparent resentment. He was born in Tajikistan in 1988. Like millions of other young men from Central Asia, his family and education were disrupted by the wars that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. His family fled Tajikistan's civil war for Afghanistan when he was 6. Then civil war in Afghanistan separated him from his parents when he was 10, he says, and he grew up in madrassas and refugee camps in Pakistan. Today he is uncertain where his parents are, or if they are alive. [Global Impact] <http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AM436A_AFGHA_20080731192817.gif > He remembers wanting to be an engineer when he had parents, but his education in the madrassas was mostly a religious one. Earlier this year, he says he had fits of depression. "I was reading about the killing, the fighting, the tsunamis in the newspapers," he said. "I was disappointed with everything in my life. There was nothing." Word of his angst spread to a half dozen of his friends, one of whom contacted Mohammed, the guide who brought him to the boarding house for suicide bombers in Bara. He didn't grow close to the other six young men, all Pakistani, with whom he shared the house for three months as they awaited their missions. Before Hamza left, he said two of his housemates blew themselves up in attacks inside Pakistan. Closely Watched Hamza said he didn't know the details of his mission when he entered Afghanistan, except that he would be attacking a convoy of vehicles. "They said you will just drive into the middle of the convoy, the target will be easy," he said. "They told me they would all be foreigners." He was closely watched by a guide who took him to the Afghan border and then by taxi to a hotel in Kabul. The following morning, they were joined by a third man in a Toyota pickup. Hamza rode as a passenger as the three of them drove north towards Mazar-i-Sharif. Along the way, they broke down twice, once for a faulty transmission, once for a flat tire. Police arrested Hamza outside the city when he stopped to relieve himself on the shoulder of a highway. He thinks someone must have tipped them off. Police later showed him photographs of the dismantled pickup, which they said had been packed with more than 600 pounds of explosives in the door panels. He said his two companions were also arrested, but he didn't know their fate. Hamza said he was surprised to see the pickup had already been outfitted with explosives, and didn't know they had been loaded yet. He said perhaps those accompanying him didn't trust him, and were planning to detonate the truck by remote control while he was driving it. He says he was tortured at the interrogation center in Kabul after he was arrested. Today, he says he is glad he failed in his attack, and blames his terrorist sponsors for exploiting his frailties. "They are very effective, and very fast" at moving young men to their missions, he said. He says he has been told he will spend anywhere from seven to 10 years in prison, similar to what other inmates have gotten for his crime. "There is nothing for me to do here," he said. "I will wait." Write to Alan Cullison at <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (F)AIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this message are copyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. 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