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IN a small flat in Damascus, a young man in jeans and T-shirt draws frequently on a Gauloises cigarette as he describes how he dressed his brother in a suicide belt and watched him blow up some American soldiers at a drinks stall in Iraq.The young man calls himself Ahmed. He is 23 and he has a degree in chemistry. He knows all about explosives.Last year, he says coolly, he took 15kg of TNT, packed it into pouches with some nails and strapped the bomb to his 19-year-old brother’s waist.There was never any doubt that it would go off. Ahmed placed detonators in both his brother’s trouser pockets and a third in a shirt pocket, just in case the others failed. Finally, he slipped wire rings on to his brother’s fingers and attached them to a fourth detonator in the palm of his hand. The thinking was that even if his brother were shot, he would clench his fist and the TNT would still explode.Ahmed had borrowed a drinks stall used by American convoys on the road that winds north from Baghdad past Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikrit. His brother was instructed to grab some bottles of cola in his free hand and head for a group of soldiers taking a break from their journey.“Go sell them some Pepsi,” Ahmed told him gently. “We will meet in heaven, you and I, and that’s a promise.”Ahmed says his brother kissed him, turned and walked away without a moment’s hesitation.Did he not long to call his brother back, I ask? The question brings tears to his eyes.“He had a smile on his face,” Ahmed replies. “He knew he was crossing to a better place where he would meet his maker as a martyr.”The emotion passes and Ahmed talks with steady self-assurance about his plans to follow his brother’s example. He, too, will take Americans with him when he dies, he says. His ambition is to blast some CIA men to smithereens.The flat where we met was rented by a handler in Damascus, the Syrian capital, who channels aspiring “martyrs” to insurgent groups such as Ahmed’s.Our encounter was arranged as part of a four-week Sunday Times investigation into the world’s biggest suicide bombing campaign. More than 1,300 bombers are said to have struck on foot or in vehicles since the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 – more than all the other suicide bombings of the past 20 years put together.The number this year promises to be higher than ever. The bombers are estimated to have killed and injured more than 4,000 people in the first nine months. Their targets have ranged from lines of police recruits in and around Baghdad to an entire village near the Syrian border where up to 500 died.So who are these bombers and why do they do it? How are they organised? And how much impact are they really making on a war that is sucking ever larger numbers of suicidal volunteers from across the Middle East into Iraq’s vortex of violence.To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah....
