Another 2007 article, moved to here. For better handling of the footnotes, see the original.

Where do the suicide bombers in Iraq come from? The kamikazes in Palestine have a clear motivation, and a defined enemy. But what is that of the fratricidal bombers in Iraq?

They seem to kill each other, and indiscriminately! But Iraq was never like this! The threads of sects and ethnicities interweave far too much to allow such fratricide! All hell broke loose after the bombing of the Al-Askari Mosque in February 2006—just over a year ago. But such bombers existed even before that! There seemed to be an interminable supply of people willing to blow themselves up and kill other Iraqis!

The obvious candidate for such fanaticism are the Salafis ^1, an obscure sect which barely had any support outside of Saudi Arabia. So are the bombers from there? Should not then the Saudi border be the focus of attention rather than Americans’ much-demonized Syrian border?

Robert Fisk ^2 suggests that some of the anti-American bombers originate from Palestinian camps in Lebanon; that they go to Iraq to support their Sunni brothers. But these account for neither the large numbers nor the bombings against Shia Iraqis.

Unlike the other chess players, the Saudis have been playing their game very silently.

Rah Sabs

22 March 2007

^1 Also referred-to as the Wahabis. Some of their earlier exploits included the destruction of the giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan, and the Algerian civil war in the 1990s. More recently, in their own homeland, they have been systematically destroying Islamic archaeological and historical sites because they deem their preservation to be idolatry (see Daniel Howden’s article in The Independent on 19^th April 2006)!

^2 This is in the first 10 minutes of his interview on 18^th Dec. 2006, on the Flashpoints Radio news program.