After Bush and Blair decided to launch unjustified war and invade sovereign and secular Iraq, retribution by suicide bombers was inevitable.
Iraqis known for adhering to secular principles have been forced by US and British invasion of their holy land to adopt means more fundamentalist. It remains matter of days now when whole of Iraq may turn into a breeding ground for militants seeking holy jihad.
For those Americans and Brits, who considered Iraq war a cakewalk and were expecting Iraqis to shower flowers are facing resistance beyond any scale.
Ali Jaafar al-Noamani, posing as a taxi driver, pulled up close to a roadblock north of the holy city of Najaf, waved to American troops for help, then blew up his vehicle when they approached. Iraqis claim 11 marines were killed while US maintains five were killed in the attack.
Americans and Brits were stunned by this attack, which Iraqi Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan says will become “routine military policy.”
Al-Noamani, a noncommissioned officer with several children – was posthumously promoted to colonel and awarded two medals – Al-Rafidin, or The Two Rivers, and the Mother of All Battles, state TV reported. His family reportedly was awarded 100 million dinars – the equivalent of $34,000.
An estimated 4,000 Muslims from Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia who say they are ready for martyrdom have flocked to Iraq since the U.S.-led war began and are being trained at a camp east of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, Al-Quds Brigades, a militant Palestinian group, has declared that its first wave of volunteer suicide bombers has arrived in Iraq. Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of Islamic Jihad said that it “brings to our people and nation the good news of the arrival of its first martyrdom (attackers) to the heart of Baghdad.”
Experts view an Iraq occupied by the U.S. military as the “perfect” environment for Muslims seething over what they see as Washington’s war against Islam. Also from the Islamic point of view, a person who fights for saving the life of his brother, unjustly attacked, and dies in that cause is a martyr. Any person, who fights for regaining his birthright to his homeland and dies in that cause is a martyr. According to a leading Islamist authority, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, attacks on enemies are not suicide operations, but ”heroic martyrdom operations” in which the kamikazes act not ”out of hopelessness and despair, but are driven by an overwhelming desire to cast terror and fear into the hearts of the oppressors.
The history of suicide attacks stretches back at least to the 11th century, when the Assassins, the disciples of the Persian master Alamut, conducted suicide raids on neighboring fortresses.
Suicide operations caught the Arab imagination in 1983, when Lebanese Muslim guerrillas trained by Iran blew up 241 American servicemen and 58 French paratroops in a simultaneous operation in Beirut.
The technique and the cult of martyrdom characteristic was transferred to the Palestinians, leading to a series of bombs in Israeli targets.
