Dressed To Kill

The phenomenon of female suicide bombers is a gender thing, and the burqa plays an important role in it. The Islamic traditional female garb that cloaks the entire body is given a new purpose with the rise of female suicide bombers. The burqa makes women avoid thorough searches at checkpoints because men are not allowed to search women, and there is a dearth of female guards. Islamic rules against men touching women have made it easy for female suicide bombers to be undetected.

In June this year, a female suicide bomber killed 15 people and injured more than 40 near a government center in Baqouba, Iraq. 15 other women had carried out suicide bombings in the area alone. The women’s black cloaks hid everything, including the bombs.

Although the gender issue aspect does not stop with the purpose of the burqa, the use of females to explode themselves for the sake of “war,” and as expendable entities, has proven to be beneficial to the militant organizations that had hired them.

In February this year, remote-controlled explosives strapped to two mentally disabled females with Down Syndrome were detonated at a busy pet bazaar in the busy central al-Ghazl market in Baghdad. At least 73 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded. It was one of the deadliest attacks since the US had sent an installment of 30,000 extra troops. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued a statement saying that the use of mentally retarded women as suicide bombers proves al-Qaeda is “the most brutal and bankrupt of movements.” The remote-controlled bombs were attached to vests that the two women wore under their traditional black Islamic robe. Local police said that one of the women sold cream in the mornings at the market and was known to locals as “the crazy lady.”

The women were clearly not willing attackers.

The Muslim extremist group Hamas thinks that “shamed” women are good recruits as suicide bombers. In early 2004, a young mother of two blew herself up at an Israeli checkpoint. She was the first female suicide bomber from Hamas. The Jerusalem Post revealed that she was forced into the suicide attack as “punishment for cheating on her husband.” Male relatives wanted her dead. Her husband was an activist in the Hamas organization. She was pressured to commit suicide to preserve “family honor.”

Hamas leaders used to reject requests of women to take part in suicide attacks. The organization has since revised its position. Some Hamas leaders now permit the use of women in terror strikes, especially women who have transgressed moral norms. The woman’s “sacrifice” atones for the “stain” she has caused to her family for violating moral codes.

November 13, 2005. Iraqi Sajida Mubarek Atrous al-Rishawi opening her jacket and showing an explosive belt as she confesses on Jordanian state-run television to her failed bid to set off an explosives belt inside one of the three Amman hotels targeted by al-Qaeda. Around this time, three female suicide bombers detonated themselves in a spate of weeks, killing and injuring dozens as U.S.-led coalition forces catch insurgents suspected of training women to become human bombs.

Diaa Rashwan who follows Islamic militancy for Egypt’s Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies said, “Women appear to be used as human bombs as coalition forces push extremists out from former strongholds, shrinking their pool of potential recruits, and forcing them to devise alternative methods to penetrate stiffened security measures.”

December 4, 2007. A female suicide bomber dead at the site of her attack in Peshawar. The woman was clad in a burqa when she blew herself up at an army checkpoint, in a high-security zone of an intelligence services building. The attack happened in the neighborhood of senior retired and serving army officers. The police said this was the country’s first attack that involved a woman since 9/11. Image Source

March 10, 2008. A female suicide bomber in Baqouba, Iraq killed the head of a local group of Sunni fighters Sheik Thaeir Ghadhban al-Karkhi. The woman wore an explosives belt when she entered al-Karkhi’s home. The explosion that killed al-Karkhi also killed his 5-year-old niece and a security guard. al-Karkhi’s 24-year old nephew died later in a hospital. Image Source

November 28, 2007. A Tamil Tiger disabled female suicide bomber blew herself up outside the heavily guarded offices of Welfare and Social Development Minister Douglas Devananda, after she was stopped from entering the office. The explosives were hidden in the woman’s bra. At least 3 security officers were wounded. The LTTE, though, claims to be a secular nationalist group with no ties with the al-Qaeda, nor interested in establishing an Islamic regime. This insurgent militant group has been recruiting female cadres for the past 24 years. Image Source

February 03, 2008. A female LTTE suicide bomber exploded herself inside the Fort railway station in Colombo. 12 people were killed and over 100 others were wounded. Image Source

February 1, 2008. A female suicide bomber blew herself up inside the busy al-Ghazl market in central Baghdad. As if used to such occurrences, Iraqis take pictures on their cell phones of the dismembered remains. Image Source

Female suicide bombers have been more newsworthy than their male counterpart. The media and the world seem to be fascinated by this phenomenon. Female suicide bombers exist precisely because of some concepts attached to gender, making gender favorable for the sake of terror attacks.

The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps

I don’t know what lies beyond the here and now. Surely, neither do you. And since what we don’t know won’t kill us, the realm of the unknown up ahead is what gives us hope. We cling on to hope to calm ourselves from the panic, assuage our fear a little, abate our loneliness somehow, or generally promise ourselves that life won’t break us.

We have become so hopeless that we peg our hope on the uncertain.

Hope is a busy fellow. It is the promise of religions, upcoming elections, newly installed politicians, self-styled spiritual teachers a. k. a. gurus et. al. They thrive on the better ‘perhaps.’ And so, because the hopes that we pin on ‘perhaps’ will only mostly get us down and frustrate us, might it not be wiser to simply dwell on the ‘present’ and learn from the ‘past?’

Hope is precisely what is fooling us.

A centuries-old temple has become the stage of a very modern military standoff as Thailand and Cambodia quarrel over a piece of land on both the nations’ borders. It is both countries’ hopes that one will win over the other for the rightful ownership of the 800-year-old Khao Preah Vihear Temple. The holy dispute affects the Cambodian Buddhist monks the most as pressure has mounted, and both Cambodia and Thailand have escalated troop build-up near the historic border temple. We can only surmise as to what lies ahead for the Thai, the Cambodians, and the monks. Each party will otherwise want to have its own hopeful prediction.

George W. Bush transported more and more troops to Iraq, partly to help the Iraqis get united, but mostly to assure US taxpayers who have been funding the war that the White House has been right on target to hang on to the hope of victory. Now, all 5 surge brigades have left Iraq and the battle-riddled country is hopeful that the US will pull out all troops from combat by 2010. The air of uncertainty remains, however, over the fact that Iraqi troops still rely on American support and that Iraqi politicians may not really be capable to manage the country at this point.

The matter of Afghanistan is on both John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s foreign policy plate. Whoever wins the US elections means sending more troops to this yet another battle-riddled country, as US troop casualties are on the rise with the burgeoning Taliban mounting more attacks. Combat brigades of up to 15,000 troops will be sent to Afghanistan to tame the insurgency.

But terrorism and insurgency are only a part of Afghanistan’s pessimism. The country is grossly underdeveloped, having been ‘promised progress by every government since 1973,’ as a lowly Afghan worker laments. Afghanistan has been battling widespread drug addiction, corruption, lawlessness, and a massively handicapped economy. Where lies Afghanistan’s hope, then?

There really is just a ‘perhaps.’ It is the realm where solutions are found – or never found. The phrase ‘there’s hope in the future’ can be misleading. There’s only hope for the solution to certain aberrations of what can be deemed normal or ideal. There really is no hope for the tides to change.

That is why hope rests in the region of ‘perhaps.’ We are never equipped to find out the answer. Where problems and solutions are out of our reach, do we wring our hands and look up to heaven, or do we still nag ourselves with the question: are you part of the solution or part of the problem? The latter is the most stupid question that has floated around, really.

No need to ask that question. We are too small for that or too beyond it.

More and more, I’m seeing the logic why many of my countrymen go more often to lottery ticket outlets than to church. I can’t rob them of their newfangled definition of hope. Their religion and government have failed them.

If there is learned helplessness, there, too, is learned optimism. That is why I kiss a frog everyday.

Hope is like white light – immediately illuminating and blindly disorienting.

God Ain't There On The Battlefield

The definitions of good and bad are askew on the battlefield. Neither exists over there. There are only good cause and good moves or bad timing and bad days. The words good and bad defy definitions in a time of war. Today, some things can be good for the victor and some, bad for the loser. Tomorrow, the victor scores less.

The battlefield is a place where morality does not exist – cannot exist.

God doesn’t visit there, either.

The myth of war is fraud. And for soldiers, the experience on the battlefield is so ludicrous as to absolutely require the strongest of obscenities.

No one wins in a war.

Does saying someone died for a good cause mean anything? Is the fact that they died saving fellow soldiers or saving the lives of civilians a good thing? When enemies are killed, or when civilians die at the crossfire, what of it? And when they are ordered by their superiors to hide the sordid truth because war crimes are punishable, who can say that that is wrong?

There is, however, moral courage.

When a soldier debunks the myth of war as fraud and calls a battle an enterprise of death and immorality, he condemns himself and his fellow soldiers as killers. Thus, the morally courageous becomes an outcast. Does the outcast become a patriotic soldier, then?

In the war memoir “The Sutras of Abu Ghraib” by Army Reservist Aidan Delgado that appeared in print in 2007, the author describes the attempts of his commanders to suppress the truth about Abu Ghraib, making it appear that Abu Ghraib is just a rumor. His captain said, “We don’t need to air our dirty laundry in public. If you have photos that you’re not supposed to have, get rid of them. Don’t talk about this to anyone, don’t write about it to anyone back home.”

The Winter Soldier investigation just outside Washington D.C in March 2008 was a scene of hard-core U.S. Iraqi veterans shaking at the podium, some in tears. Jon Michael Turner described the horrific incident on April 28, 2008 when he shot an Iraqi boy in front of his father. His commanding officer congratulated him for “the kill.” To a stunned audience, Turner presented a photo of the boy’s skull, and said, “I am sorry for the hate and destruction I have inflicted on innocent people.”

“Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians” by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian is based on hundreds of hours of taped interviews with Iraqi combat veterans. This pioneering work on the catastrophe in Iraq includes the largest number of eyewitness accounts from U.S. military personnel on record.

A soldier only knows disillusionment. When he turns against the military principle that truth is seditious, and when he starts to seek forgiveness and musters moral courage, his only one hope is to stop denying the truth.

Then, and only then, can he start to heal.