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Posts Tagged ‘Suicide Bomber’

source: LA Times
Security has been high in anticipation of new violence after the U.S. formally ended combat operations last week. The targeted building is also a recruitment center.

Medical staff treat a wounded soldier after a bomb attack in Baghdad. (Reuters / September 5, 2010)

Suicide bombers hit a Baghdad military headquarters on Sunday and killed 12 people, two weeks after an attack on the same site pointed to the failure of Iraqi forces to plug even the most obvious holes in their security.

Baghdad has been on high alert as the U.S. declared the official end to its combat operations in Iraq last week, yet the militants still managed to attack an obvious target in the center of the city that has been struck very recently.

On Aug. 17, al-Qaida linked suicide bomber blew himself up at the same east Baghdad military headquarters and killed 61 army recruits last in the deadliest act of violence in Baghdad in months.

Iraqi military spokesman Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said in a statement that 12 people were killed in Sunday’s attack and 36 were injured. Five soldiers were among the dead.

In Sunday’s attack a car bomb charged the building and exploded and then gunmen assaulted the headquarters, battling the building’s guards in a 15 minute firefight in the middle of downtown Baghdad, according to police officials who said at least three militants were wearing explosives belts.

The bombers were headed to the building’s entrance on foot but were shot by the guards before they could trigger their devices. One was only wounded and has been taken into custody.

All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Mohammed al-Askari confirmed that some of the gunmen were wearing explosives belts. He said they were planning a second blast.

“The plan was to strike twice,” he said. “First with a car bomb and then with suicide bombers.”

Sunday’s attack is an embarrassment for the officials in the capital where security has been high in past days as insurgents intensify their strikes on Iraqi police and soldiers to mark the change in the U.S. mission.

The building attacked on Sunday is the headquarters for the Iraqi Army’s 11th Division and an army recruitment center. In mid-August attack, al-Qaida boasted that its operative easily passed through checkpoints before detonating his explosives belt in a crowd of officers and recruits outside the building.

The Iraqi security forces are now solely responsible for protecting the country after President Barack Obama declared an end to U.S. combat operations on Wednesday. Many, however, doubt that Iraq’s police and army are a match for the well-armed insurgency determined to bring down the Shiite-led government.

Last week Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki put his nation on its highest level of alert for terror attacks, warning of plots to sow fear and chaos in the country. He said insurgents would try to exploit widespread frustration with years of frequent power outages and problems with other public services by staging riots and attacks on government offices.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have long worried that political instability would lead to widespread violence in Iraq, and the lack of a power-sharing agreement among the competing leaders has only increased fears.

Six months after an inconclusive election in March, Iraq still has no government as al-Maliki, a Shiite, is struggling to keep his job after his political coalition came in a close second to a Sunni-dominated alliance at the March 7 vote.

source:Huffington Post

KABUL — Hundreds of protesters brandished sticks, threw stones and burned an American flag Friday in eastern Afghanistan as they accused NATO forces of killing civilians in an overnight raid, but the alliance said eight insurgents were killed in the attack.

Also Friday, the governor of eastern Paktiya province narrowly escaped an attack when a suicide bomber jumped in front of a vehicle in his convoy in the provincial capital, Gardez, the governor’s spokesman said.

In the neighboring province of Nangahar, more than 500 people poured into the streets in the Surkh Rod district to protest the raid by international forces.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office said in a faxed statement that ten “innocent people” were killed in the Surkh Rod village of Saydan, and that he “strongly condemned” the operation.

The statement made no mention of any role for Afghan troops, who often accompany NATO forces, in the operation. Karzai ordered security officials to review the incident and report back to the presidential palace.

Karzai expressed sadness at the “painful” incident, it said.

Mohammed Arish, a government administrator in Surkh Rod, said a father and his four sons and four members of another family were killed in the NATO operation.

“They are farmers. They are innocent. They are not insurgents or militants,” Arish told The Associated Press by phone.

However, NATO said the raid involved allied and Afghan forces and targeted insurgents. Eight – including a Taliban sub-commander – were killed in a firefight, said alliance spokesman Col. Wayne Shanks.

hanks revised NATO’s original version of events, saying militants had not fired rocket-propelled grenades at coalition forces, as had been first believed. He said the alleged insurgents had fired machine guns.

Two other people were captured during the operation, and weapons and communications gear were confiscated at the targeted compound, Shanks said.

Locals paraded out several of the bodies during the demonstration.

Protesters blocked roads, hurled stones at a government office and sought to march toward the provincial capital of Jalalabad, before being turned back by police, Arish said. At least three people were injured during a clash with police, the Nangahar governor’s office said.

Zemeri Bashary, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said police investigators were heading to the area to look into whether the people killed were civilians or insurgents.

Safiya Sidiqi, a parliamentary lawmaker from Nangahar, accused allied forces in the operation of relying on flawed intelligence fed by enemies of the state who want to drive a wedge between civilians and the government.

“Unfortunately, they are getting wrong intelligence reports, or the spies and these intelligence people are purposely providing incorrect information,” she said by phone.

She said the men killed were all members of the same extended family, and that many were farmers who had been working late in the fields.

Late last month, NATO and Afghan forces led a nighttime raid on Sidiqi’s home in eastern Afghanistan and fatally shot her brother-in-law, she said then. At that time, NATO said coalition forces had killed an armed individual during a pursuit of a suspected Taliban accomplice. It did not identify the person killed.

Civilian deaths at the hands of NATO forces are highly sensitive. Public outrage over such deaths led Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the NATO commander, last year to tighten the rules on combat if civilians are at risk.

McChrystal has ordered allied forces to avoid night raids when possible and bring Afghan troops with them if they do enter homes after dark. But he stopped short of seeking a complete ban sought by Karzai, who discussed the issue in meetings this week with U.S. officials in Washington.

Also Friday, NATO said at least nine insurgents were killed the previous night during a pursuit of suspected militants in the Tarnak Wa Jaldak district of eastern Zabul province.

NATO spokesman Shanks said an American service member died in an insurgent attack in the east Friday, but he did not provide details. The alliance said another service member died a day earlier following in a roadside bombing in the restive south. NATO has not indicated the nationality of the service member, citing a policy of deferring to member nations.

With the deaths, NATO has lost 23 service members in Afghanistan this month.

Violence has been rising in the southern province of Kandahar. NATO and Afghan government forces are gearing up for a major operation in the region to root out Taliban insurgents in the region. NATO leaders believe the operation will be crucial to the outcome of the war.

In the suicide attack in Gardez, the bomber blew himself up after jumping from a wall near the convoy of Paktiya regional governor Juma Khan Hamdard, provincial government spokesman Rahullah Samon said.

The head of the Paktiya provincial council, Shah Yasta Gul, said a civilian was killed and four other people injured.

Samon said the suicide bomber had been in a mosque, and had shaved his beard before the attack so he would look less suspicious to security officials.

source: Redress Information and Analysis

By Stuart Littlewood

9 March 2010

Stuart Littlewood looks at how Israel’s incessant abuse of the Palestinian people’s rights and freedoms, and its trampling on their dreams, lie behind almost every act of suicide bombing.

”Here in the West few of us can fully comprehend what turns a bright, intelligent person into a suicide bomber. But then, we don’t have a jackboot on our throat. We don’t have our front door battered down in the middle of the night by military thugs, our family abducted, our home bulldozed and our land confiscated.”

The suicide bomber wrote that he began to live the day he came to know he was to die. Where did he get this passion to kill? – Mahesh Bhatt

Here in the civilized West we hate suicide bombers with a passion.

We’re taught that the proper way to blow fellow humans to smithereens is to do it from 40,000 feet.

Or failing that, send Apache helicopter gunships at street level firing their laser-guided missiles and 30mm cannon.

Or failing that, turn loose our main battle tanks to shred and vaporize the “enemy”, reduce their homes to rubble with depleted uranium (DU) shells and spread birth defects for generations to come.

Nowadays we don’t even have to leave home to do it. We can train our really brainy chaps to steer armed drones to the target from the comfort of an armchair.

B-52s, F-16s, Apaches, drones and tanks – that’s the ticket. Awesome hardware gives any murky mission a moral superiority that gets nods of approval from the governing élite in the drawing rooms of London and Washington.

What is not acceptable is delivering the high explosive in person, all the way to the target, and looking your enemy in the eye as you push the detonator. That simply isn’t cricket.

“There can be no justification, under any circumstances, for taking innocent lives through terrorism.” Those were the very words used by Liberal Democrat Party leader Charles Kennedy in 2004, when he sacked British MP Jenny Tonge from her front-bench spokes job for suggesting she might consider becoming a suicide bomber herself if she had to live through the situation the Palestinians were in.

Statistics from Israel’s B’Tselem make the Palestinians’ situation clear. Between 2000 and the start of Israel’s “Cast Lead” blitzkrieg on Gaza in December 2008, the Israelis’ vast standing army, equipped with the most advanced weaponry American money can buy, killed 4,790 Palestinian civilians in their homeland. Of these, 952 were children.

Yes, 952 young Palestinian lives horribly snuffed out and their parents desolated…

In response Palestinians, with their garden-shed weapons, killed 490 Israeli civilians, including 84 children. In this vicious game of murder the Israelis were leading the Palestinians by 11 to 1.

Those were the “circumstances” in which Kennedy sacked Jenny Tonge.
Terrorism most foul

During the Cast Lead onslaught – the foulest act of state terrorism for decades – Israel slaughtered at least 350 more children, and Gaza has been under daily attack ever since. So the “most moral army in the world” must have blown to bits, shredded, incinerated or smashed with snipers’ bullets at least 1,400 youngsters in the last nine and a half years. The numbers left maimed and crippled don’t bear thinking about.
“Israeli policy is to grind the Palestinians into poverty and helplessness, to take away everything they own and let them rot in a Zionist-prepared hell.”

In their study, Palestinian Suicide Bombers: A Statistical Analysis, Sean Yom and Basel Saleh found that many Palestinian suicide attackers had been on the receiving end of violent encounters with the Israeli military, resulting in injury to themselves, or arrest, or a close family member being killed.

From October 2000 to March 2004, over 2,800 Palestinian fatalities and 25,600 non-lethal injuries were inflicted by the Israeli armed forces. Revenge, often fuelled by deteriorating economic prospects and the imposition of harsh policies, provided recruiters with a ready supply of volunteers. Persuading individuals not to support or participate in violence would necessarily involve “improving the structural health of Palestinian society”.

Fat chance of that. Israeli policy is to grind the Palestinians into poverty and helplessness, to take away everything they own and let them rot in a Zionist-prepared hell. Far from allowing the health of Palestinian society to improve, they tighten the screw of oppression further. In the period covered in the study they deliberately destroyed some 4,700 Palestinian homes while continuing their normal programme of slaughter, dispossession, abduction and all the other atrocities they are famed for.

Since 1967, according to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), Israel has demolished in total 24,145 homes in the occupied territories, including 4,247 (a UN figure) destroyed during Operation Cast Lead. Palestinians tend to have large families. Consider how many homeless have been created.

Professor Robert Pape’s comprehensive analysis, Dying to Win, based on his work for the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, advances the idea that suicide terrorism exerts coercive power “to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland… The bottom line, then, is that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation”

Occupation includes control of territory, as in Gaza, not necessarily military occupation.

And of course, when it comes to Israel, we’re not talking about a democracy but a vile ethnocracy.

Religion has little to do with it. Pape dismisses the often-repeated view that Islam is the root of the problem. “Rather, the taproot is American military policy.” And the notion that Islamic fundamentalism is bent on world domination is “pure fantasy”.

Many suicide bombers are simply motivated by the desire for revenge. According to one researcher, harsh state repression “should not be perceived only as a reaction to suicide bombing” but “often precedes and is a major cause of suicide bombing.”

One Saturday night in 2001 Saeed Hotari blew himself up at the entrance to a disco in Tel Aviv, killing 21 teenagers and injuring 132. Hotari was one of nine children from a poor Palestinian family living in Jordan and had been in the West Bank for two years hoping to find a better life. He left a message saying: “If we don’t fight, we will suffer. If we do fight, we will suffer, but so will they.”

The disco bombing was cited by the Israeli government as one of the reasons for building the Apartheid Wall.

In 2003 a female Palestinian lawyer, Hanadi Tayseer Jaradat, aged 29, killed 21 civilians at Maxim restaurant in Haifa. She acted to avenge the killing of her brother and a cousin (some sources say her fiancé) by Israeli security forces.

Surgeon Abdel Aziz Rantissi, co-founder of Hamas, warned: “Israelis will have no stability and no security until the occupation ends. Suicide bombers are Israel’s future.” Rantissi was assassinated in 2004 in a helicopter attack on his car. A mother and her five year-old daughter were killed in the attack and four other bystanders wounded.
How much can a person take before snapping?

Arrest, detention without due process, constant humiliation, homelessness, unemployment and other family suffering at the hands of the Israeli army are not the only spur. Yahya Ayyash, nicknamed “the Engineer” and regarded as the father of suicide bombing, became Hamas’s chief bomb maker and for several years topped Israel’s most wanted list. From a relatively well-off family, he gained a BSc in electrical engineering at Birzeit University and planned to study for a Master’s degree in Jordan but the Israeli authorities wouldn’t allow him to.

Thwarted in his life’s ambition Ayyash joined Hamas. “Don’t get sore, get even” might have been his motto. He used household chemicals to manufacture an explosive brew called Mother of Satan. His devices were used in a number of “massacres” and he quickly achieved hero status, narrowly escaping capture many times. It is claimed he was responsible for the deaths of around 90 Israelis, a high price for the occupier to pay for robbing this youngster of his rights to travel and study – rights we in the West take for granted.
“The [Israeli] regime’s leaders, seeing the Israel brand image plummet, are now pulling every dirty trick imaginable – even to the point of trying to annex sacred Islamic heritage sites – in a frantic bid to provoke a third initifada (uprising) and cast themselves once again as the victims of terror.”

Eventually in 1996 Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, eliminated Ayyash by persuading a relative to give him a rigged mobile phone that exploded when he used it. Some 100,000 people are said to have turned up at the funeral. Forty more Israelis were then killed in retaliatory bombings.

Yet Israelis still revel in targeting Palestinian students. Five years ago they forcibly removed four Birzeit University students from their studies in the West Bank and unlawfully sent them back to the Gaza Strip. All four were due to graduate by the end of that academic year.

There was an outcry from around the world and the Israeli military agreed to let them return to Birzeit, but only on condition that they signed a guarantee to permanently move back to the Gaza Strip after completing their studies. This revealed for all to see Israel’s plan to separate the West Bank from the Gaza Strip, even though the two areas are internationally recognized as one integral territory. Under international law everyone has the right to freely choose their place of residence within a single territory. Ten years ago around 350 Gaza students were studying at Birzeit, but today there are almost none and the racist regime blocks Gaza students from reaching the eight Palestinian universities in the West Bank.

It was no surprise to learn last Christmas that Berlanty Azzam, a fourth year Business Administration student from Gaza studying at Bethlehem University, was suddenly “deported” by the Israeli military back to Gaza. Berlanty, a Christian girl, had lived in the West Bank since 2005 and resisted all temptation to visit her family home in Gaza in case she was prevented from returning to Bethlehem.

The 21-year-old was only a few weeks from graduating when she was arrested after attending a job interview in Ramallah. In a deliberate attempt to rob her of her degree “the most moral army in the world” blindfolded and handcuffed her, loaded her into a jeep, drove her to Gaza and dumped her in the darkness late at night.

In the case of another university honours student in her final year, Israeli soldiers frequently rampaged through the Bethlehem refugee camp where she lived, ransacking homes and arbitrarily arresting residents. They took away her family one by one. First her 14-year-old cousin and best friend was shot dead by an Israeli sniper while she sat outside her family home during a curfew.

Next the Israelis arrested her eldest brother, a 22-year-old artist, and imprisoned him for four years. Then they came back for her 18-year-old brother. Then they came again to take her youngest brother – the “baby” of the family – just 16. These were the heartbreaking circumstances (Mr Kennedy please note) under which this student was studying for her degree.

Luckily, she had the guidance of caring university teaching staff to keep her on the straight and narrow. The “most moral army in the world” may have robbed her brothers of an education, but she was determined to complete hers.

Although Palestinians take their education seriously, not all students cruelly obstructed by the Israelis react as Yahya Ayyash did. However, there must be a limit to how much injustice and frustration a young person can take before he/she snaps.

Modern suicide bombing appears to have started in 1980 in the Iran-Iraq war when an Iranian youngster exploded himself against an Iraqi tank, but it was Hezbollah’s devastating attacks two years later in Lebanon which attracted world attention. US forces and the Israeli invader were soon expelled. The technique was then exported throughout the Middle East and beyond.

The threat of suicide bombing has receded in the Holy Land while Israeli military atrocities escalate. The regime’s leaders, seeing the Israel brand image plummet, are now pulling every dirty trick imaginable – even to the point of trying to annex sacred Islamic heritage sites – in a frantic bid to provoke a third initifada (uprising) and cast themselves once again as the victims of terror. Something has to give. Many Palestinians will snap, and no-one will be surprised to see another Ayyash emerge.

Here in the West few of us can fully comprehend what turns a bright, intelligent person into a suicide bomber. But then, we don’t have a jackboot on our throat. We don’t have our front door battered down in the middle of the night by military thugs, our family abducted, our home bulldozed and our land confiscated.

The moral to the story is surely this. You mess with other people’s rights and freedoms, and trample on their dreams, at your peril.
Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. For further information please visit www.radiofreepalestine.co.uk.

We knew it would happen. Faux journalists on the Left have decided to make Joe Stack, the man who flew his plane into the IRS building in Texas, a poster boy of the right and especially the Tea Party folks. NewsReal Blog, Rush Limbaugh, and others prophesied that would happen before the flames were even put out in Austin.

Think Progress (TP), a left-wing activist blog, has joined the liberal blog chorus of ranters calling Stack a member of the Right. TP has now taken the next step of lies by attempting to link Stack to key Republicans in the House and Senate. The TP article I read comes off like something out of The Onion. It bears no resemblance to truth or journalism.

Check out the article they posted yesterday by Lee Yang that pathetically attempts to link Congressman Steve King of Iowa (and others) with Stack.

“The suicide bomber, identified as Joseph Andrew Stack, was allegedly a right wing extremist who wrote on a website that violence “is the only answer” and expressed anger at the IRS, the federal government, and health care reform. Some on the fringe right have declared Stack a hero…He (Rep. King) noted that although the attack was “sad,” “by the same token,” it was justified.” – Think Progress

How in the world can Yang write that paragraph? Did he not read Stack’s suicide manifesto? It is impossible to read that note and think Stack was a member of the Right. The man unabashedly attacked George W. Bush. He promoted the “Communist creed” over Capitalism and free enterprise. Moreover, he attacked the Catholic church in a way that sounded like Stack had just been reading the Communist Manifesto.

I am shocked that Yang wrote Stack was angry at health care reform like it would lend credence to Stack being on the Right. His suicide note shows he wanted a socialistic form of health care. So his anger was clearly directed at the Republicans for not passing Obamacare. Either Yang did not know that or is intentionally twisting the truth to push his lie.

Finally Yang calls Stack a hero of the “fringe right”. He doesn’t define the fringe right, but does go right into declaring some Republicans as part of that group in their supposed support for Stack. Yang fails to mention that the only people who have called Stack a hero are Stack’s own daughter and a couple of white supremacy groups.

The rest of the TP article tries to paint Rep. King, Senator Scott Brown (R-MA), and usual suspect Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) as somehow defenders, discounters, and promoters of Stack’s violence. Of course there is no proof for such accusations. TP even had the gall to assert King believed Stack’s actions were “justified” – even though King never came close to saying that.

Basically if someone on the Right says they don’t like something about the IRS, TP links them to Stack. Of course, key Obama staff who have avoided paying taxes in the past somehow get ignored by the Left in this whole discussion.

Hopefully liberal bloggers will learn to actually read Stack’s own words and give up on this pathetic attempt to link him with the Right. Such journalism is not only shoddy, but it’s harmful when you begin to try to destroy people’s lives and reputations with it. Think Progress needs to think responsible journalism.