--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Suicide attacks are acquiring deadly foothold in Afghanistan Suicide attacks increasing in Afghanistan
Weapon of choice for Taliban militants has killed hundreds
- Rahman Nullah, Chronicle Foreign Service
Sunday, November 26, 2006
(11-26) 04:00 PST Spin Boldak, Afghanistan -- For the past several months, Mullah Ezatullah has been training a half dozen would-be fedayeen, or "men of sacrifice," in a remote camp in the art of blowing themselves up.
"They are now ready to destroy the enemies of Islam and free Afghanistan from foreign invaders," said Ezatullah, who like many Afghans goes by one name.
Last year, suicide attacks were rare occurrences in Afghanistan. But they have grown deadlier and more frequent. NATO said that as of the middle of November, 97 suicide attacks have killed 217 people in the country this year. In September and October alone, nearly 100 people were killed in such attacks, including 18 outside the governor's compound in Helmand province, 16 near the U.S. Embassy and 12 outside the Interior Ministry in Kabul.
Gen. Abdul Manan Farahie, chief of the Interior Ministry's anti-terrorism department, has told reporters that most suicide attacks are planned in Pakistan and carried out by men who have little training.
"The Afghans doing the suicide attack, they were in the madrassas (religious schools) for five, six, seven months. They had no contact with their families, and they are under the psychological control of the mullahs," Farahie told the Associated Press. "If they had contact with their families, they would say, 'Don't do this.' "
The interview with Ezatullah, a 27-year-old Taliban commander, and his students occurred last month after local elders persuaded them to speak to a reporter. The meeting took place in a two-room mud house outside this southern town, one hour east of Kandahar near the Pakistan border, which was once a Taliban stronghold. Other than a few rifles propped against walls, the house was bare.
Ezatullah said his handpicked group consists of a Pakistani and five Afghans who range in age from 14 to 30 years. All are from poor or lower-middle-class families. The would-be bombers carried Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenades loosely over their shoulders. Some kept their finger on the trigger as if protecting their young leader.
Ezatullah boasted that he has more volunteers than explosives and that some have been waiting for more than a year to put on a suicide vest.
Qari Asadullah, 22, the Pakistani, says he prefers suicide bombing over conventional warfare because it is "the most precise weapon we have." Asadullah has not seen his parents or his younger brother, a shopkeeper, for five years, and has no intention of going home.
"God will pave the way to paradise for me and my family once I become a martyr," he said. "We are convinced that this is a holy martyrdom that will gain the Almighty's happiness."
Their accounts could not be independently verified, but Afghan officials say that suicide bombers have become the Taliban's weapon of choice against NATO forces, government workers, state buildings, foreign diplomats and soldiers of the national army in an effort to destabilize the government of President Hamid Karzai.
In a recent interview by satellite phone with the Pakistan newspaper News International, Mullah Dadullah Khan, a Taliban commander in four southwestern provinces, boasted of training 500 suicide bombers and supplying each with his personal jannat ka parwana, or "admittance to paradise."
While some of this may be bluster, there is little doubt that the government is taking the issue of suicide bombers very seriously.
"We have increased surveillance on public gatherings and are closely watching to foil any terrorist activity," said Interior Ministry spokesman Zmaray Bashiri. In the past month, Afghan counterterrorism units have arrested 17 would-be bombers, according to Sayed Ansari, a spokesman for the national directorate of security. Joint NATO-Afghan operations have dismantled six suicide cells in the past three months, said NATO spokesman Maj. Luke Knittig.
Bashiri says the captured suspects are brainwashed by mullahs who show them films depicting "immoral acts" committed in Afghanistan since the fundamentalist Taliban were ousted in 2001. He said they are equipped by Arab, Chechen and Uzbek militants in Pakistan.
Authorities also said they had arrested Hafez Daud Shah, a 21-year-old Afghan caught carrying explosives in a waistcoat. Shah is one of the 2.5 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan who rotate through the ranks of the Taliban and other militant Islamic groups, officials say.
Ezatullah, who has piercing dark eyes and a thin beard, squatted on a fraying brown rug toying with his rifle while explaining how to detonate jackets filled with explosives. He instructed his men on how to pack cars and motorcycles with the right proportion of explosives, much of which remains from the 1979-89 war with the Soviet Union.
A simple attack, he told his men, requires between 11 and 26 pounds of explosives packed into a vest or jacket. A car bomb, however, needs as much as 110 pounds to plow into a NATO convoy. He also showed them how to fashion homemade bombs from gunpowder and gas cylinders.
Ezatullah prefers ordinary jackets bought in the local bazaar -- explosives are packed in pockets and between the linings and configured to explode with the press of a button on a narrow belt worn around the waist. Detonation can also be triggered by opening the belt.
He says his men are well trained and able to hit targets without causing civilian casualties. But he paused when asked if innocent bystanders are sometimes killed.
"We try our hardest to spare shedding innocent blood, but sometimes it is unavoidable. We try to limit this," he said.
Ezatullah claims his men carried out the Sept. 26 attack against the compound of Helmand provincial Gov. Mohammed Daoud Safi -- which killed 18 people, including several Muslim pilgrims seeking permits to travel to Mecca -- and the Sept. 30 attack on the Interior Ministry in Kabul that killed 12, including a woman and her child, and injured 42. The latter was the first suicide bomb aimed at Afghans. His claims could not be verified.
Ezatullah says he receives funds from poppy growers, other Taliban commanders and locals who give him zakat, the Islamic version of alms. Unlike Palestinian bombers, his men do not make videotapes that are played after they are dead and receive no money for their families.
"The fedayeen do not want to pollute their martyrdom with a financial reward," Ezatullah said.
Meanwhile, religious scholars are trying to deter new recruits by calling such actions jihalat, or ignorance.
"The Quran says 'and spend our substance in the cause of God, make not your own hands contribute to your destruction,' " said Sher Mohammad Ibrahimi, director of Kabul's mosques.
Ibrahimi has directed local religious leaders and imams across Afghanistan to preach that suicide is a sin under Shariah, or Islamic law.
Page A - 17
URL:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f ... MK1UA1.DTL --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle
SUICIDE 
are you talking to me? do you have anything new to tell here? this isn't new to us,so stop mentioning my name,yeah
