WASHINGTON: Before Hadi bin Mubarak Qahtani exploded himself into an anonymous fireball, he was young and interested only in “fooling around.” Like many Saudis, he was said to have experienced a religious awakening after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and dedicated himself to Allah, inspired by “the holy attack that demolished the foolish infidel Americans and caused many young men to awaken from their deep sleep,” according to a posting on a jihadist website.

On April 11, he died as a suicide bomber, part of a coordinated attack on a US Marine base in the western Iraq city of Qaim. Just two days later, “the Martyrdom of Hadi bin Mubarak al-Qahtani” was announced on the Internet, the latest requiem for a young Saudi man who had clamoured to follow “those 19 heroes” of Sept 11 and had found in Iraq an accessible way to die.

Hundreds of similar accounts of suicide bombers are featured on the rapidly proliferating array of websites run by radical Islamists, online celebrations of death that offer a wealth of information about an otherwise shadowy foe at a time when US military officials say that foreign fighters constitute a growing and particularly deadly percentage of the Iraqi insurgency.

The account of Qahtani’s death, like many other individual entries on the websites, cannot be verified. But independent experts and former government terrorism analysts who monitor the sites believe they are genuine mouthpieces for the Al Qaeda-affiliated militants who have made Iraq “a melting pot for jihadists from around the world, a training group and an indoctrination centre,” as a recent State Department report put it. The sites hail death in Iraq as the inspiration for a new generation of militants in much the same way that Afghanistan attracted Muslims eager to fight against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Who are the suicide bombers of Iraq? By the militants’ account, they are an internationalist brigade of Arabs, with the largest share in the online lists from Saudi Arabia and a significant minority from other countries on Iraq’s borders, such as Syria and Kuwait. The roster of the dead on just one extremist website reviewed by the Washington Post runs to nearly 250 names, ranging from a 13-year-old Syrian boy said to have died fighting the Americans in Fallujah to the reigning kung fu champion of Jordan who snuck off to wage war by telling his family he was going to a tournament.

Among the dead are students of engineering and English, the son of a Moroccan restaurateur and a smattering of Europeanized Arabs. There are also long lists of names about whom nothing more was recorded than a country of origin and the word “martyr.”

Some counterterrorism officials are skeptical about relying on information from publicly available websites, which they say may be used for disinformation. But other observers of the jihadist websites view the lists of the dead “for internal purposes” more than for propaganda, as British researcher Paul Eedle put it. “These are efforts on the part of jihadis to collate deaths. It’s like footballers on the Net getting a buzz out of knowing somebody’s transferred from Chelsea to Liverpool.” Or, as Col Thomas X. Hammes, an expert on insurgency at the National Defence University, said, “they are targeted marketing. They are not aimed at the West.”

Many of the Arabs, according to the postings, were drawn to fight in Iraq under the banner of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the group run by Jordanian Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi that has taken credit for a gruesome series of beheadings, kidnappings and suicide attacks — many of them filmed and then disseminated on the Internet in a convergence between the electronic jihad and the real-life war.

In recent days, the US military in Iraq has stepped up its campaign against the Al-Zarqawi network, with an offensive in western Iraq in an area where foreigners are believed to be smuggled across the Syrian border and claiming to have arrested or killed nearly two dozen key Zarqawi lieutenants. At the same time, Iraq has been hit by a wave of suicide attacks causing some 400 deaths over the last two weeks, one of the deadliest periods since the US invasion in 2003.

As the military has blamed much of the escalating violence on foreign fighters coming to Iraq, Al-Zarqawi’s group responded this week. “The infidels once again are claiming that foreign fighters are responsible for initiating the attacks and an increase (in foreign fighters) is the true danger,” the Al-Zarqawi media wing said in a May 10 Internet posting. But “the real danger” is Al-Zarqawi’s overall following. And besides, added the posting, “Who is the foreigner...? You are the ones who came to the land of the Muslims from your distant corrupt land.”

US military estimates cited by security analysts put the number of active jihadists around 1,000, or less than 10 per cent of the number of fighters in a mostly Iraqi-dominated insurgency. But military officials now say the foreigners are responsible for a higher percentage of the suicide bombings, and the online postings include few names of dead Iraqis affiliated with Zarqawi’s group.

Many of the suicide bombers appear to have been novices in warfare, attracted by the relative ease of access to Iraq and the lure of quick martyrdom. “This is not Al-Qaeda’s first team,” said Hammes of the National Defense University. “These are the scrubs who could never get us in the States.” Reuven Paz, an Israeli terrorism expert, analyzed the lists of jihadi dead in a March paper. He found 154 Arabs killed over the previous six months in Iraq, 64 per cent of them from Saudi Arabia, with Syrians, Iraqis and Kuwaitis together accounting for another 25 per cent. He also found that 70 per cent of the suicide bombers named by the websites were Saudi. In three cases, Paz found two brothers who carried out suicide attacks. Many were married, well-educated and in their late 20s, according to postings. “While incomplete,” he wrote, the data suggest “the intensive involvement of Saudi volunteers for jihad in Iraq.”

In a telephone interview, Paz said his list — assembled from monitoring a dozen Islamic extremist web forums — now had more than 200 names. “Many are students or from wealthy families — the same sociological characteristics as the Sept. 11 hijackers,” he said. The apparent predominance of Saudi fighters on the Internet lists has caused an alarmed reaction by Saudi officials, who fear a backlash from the Americans at the same time they are trying to convince the US they are working as allies against terrorism. While Saudi officials don’t deny that Saudi citizens have taken up arms against the US in Iraq, they argue that the long lists of Saudi dead could be a disinformation tactic or simply a recruiting tool used to lure Arab youth to Iraq by convincing them of how many others have already won a place in paradise.

“Are there Saudis in Iraq? Yes, we know that. Absolutely. But are there the numbers being bandied about? We really don’t believe so,” said a Saudi official who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject. “The Internet sites try to recruit people — it’s the best recruitment tool,” said Saudi security analyst Nawaf Obaid Obaid, who has worked closely with the government, said he found 47 cases of Saudis who were dead and injured reported in the kingdom’s newspapers, far lower than Internet totals, and had concluded the overall number of Saudi jihadis in Iraq was in the hundreds.

—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service

PRIMEVAL rage erupted on the streets of Afghanistan’s eastern city of Jalalabad against the desecration of the Holy Quran by the US keepers of the Guantanamo Bay prison. Chants of ‘death to America’ were raised as the infuriated Afghans went on a rampage last week.

Just about the time when Jalalabad, the doorway to the Pakistan-Afghan border at Torkham, was in the grip of mob violence, President Hamid Karzai in Brussels was soliciting Nato Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer for continued military assistance to ensure peace and stability in his country. It would take “my country many years before it could stand on its feet in real terms,” Karzai confessed.

This was a rare instance of an Afghan head of state beseeching foreign military forces to stay on in his country. Traditionally, a greater affront, a more humiliating snub to the tribal Afghan psyche, would be hard to recall. The decade-long Afghan resistance to strong Soviet battalions by rag-tag guerrilla bands under different, even mutually hostile, commanders forms a unique chapter in the history of guerrilla warfare.

The frenzied demonstrators on May 12 were shouting “Allah-o-Akbar” and “America murdabad” – in a fearsome display of long-incubating rage over the presence of unwanted foreign military forces in the land of the Afghans.

But President Karzai wants foreign military forces, whether under the Nato-led ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) or those under exclusive US command, to stay on for an unspecified period of time. For the smooth conduct of the forthcoming parliamentary elections, he will depend on the presence of the foreign military forces.

Quite a paradox is involved in seeking establishment of a democratic process under the aegis of foreign military forces. Might not the Afghan president be overtaxing the patience and emotional resources of his people by conceding so high profile a role to the ‘infidel’ foreign military forces, in virtual occupation of his country? US forces, despite their apparent role as a benign ally and a friendly force, have all but failed to earn the goodwill and trust of the common Afghan.

The Jalalabad and Kabul rallies also saw anti-Pakistan slogans and sentiment. Besides Afghanistan’s historical hostility to Pakistan, could the explosive outbursts along the streets of Kabul and Jalalabad in any way reflect also the Afghans’ anger over the on-going US-Pakistan joint moves along the border between the two countries?

What the Pakistani planners will do well to recall is that even if Afghanistan does not descend to the violent depths of Iraq, Americans would remain as unwelcome foreign occupiers and intruders involving Pakistan indirectly in their campaign.

The extent of devastation inflicted on Afghanistan and its people since December 2001 has been seared into Afghan memory. American operations like Enduring Justice and Anaconda were marked by some of the fiercest bombing raids since Vietnam. The Tora Bora bombings targeting Osama bin Laden’s underground hideouts played havoc not only with the lives of the people but with the ecology of the area.

The number of civilian casualties suffered remains anybody’s guess. It should be in the thousands. President Karzai himself on a number of occasions has publicly expressed his deep concern over the loss of life inflicted on hapless Afghan civilians through the US-led operations.

The question staring the Afghan president in the face arises from the clash, physical and doctrinal, between the continued presence of foreign military forces and the revival of the democratic process.

The violent protests in Jalalabad and Kabul are more than mere straws in the wind. They are firm indicators of the shape of things to come in Afghanistan. A mounting tide of anti-Americanism with strong undercurrents of anti-Pakistan sentiments is visible on the horizon.

—The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army.