The suicide bombers are mad people, they don’t know what they are doing, President Musharraf said recently. The new brand of heartless killers on the lunatic fringe of religious fanatics, of who we have seen a good deal recently, is a threat we really don’t know how to cope with. We are often told these are desperate individuals, dogmatic, irrational and hardened to the core through indoctrination. They are no mercenaries carry out missions assigned to them by their mentors for any monetary reward or material benefit, but are indeed committed to the ‘cause’ to a degree that they are prepared to sacrifice their own lives -- the most precious possession they have. Nevertheless, it is highly doubtful whether most of the ‘soldiers of Allah’, recruited for killing missions, many of them still in their teens, have the mental capacity to comprehend the implications of the ‘dicey business’ in which they are involved. And one is prone to accepting the hard reality that they are mere puppets whose strings are in the hands of those who have a neurotic obsession for reversing the process of history and social change. The key question then is; are we prepared to fight a decisive battle against the onslaught of obscurantist forces by offering a better alternative for peace, progress and prosperity to the people? But if we cannot sell to the people our prescription for a better future, we are doomed to failure in the battle for winning the hearts and minds of the populace.
In recent days the government has claimed some success in pre-empting a suicide attack on the eve of Ashura. According to press reports a gang of suspected terrorists was busted in Karachi when eight persons belonging to banned religious outfits were arrested, and huge quantity of C-4 explosive material, other items used in making suicide bombing jackets and 500 gram of cyanide was seized from them. The government sources claimed that a massive terrorist bid was foiled since the militants were planning to attack the Muharram procession on the 9th and 10th and also target some military installations. According to government sources, another success story is the nailing of a teenager (15-year-old Hafiz-e-Quran) from Dera Ismail Khan who is said to be ‘part of a five-man squad’ assigned to kill Benazir Bhutto. The teenager was reported to have confessed his involvement in the December 27 Liaqat Bagh incident. The interior ministry had earlier claimed that the government has arrested most of the terrorists involved in suicide attacks and is likely to get close to breaking other networks in the wake of information obtained from the detainees. Nonetheless, it is rather early to believe the government word and assume that the backbone of the militant outfits masterminding suicide attacks has been broken.
On the face of it, there appears to be no end in sight to the recruitment drive for suicide killers, in particular from amongst the teenagers of madrassah trained youngsters. Besides the 15-year-old self-confessed terrorist involved in Benazir’s killing. Press reports said that the bomber who blew himself up at the entrance of Peshawar Imambargah was also a teenager, possibly no more than 15, or 16 years old. An only a few days ago a boy of just 12 years of age with explosives strapped to his body was killed in an abortive attack on a military check post in Mohmand Agency. Whether the recruiters have run short of finding mature people to do the job, or find it handy to use young kids for carrying out suicide missions, it is indeed a disturbing phenomenon, since there is a huge reservoir of madrassah crowd to pick potential terrorists and groom them into ‘suicide bombers’. As long as the hard-core militant outfits have the facility to find new recruits there is no way one can see an end in sight to the menace of ‘suicide bombing’.
One may not take solace in the fact that militants resorting to suicide bombing as a political weapon is only the lunatic fringe of the religious fanatics. What we need to take into account is the ‘breeding ground’ for the conversion of fanatics into terrorists, and carry the battle to the devils den.