The Religious Policeman looks into the eyes of a suicide bomber and fills in his back-story. You might have heard of the bomber before. He’s the Saudi kid who somehow survived the detonation of the fuel tanker he drove into Baghdad’s Al-Mansour neighborhood on Christmas Day. (Bystanders were not so luck). Sufficed to say, there aren’t many veteran suicide bombers, so if you’ve heard of one, it’s probably him.

What’s interesting here is the back-story, which RP, as a Saudi well acquainted with the sad tendencies of his country’s youth, serves up:

One day he was just an ordinary Saudi kid whose progress thru the Saudi educational system had been that of a log in a slow-moving river – ponderous, not really getting anywhere fast, certainly not picking anything up on the way. He’d never have mastered geometry in a million years. However he did pick up the bit about the Joooos being liars, and how we are better than non-believers, and Jihad is good, because that kept getting drummed into him. But he doesn’t have a very sophisticated theological or historical understanding, and all those ideas got a bit mixed up. Where was he born? Buraydah, in Qassim. Somehow, I’m not surprised. But no jokes about Qassim today.

So Ahmad graduates from school. He’s not bright enough to get a job in a Call Center, and too stuck-up to work alongside those Indians on the supermarket check-out. He would normally look forward to an existence of PlayStation, satellite TV, McDonalds, and trying to get past the doorman into a “family-only” shopping mall. The nearest he’d come to danger would be driving around with his pals in some old wreck, no seatbelts, failing to complete a hi-speed u-turn and getting wrapped around a lamp-post.

However these days, just across our northern border, there is excitement and adventure, beckoning our no-hopers like a beacon. Iraq.

Ahmad said he had gone to Iraq out of a conviction that he should do something to help his Iraqi brothers though he had not consulted scholars about his plans and in fact ignored the advice of his parents and family.

Just two clarifications there. “Iraqi brothers” means “Iraqi Sunni brothers”, because even with his limited understanding, he knows that he’ll be killing Iraqi Shiites; however he’s a good Sunni and like all other Sunnis, doesn’t approve of [Shiite] chest-slapping and other strange ways. Secondly, it was undoubtedly a “scholar”, some Imam or teacher with Al Qaeda connections, who, far from discouraging him, actually recruited him in the first place. “Listen Ahmad, you’re a good Muslim, there’s nothing for you here, you could go to Iraq and fight for the Muslim Brotherhood, think how much better Paradise will be than what you have now. You’ll die eventually anyway, so why not go sooner and guarantee yourself the place that all Jihadis have in Paradise?” Fair enough, he says.

….he had entered Iraq through Syria with the help of smugglers.

…. He said he was taken to an Al-Qaeda cell in Doura district in the south of Iraq where he was trained to drive an oil tanker.

Now Ahmad is not trained to fire a rocket launcher or a machine gun. That would be a bit beyond him, and anyway, that’s reserved for the Iraqi insurgents who are mostly army trained and certainly plan to “fight another day”. Why go and kill yourself when hordes of stupid Saudi kids are streaming across the border asking for the privilege? The Iraqi insurgents are not daft. So he learns to drive his oil tanker. Then comes the big day.

RP’s conclusion is sobering.

Also, and I’ve no doubt that this opinion will not be universally popular, ten years ago Ahmad and his like would have spent their lives in useless but low-key hedonism, eventually dying a peaceful but definitely lonely death. Iraq has changed all that. For those who believe that invading Iraq has somehow reduced the world’s sum total of terrorists, think of Ahmad, and all those who preceded him, and all those who will follow him.