Posted on 10/17/2001 3:02:17 AM PDT by sarcasm
Douab, Afghanistan -- A cherub-faced foot soldier for Osama bin Laden and radical Islam, Obaidur Rahman paused to consider whether more than 6,000 people deserved to die when hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside last month.
"There were no innocent people in those skyscrapers," said Rahman, with chilling earnestness.
The hijackers who carried out last month's catastrophic attacks are dead. Their accomplices are under arrest or on the run. Yet here, in a remote prison in rebel-controlled northern Afghanistan, Rahman and other inmates provided clues to their thinking.
For these Islamic militants, the guilt or innocence of Americans and hundreds of other foreigners killed in the attack is no issue.
In a world they view as a battleground between believers and infidels, there are no shades of complicity, only good versus evil. The Sept. 11 assault on the United States was a victory in a war, and an occasion only for rejoicing.
"When I heard the news, I was happy. I thought, Muslims are becoming strong," Rahman said, fingering a string of brown prayer beads, his legs shackled in thick iron manacles.
And if his fellow Muslim extremists are responsible for mailing anthrax-treated letters to U.S. journalists and lawmakers? "All the better," he said.
If Rahman, 22, shows little ability to parse guilt and innocence, it is because the world as he knows it has been sharply divided into believers and non-believers ever since he can remember.
Born in Yemen, on the Arabian peninsula, to parents who were farmers, Rahman attended an Islamic religious school. There, he was imbued with the fiery teachings of Abdul Majid Zandani, the head of Yemen's Iman University who advocates a return to an austere, early brand of Islam. Rahman and other students were urged to wage war against infidels for the survival of their faith.
First, however, they had to go to Afghanistan for military training.
Few exhortations were needed. While most non-Muslims know little, if anything, about Afghanistan, Rahman and many other Muslim youth viewed it as a shining symbol of empowerment.
In the 1980s, up to 25,000 Arab and Muslim young men had answered the call to converge on Afghanistan and help expel the occupying Soviet Red Army. With the aid of Pakistan, the United States and Saudi Arabia, they succeeded brilliantly.
Ten years later, Afghanistan beckoned another generation of Muslim youth -- this time not to fight Soviet soldiers but to help establish "pure" Islamic states worldwide.
"There was no question of becoming a farmer like my father. My decision was to fight pagans," Rahman said.
With the financial help of local businessmen, Rahman says, he traveled first to Karachi, Pakistan, then to a military training camp operated by bin Laden's al-Qaida network near the Afghan city of Khost. After he learned to shoot a Kalashnikov automatic rifle, he was deployed alongside his religious kinsmen, the ruling Taliban militia, to fight the opposition Northern Alliance.
After only three months, he was captured. He was just 17 years old.
Five years later, Rahman's contempt for the United States is unabated, his scorn rooted in what he says are America's evil policies toward the Islamic world -- its persecution of Iraq, its support of Israelis over Palestinians and the presence of 5,000 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the site of the Prophet Mohammed's birth and death.
The ambition that burns inside remains unquenched: to wage holy war against infidels, free Islamic countries from the grip of U.S. influence and help fundamentalist Muslims from the Philippines to Chechnya establish true Islamic governments. The source of his inspiration is simple, he said: "The Prophet Mohammed and the Koran tell us to wage jihad against pagan peoples."
Rahman believes ordinary Americans are guilty because they are accomplices of anti-Muslim policies carried out in their name. But not all of his fellow prisoners believe the calculus is quite that straightforward.
Mistakes have been made, said Salhuddin Khalid, a 27-year-old Pakistani who also fought on the side of the Taliban until he was taken captive by Northern Alliance forces five years ago.
The deaths of at least 229 Kenyans and Tanzanians in car-bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 were an "accident," the bespectacled Khalid said. Twelve Americans were killed in the blasts, which U.S. officials say were masterminded by bin Laden.
As for last month's attacks, Khalid said the complicity of the victims in anti-Islamic policies was insignificant compared to the responsibility of the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military.
Still, he insisted, the deaths of Americans in the Twin Towers and on hijacked planes were merely the moral equivalent of a landmark event in another war. "Lots of innocent people were killed by the atomic bomb that America dropped on Hiroshima," he said.
In the deadly serious world of Rahman and Khalid, the end justifies the means. Both said they would once again join the holy war if they are ever released.
At that time, they said, no exceptions would be made for unsympathetic Muslims, let alone acquaintances who fall on the wrong side of their rigid view of life and pious mission.
That was evident as Rahman's visitor prepared to leave the prison and asked him a final question, this one hypothetical.
If he were piloting a hijacked civilian airliner bound for an attack on the World Trade Center and were told that his visitor, an American, were working on the 82nd floor of the skyscraper, would he still crash the airplane into the building?
"Yes, of course."
"Nothing personal, right?"
"Right."
Hmm. Well I seem to be straight now, but I must have been suffering some kind of flashback to think that crap was worth replying to in the first place. My bad, I guess.
Possibly, but those who would hold that view are of no consequence to the status of my blessings, or anything else for that matter.
Yeah. Most of those are on Oprah.
What? You mean Richard Gere was wrong when he said we just need to love them?
The punishment that is fit for these pigs is not imprisonment: it is gruesome torture followed by a slow death.
This is what we are fighting; and we will have to fight dirty.
--Boris
My thoughts exactly!
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