Word: bomber
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...Afghans the worst suicide bombers in the world? That's the conclusion of U.S. academic Brian Glyn Williams, an assistant professor of Islamic history at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. In a fascinating recent essay published on the website of conservative think tank The Jamestown Foundation, Williams analyzes the success rate of suicide attacks in Afghanistan over the past two years. Though attacks are getting more frequent, Williams found that more than four out of every 10 attempted suicide bombings in Afghanistan kills only the attacker. "Such unusual bomber-to-victim death statistics are, of course, heartening both for coalition...
Then there's plain ineptitude. Afghan police and military personnel say that the young men the Taliban recruit to be suicide bombers are regularly "deranged, retarded, mentally unstable or on drugs," according to Williams. That's a view shared by Waheed Muzhda, an Afghan political analyst. "The suicide bombers don't have enough knowledge of how and exactly when to detonate themselves," Muzhda, a former foreign ministry official during the Taliban regime, told TIME. "Most of them are not educated. It has happened many times that these suicide bombers' explosives detonate before they reach the target. The result...
United Nations officials in Kabul also told Williams that some young Afghan men become suicide bombers as a way to make money for their families. There is anecdotal evidence that a few such men deliberately detonate their deadly payloads so as to minimize the number of people they might kill. Officials point to a suicide bomber who blew himself up in the toilet of a Kabul Internet cafe in 2005 rather than in the cafe itself. The recent recruitment of young boys - this year Afghan officials stopped a six-year-old before he could detonate himself - is also behind...
Last week, at the Directorate of National Intelligence in Kabul, I met a failed suicide bomber. Arrested two weeks before in Jalalabad, preparing to assassinate the governor of Nangahar Province, Farhad was setting outside of Pakistan's Waziristan Province for the first time...
...Driving around Kabul I came across a British patrol that had just been attacked by a suicide bomber in a Toyota Corolla, wounding two. They were lucky, and it never made the news. I wondered how bad the rest of Afghanistan is, and, as I usually do when I get to a new city, I casually asked around where I could go and couldn't go. Forget Kandahar, I was told. Even heavy armor is vulnerable to the new improvised explosive devices showing up in Afghanistan. Which means that you can't drive to Herat. Nor can you set foot...