Word: jihadi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...nothing--not a rock, not even a shrub--for cover. Unaware that they are being watched, the Marines think they are on the hunt. An Arabic scrawl across the screen explains that the Marines are laying a trap for insurgents. The video cuts to a pickup truck, supposedly carrying jihadi fighters, racing along a dirt track through some palm trees. It quickly becomes clear that the trap being set is for the Marines, not the other way around. The next scene shows the Marines on the hill falling and dying, dust kicking up around them from the spray of enemy...
...February general election suggests that few southerners want independence, NRC chairman Anand noted last week. Yet this is no cause for complacency, with unidentified militants growing more sophisticated in the planning and execution of their attacks, and perhaps drawing inspiration-if not yet direct support-from the global jihadi movement. A "conspiracy of silence" surrounds the militants, says Zachary Abuza, a terrorism expert with the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. "No group has taken credit for any attack, tried to discredit their rivals, or stated their platform," he observes...
BIRTH OF A JIHADI Marwan's journey toward suicide murderer began just a few weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Before the war, he had been one of Fallujah's privileged young men: his father's successful business earned enough--even during the difficult years when the West imposed economic sanctions on Iraq--to provide a good life for Marwan and his six brothers and four sisters. In high school, he was an average student but excelled in Koranic studies at the local mosque...
FROM WARRIOR TO "MARTYR" Marwan says waiting is the hardest aspect of a jihadi's transformation into a suicide bomber. Volunteers have to undergo a program to discipline the mind and cleanse the soul. The training, supervised by field commanders and Sunni clerics sympathetic to the insurgency, is mainly psychological and spiritual. Besides the Koran, he says, "I read about the history of jihad, about great martyrs who have gone before me. These things strengthen my will." One popular source of inspiration for suicide bombers is The Lover of Angels, by Abdullah Azzam, one of Osama bin Laden's spiritual...
Toward the end of the cleansing period, a bomber may ask a fellow jihadi, one better versed in religious doctrine, to help with the final spiritual preparation. Marwan says he was asked to mentor a friend intent on martyrdom earlier this year. He expects his final weeks to be a period of euphoria rather than penance. "My friend was happier than I had ever seen him," Marwan says. "He felt he was close to the end of his journey to heaven." (The friend, he says, blew himself up two months ago at a checkpoint manned by Iraqi soldiers near Ramadi...