Editorial: Creating Bin Ladens
2 April 2003
This week, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak warned that the war against Iraq would create “a hundred Bin Ladens”; so bitter are Arabs and Muslims about the US and UK over Iraq. Others made the same prediction even before the invasion started.
It is already beginning to come true, as our correspondent Mohammed Alkhereiji noted in his report from Amman in yesterday’s edition. Busloads of volunteers are making their way from the Jordanian capital to Baghdad. Many, as he pointed out, are Iraqi exiles heading home, eager to join up and fight the Americans and British — an estimated 5,700 according to the Iraqi Embassy in Amman. But there are others from elsewhere in the Arab world — Algerians, Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Yemenis — all determined to fight. Their numbers are growing rapidly.
Images of bodies, of injured children, or homes bombed have raised Arab fury to fever point. Even more volunteers can now be guaranteed to head for Baghdad following the two bloody bomb attacks on Baghdad markets and, on Monday, the killing by US troops of seven women and children in a vehicle at a checkpoint near Najaf.
This latter tragedy is another nail in the coffin of Washington’s plans to convince the Iraqis that they are not its target. It will also further stoke up Arab and Muslim anger against the US. The killing may have been an accident, but the seven women and children would be alive today but for Bush’s invasion; and that is how most Arabs will see it. As for the report from a Washington Post correspondent that in fact 10 people were killed and that US troops fired without giving sufficient warning, it, not the official US version, is going to be believed; Arabs are in the mood to believe the worst of the US at the moment.
Such is the level of hatred and bitterness that it comes as no surprise that many of the Arab volunteers heading to Baghdad talk about becoming suicide bombers. The Iraqis say they now have 4,000 of them in the country. The number is probably an exaggeration but that there are would-be suicide bombers can be in no doubt.
The most astounding aspect of this bitterness toward the US and UK, and the willingness of young Arabs to die fighting them, is that most of them probably never gave Iraq a second thought a few weeks ago. They were anything but militant; they have been turned into militants by events. And in the wider Muslim world, the response is the same. In Pakistan, militancy is again on the rise, fed by pubic fury with the war; outlawed groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba are making a comeback under new guises. In Iran too, hardly Iraq’s best friend, there is deep anger over the invasion. People do not drive vehicles loaded with gallons of petrol into the walls of the UK Embassy in Tehran, as happened yesterday, out of mere annoyance.
Whether this intense level of Arab and Muslim animosity toward the US and UK will continue in a post-Saddam Iraq that is allied to Washington remains to be seen; but there is no reason to believe it will subside. Arabs and Muslims do not trust President Bush. They do not trust his promise to keep Iraq united; they do not trust his promise of a road map to a Palestinian state. A legion of terrorists is being created by this war; and it is the US and the West that will reap this whirlwind.
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