Suicide bombers - the worst kind of evil

How do you possibly combat such
radicalised hatred?

Do you ever have those moments where you read or hear something that takes you totally by surprise?

In fact, sometimes I’ll hear something along similar lines to something else I’ve heard a million times before, only it suddenly resonates with me on a much deeper level.

This happened to me yesterday morning.

My morning routines are fairly routine.  I get up, have a shower, read my bible, pray, eat some cereal while watching TV and head off to work.  The entire routine takes anywhere from 40 – 60 minutes.

Yesterday morning I was in a weird state because I slept through my alarm, so things were happening at an accelerated rate.  I was barely paying attention to the TV when suddenly a news story tore through my malaise.

The summary:

“A twin suicide bombing attack killed 23 people Wednesday in a car park crammed with vehicles supplying a major NATO base in Afghanistan's southern province of Kandahar.”

Now, there are suicide bombings in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan almost every day.  Usually, I’m ashamed to say, the announcement of such events passes over me.  Tragically, I view these ‘events’ as merely “business as usual.”

For some reason though, this headline made me sit up and take notice.  I almost wish I hadn’t because the details are horrible.

“A suicide bomber on a motorcycle struck first and as a crowd gathered to help the victims, a second bomber walked into their midst and set off explosives strapped to his body.”

Even now as I re-read that sentence I find it hard to grapple with.

That said, this is possibly the worst tactics I’ve heard yet.  People die in an explosion and then someone else blows themselves up to kill the ‘helpers’.


How the hell can you fight against or combat an enemy so relentlessly evil.  What possible defence is there against people willing to blow themselves up for their so-called cause?

“Controlling the suicide attacks is really a hard job.  The only two options are, first, to have really strong intelligence, even try to infiltrate the Taliban to get information about suicide bombers. Second, to raise awareness among families and not let the enemies use their children,” says Ahmad Javid Faisal, a spokesman for the Kandahar governor’s office

It sounds a little hopeless to me.  Because stopping a mindset is basically impossible.

Radicalised religious terrorism is one of the scariest concepts imaginable.  Statistics are difficult to find, but it seems the number of suicide bombings in Iraq is dropping. 

According to the faultless source of knowledge, Wikipedia1, there were just 44 suicide bombings in Iraq throughout 2010 compared to more than 400 in 2007.

It seems that people willing to criticise the war effort in Afghanistan and Iraq are often a little simplistic.  To simply say ‘we shouldn’t be there’, I reckon, ignores the story above.

These are countries where people are willing to blow themselves up and kill innocent people.  This simply cannot be tolerated.

What NATO’s presence in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan actually looks like is certainly fair game for discussion.  After all, as the quote earlier from local police shows, the current efforts aren’t eradicating this kind of terrorism.

But to simply call for troops to leave because it’s too hard?

I reckon that’s horrendously unfair to the 22 people who died in yesterday’s attack.

We must help these people.

So let’s stop saying “let’s leave” and let’s start discussing “how can we best help?”

NOTES

1: Sarcasm alert!