It’s chill time in Great Britain….and that doesn’t mean chill out. The chill is the feeling going up and down many spines as details begin to emerge about the young suicide bombers that have walked among them.
Some call them suicide bombers.
Some call them “sleeper cells.”
But most of all you can call them deception — and sudden death:
He was the tallest boy in his class. Hasib Hussain, aged 10, in his final year at Ingram Road Primary School in Holbeck, Leeds, was already showing signs of being a promising athlete and had ambitions to be a professional cricketer. But he was always an unassuming child.
A few years later, however, Hussain was to become one of Britain’s first home-grown suicide bombers at the age of 18. One week ago yesterday, he told his mother he was going to London with friends for the night. Once there, he boarded a No 30 bus and detonated the last of the four bombs that shook the capital.
Yesterday, the multicultural community of Holbeck was coming to terms with the fact that Hussain, known as a quiet boy always overshadowed by his gregarious older brother Imran, was a suicide bomber.
The teenager and his three friends, Shahzad Tanweer, 22, Mohammed Sadique Khan, 30, and a man yet to be formally identified, have been revealed as the bombers responsible for last Thursday’s atrocities….
Hussain, Shazhad and Mohammed Khan met at the district’s Stratford Street mosque. It is increasingly likely that the fourth bomber went there as well to exchange ideas with the friends. They disguised their murderous intent under the cloak of a popular and vibrant community, hidden amid the thousands of Muslims from south Leeds who come here to attend the area’s three mosques and the popular Asian shops.
But the deception, the Telegraph reports, wasn’t just aimed at friends. Or those who sat in the areas where these Devils of Death emerged. The deception extended to their own families:
One of the last conversations he had with his parents was on Wednesday afternoon. He told his mother, Maniza, that he intended to travel down to London the next day with “a few of the lads”. He was casual about his plans, according to a resident, who said he had told Mrs Hussain: “I might go to London for the night and come back tomorrow morning.”
His mother saw him asleep on the sofa a few hours later. She thought nothing of his plans. “He goes to stay with friends two or three times a month,” said the resident.
But two days later, Hussain had not returned. His parents became frantic with worry that he may have been caught up in the disaster. They tried to ring him but there was no answer. Eventually, at 10.20pm on Thursday, they went to the police to report his absence and hand in a picture of him.
The truth later emerged:
Far from being a victim of the bus bombing, he was found to have been the perpetrator. His driving licence and cash cards were found in the wreckage in Tavistock Square. A man who said he was Hasib Hussain’s uncle said yesterday his nephew was not “the type” to be a bomber. “He was a nice lad. He was really nice,”he said. “He wasn’t the type of guy to do it. He wouldn’t do it. I wish in my heart he was still alive.”
A series of setbacks in Hussain’s life may be behind a sudden change from a British Asian who dressed in Western clothes to a religious teenager who wore Islamic garb and only stopped to say salaam to fellow Muslims.
And then the journal-psychoanalysis begins. Yet another bomber taught disbled children.
So what do we make of this?
The war on terror is unlike any war the world has seen. It’s a new kind of guerilla war, marked by mass deception, sudden death, and absolutely no mercy. In typical a war there is usually some specific goal of each side. In this one, the terrorists key goal is to drive up a body count. It doesn’t matter what body — a soldier, a child, your child, your mother, you, a Jew, a Muslim. Just do the bloody gig and increase the horrorific body count for The Cause.
The chilling part of it is: if your neighbor is a suicide bomber, he/she can smile at you in the morning and without a shred of mercy blow you and your infant up at night. Suicide bombers are truly the enemy within. And there are no reliable estimates on how many are lurking in Great Britain…or in the United States.
Up until now, suicide bombing hasn’t been a hallmark of conflicts in Europe and in the United States.
Up till now.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.