Hainuallah’s days in a destitute border village in Pakistan all seemed exactly the same: a trip to the madrasa (religious school), the return home, dinner, and then creeping into bed.
Of course it was boring, says the Pakistani teenager from the border province of Waziristan.
Then one day, a preacher told him about a way out of the boredom — a sure ticket to a paradise filled with voluptuous virgin nymphs and milk and honey running under fruit-laden trees.
”I came to Afghanistan to carry out a suicide attack on Americans,” Hainuallah, who uses only one name, told an Agence France-Presse (AFP) reporter.
”The mullah said it would earn me entry into Paradise where you live with houris [virgin nymphs] and streams of milk and honey forever.”
The dishevelled young man with a few soft hairs on his chin, wearing a grimy traditional shalwar kamiz, was presented to AFP in an underground cell inside the Afghan Intelligence Department in the capital, Kabul.
His interrogators said he had been there for two days, after being arrested in late December 60km away, in the southern town of Ghazni. He was caught wearing an explosives-packed waistcoat, they said.
Looking tired and grubby, Hainuallah calmly delivered his account in front of several intelligence officers. It differed little from one provided earlier by the secret police.
The teen said he had not been manhandled, although he did have a light graze under his left eye.
Another alleged suicide bomber also presented to AFP, who identified himself as Jandol, denied the charges against him, insisting his interrogators forced him to sign a statement of confession.
The nervous Jandol was captured in the eastern city of Jalalabad in late 2006, his interrogator said, alleging the bearded pale-faced man had also been wearing a bomb-filled vest.
Waistcoat
The long, black waistcoat that Hainuallah was caught wearing was similar to one worn by many Afghans and some Pakistan men, and easily available at any local bazaar for a few dollars.
Explosives were packed between the garment’s outer material and its lining. A cable passed from a tiny hole in the lining to a detonator positioned at around waist level. ”My job was to press the button,” said Hainuallah. ”The Americans would’ve gone up.”
When reminded that he too would have been killed, the young man offered a bitter smile, seeming not to grasp totally the risks of his deadly assignment. ”Yes, then I could go to paradise. And if I survived, they said they would pay me big money,” he said.
His story backs up claims by some officials that most suicide bombers are poor and ignorant young Muslims recruited from Islamic schools that do little more than make their students recite the Qur’an.
”Most of the bombers are being recruited from poor and uneducated communities,” said Sayed Ansari, a spokesperson for the intelligence department, which captured more than two dozen would-be suicide bombers last year.
”Some are mentally ill, some are addicted to drugs and most are brainwashed by mullahs,” Ansari said.
Hainuallah said he was given ”special tablets” to ease the tension before his planned attack. ”Once you take one of those tablets, fear leaves you,” he said.
The tablets found in his pocket were yet to be examined in a laboratory, the young man’s interrogator said, asking not to be identified.
Training
Another high-ranking intelligence official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said recruits were trained by ”foreigners” in camps in Pakistan’s tribal areas along the border before being sent to Afghanistan.
The country suffered nearly 120 such attacks in 2006, the bloodiest year since 2001, when the Taliban movement — now leading a vicious insurgency — was ousted from government.
Such bombings were once unheard of in this Central Asian nation: the first is believed to be that which killed legendary anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Massoud on September 9 2001.
President Hamid Karzai last month directly accused Pakistan — a key United States ally in its ”war on terror” — of supporting Taliban-led militants carrying out suicide attacks, which he said were designed to scare him out of office.
In Hainuallah’s case, the former religious student said he was persuaded to join the ”holy fighters” by a friend who introduced him to a local mullah. The mullah tantalised him with tales of ”paradise” before handing him over to a Taliban commander for training.
The commander took him to a walled compound in a village five hours by car from his own, in the Wana district of South Waziristan. Hainuallah recalled driving on bumpy roads in the back of a pick-up truck in October.
He was trained using fake bombs and explosives for several weeks by men who did not introduce themselves but spoke his language, Pashto, spoken by most Taliban, he said.
Then he was handed over to another group — bearded men armed with AK-47s and machine guns — that walked him through the rugged mountains into Afghanistan, to what Hainuallah said he was told was a village outside Ghazni.
More trainers then gave the Pakistani youth tours of the dusty town, which is patrolled by Afghan and International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) soldiers. Once they went on a motorbike, another time in a car. Sometimes they walked.
The men wore police uniforms as they moved through the town, occasionally passing military convoys and government buildings — potential targets.
One day, the young man said, he was handed the deadly waistcoat and shown the detonator. But as he prepared to walk out of the compound to find his target — perhaps an Isaf convoy — intelligence police seized him.
Ansari, the Intelligence Department spokesperson, said the agents and police had been tipped off about Hainuallah and his hideout. ”Just imagine if he had succeeded,” the official said. ”Lots of lives would have been lost.”
Young and impressionable, Hainuallah, instead of finding the paradise he was promised, now faces court and several years in an Afghan jail. — AFP
