The blow-back of war
Whilst Gaddafi has been hogging the headlines for weeks in Libya, much else has been happening amid the continuing blow-back of the “War on terror”. No-one much likes to cast back to George Bush’s infamous coining of the phrase. But as we head to the tenth anniversary of 9/11 the landscape – particularly threaded from Pakistan in the East, to Nigeria in the West – is not pretty.
Over the weekend, whilst Colonel Gaddafi’s family was packing their bags in Tripoli, there was the a most blood-curdling suicide bomb attack on the Iraqi capital’s biggest mosque, Um al-Qura. You see the great domed building dominating the skyline as you speed along many of Baghdad’s urban freeways. This was a high profile Al Qaida operation which claimed the lives of 29 people, including a high profile Member of the Iraqi Parliament. The Sunni al-Qaida movement claimed the bombing – a completely sacrilegious act in the holiest time in the muslim calendar. Some 250 people were killed in such bombings in Iraq in July. On average in August, there were eleven attacks a day. Ninety people were killed in 43 co-ordinated bombings on August 15th – more than 300 were injured.
Further east, attacks and suicide bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan are so numerous that news of them barely surfaces in the West.
But it is in Nigeria on Friday that one of the most alarming incidents occurred. Suicide bombing has been a stranger to West Africa. Not any more. The radical muslim movement Boko Haram killed 18 people in a suicide attack on the UN headquarters in the Nigerian capital of Abuja. This was the country’s second ever suicide attack – the first was in July against a police station.
That suicide bombing has come to this vast and populous nation, in an area of the world where no such activity had ever been seen until this year, is alarming indeed. Paul Rogers of Bradford University points out that 140 people have been killed by police in Nigeria this year alone as the authorities try to destroy Boko Haram (literally in English “Education is Prohibited”). The movement’s leader, Mohammed Yusuf, was captured by the Nigerian army and killed. Rogers suggests that tactics aimed at trying to contain the violence may even be provoking it.
I haven’t even mentioned Yemen and Somalia, where suicide bombing has also become endemic. Everyone reading this blog is old enough to have lived in a world where such attacks were completely unheard of. Perhaps the most fitting memorial to 9/11 might prove to be a thorough analysis of how and why this devastating mechanism of war is taking root with such speed. Did anyone imagine that so many people would ever be found to demolish themselves in such a cause?