Building Small Coffins

Last month the Washington Post reported on the efforts of foreigners to join the jihad in Iraq.

When the Americans led the invasion of Iraq, the men of Abu Ibrahim's family gathered in the courtyard of their shared home in the far north of Syria. Ten slips of paper were folded into a plastic bag, and they drew lots. The five who opened a paper marked with ink would go to Iraq and fight. The other five would stay behind.

Abu Ibrahim drew a blank. But remaining in Syria did not mean staying clear of the war. For more than two years, by his own detailed account, the slightly built, shabbily dressed 32-year-old father of four has worked diligently to shuttle other young Arab men into Iraq, stocking the insurgency that has killed hundreds of U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqis.

BAGHDAD -- A suicide bomber in an explosives-laden SUV killed at least 27, including an American soldier, late this morning in the deadliest insurgent attack in more than two months.

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Many, if not most of the dead were children loitering and playing near U.S. soldiers at an impromptu checkpoint in Baghdad al-Jadida, a lower-middle class residential district populated by Shiites, Sunnis and Christians.

Near the charred, shrapnel-scarred bombing scene women draped in black abayas wept as they walked by, and dazed children with tears in their eyes wandered amid bits of metal and bloody human remains. A pile of children's slippers lay on the street.

"My cousin Mustafa was killed," said 11-year-old Mohammed Nouredin, gesturing toward a blackened engine block in the middle of the street. "That is part of his bicycle. His coffin was sent to Najaf," the traditional burial ground for Iraqi Shiites.

A Reuters news agency television cameraman at the scene shortly after the bombing said the vehicle blew up in between houses, reducing parts of three houses to rubble. Women in the street screamed in anger and sorrow near pools of blood

Witness Mohammed Ali Hamza said U.S. forces had gone to the southeastern district of Al-Jedidah to warn residents to stay indoors because of reports of a car bomb in the area.

At the nearby Kindi hospital, hundreds of distraught parents mingled in blood-soaked hallways shouting and screaming as they looked for their children, many of whom were badly mutilated.

"Most of them are children. The Americans were handing out sweets at the time of the attack," a duty policeman at the Kindi Hospital said.

"We have received the bodies of 24 children aged between 10 and 13," said an official in charge of the morgue.

Abu Hamed whose 12-year-old son Mohammed was killed, said: "I was at home. I heard the explosion. I rushed outside to find my son. I only found his bicycle."

He found his son in the hospital morgue.

"I recognized him from his head. The rest of the body was completely burnt."

Among the young bodies at the morgue, some headless or missing limbs, two children still clutched blue chocolate wrappers.

The attack stunned the impoverished east Baghdad neighborhood of mostly Shiite Muslims and Christians, reports the AP.

Hassan Mohammed, whose 13-year-old son Alaa also died, swore at insurgents for attacking civilians.

"Why do they attack our children? They just destroyed one U.S. Humvee, but they killed dozens of our children," he said as women screamed, slapped their faces and beat themselves over the head.

"What sort of a resistance is this? It's a crime," he added.

At Kindi hospital, one distraught woman swathed in black sat cross-legged outside the operating room. "May God curse the mujahedeen and their leader," she cried as she pounded her own head in grief, reports the AP.

I didn't need the reminders contained in most reports of this incident to recall a similar one from when I was in Baghdad, and terrorists struck at the opening of a sewage treatment plant:

For many Iraqi children, a car bombing or mortar strike isn't a tragedy. It's the biggest excitement of the week.

They are drawn by billowing smoke, police sirens and the certainty that journalists will soon arrive to interview witnesses. The children flood to the scene, pick through debris, wave to television cameras and interact with the U.S. troops who show up to clear the wreckage.

So it was Thursday when scores of children rushed to the site of a suicide car bombing in the working-class Amal district of Baghdad. They marveled at the crater left by the bomb, practiced their English on troops and rode bicycles around the American tanks. They accepted candy from a soldier.

Then a second suicide bomber barreled down the street toward the U.S. and Iraqi forces ? and the children who surrounded them. And then a third. The children were no longer observers of the attack, but its victims.

"I saw dead bodies scattered like sheep," said Rashid Salih, 67, describing the scene where his grandson was killed.

Children's shoes, clothing and crumpled red bicycles decorated with feathers littered the street.

Iraqi health officials said 35 of the 42 fatalities from Thursday's blasts were children.

"What really hurt me was that most of the killed or injured people were children," said Moyad Ismail, 25, who saw the U.S. soldier handing out candy minutes before the second explosion. "The children were making a ring around the soldiers."

The disaster sent panic through the neighborhood. By Thursday afternoon, nearby Yarmouk Hospital was overrun with parents roaming the hallways and makeshift emergency rooms, looking for their children.

At the morgue, stunned mothers and fathers left with only body parts to take home and bury.

And here's another event from my time in Baghdad - an election day story

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq's interior minister said Monday that insurgents used a handicapped child as one of the suicide bombers who launched attacks on election day.

Falah al-Naqib told reporters in Baghdad that 38 attacks were carried out on polling stations in Iraq on Sunday and that one of the suicide bombings was carried out by a disabled child.

"A handicapped child was used to carry out a suicide attack on a polling site," al-Naqib said. "This is an indication of what horrific actions they are carrying out."

He gave no other details about the attack, but police at the scene of one the Baghdad blasts said the bomber appeared to have Down's Syndrome.

Eye witnesses said (and I'm quoting one of my colleagues; a dentist who lives there) "the poor victim was so scared when ordered to walk to the searching point and began to walk back to the terrorists. In response the criminals pressed the button and blew up the poor victim almost half way between their position and the voting center's entrance".

I couldn't believe the news until I met another guy from that neighborhood who knows the family of the victim. The guy was reported missing 5 days prior to elections' day and the family were distributing posters that specified his descriptions and asking anyone who finds him to contact them.

When a relative of mine (who has a mental handicap due to an Rh conflict at birth) told me a month ago that a group of men in a car tried to kidnap him as he was standing in front of the institution he periodically visits to get medicine and support waiting for his brother; I thought that he was imagining the whole story.

He said that they tried to force him into the car telling him not to be afraid and that they're from the "mujahideen and not going to hurt him". My relative, despite his handicap was moved by his survival instinct and managed to run away.

After I heard the other story, I began to connect between the two stories and to consider my cousin's story as a true one that uncovered a new miserable war technique that can come only from the sickest minds.

A Shia Muslim from the Sadr City slums of Baghdad, Ahmed had joined the new Iraqi National Guard, only to be killed in his patrol car when a bomb planted by insurgents exploded.

The next day, as his family took his coffin for burial in the holy Shia city of Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, they were stopped at what purported to be a police checkpoint near the town of Iskandaria and ordered out of their minibus.

Insurgents wearing fake police uniforms shot and beheaded six of the mourners, including Ahmed's mother. Then they ripped Ahmed's body out of the coffin and decapitated him too.

The bombers are recruited from Sunni communities, smuggled into Iraq from Syria after receiving religious indoctrination and then quickly bundled into cars or strapped with explosive vests and sent to their deaths, the officials told the AP. The young men are not so much fighters as human bombs - a relatively small but deadly component of the Iraqi insurgency.

"The foreign fighters are the ones that most often are behind the wheel of suicide car bombs or most often behind any suicide situation," said U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Don Alston, spokesman for the multinational force in Iraq.

There have been a few exceptions.

On election day, Jan. 30, a mentally handicapped Iraqi boy wearing a suicide vest attacked a polling station.

In the interest of complete fairness, we'll return to our first story and let the killers explain themselves in their own words:

His father was a Sufi Muslim, devoted to a tolerant, mystical tradition of Islam. But Abu Ibrahim said he was born a rebel, gravitating early in life to the other end of the spectrum of Islamic belief.

Salafism, or "following the pious forefathers," is a fundamentalist, sometimes militant strain of the faith grounded in turning back the clock to the time of the prophet Muhammad.

In the Syrian countryside north of Aleppo where Abu Ibrahim grew up and married, his fundamentalist impulses took their present shape when he met "a group of young men through my wife's family who spoke to me the true words of Islam. They told me Sufism was forbidden and the Shiites are infidels."

A year later, he went to Saudi Arabia, a kingdom founded on Wahhabism, a puritanical form of Islam in the Salafi wing.

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Abu Ibrahim credited Zarqawi with revitalizing the insurgency, especially since October, when he pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader. Abu Ibrahim said that union helped cement an alliance among several resistance groups in Iraq that formed a joint treasury.

"Six months ago, Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden were different," he said. "Osama did not consider the killing of Shiites as legitimate. Zarqawi did that. Anyone -- Christian, Jew, Sunni, Shiites -- whoever cooperates with the Americans can be killed. It's a holy war."