“There is no jihad. We are just instruments of death,”

- Former suicide bomber Ahmed Abdullah al-Shaya,

In context:

Al-Shayea says his change of heart began when he was visited by a cleric at al-Ha’ir Prison in Riyadh following his repatriation from Iraq.

He says he put two questions to the cleric: Was the jihad for which he traveled to Iraq religiously sanctioned? And were the edicts inciting such action correct in saying the militants should not inform their parents or government of their intentions?

No and no, came the reply.

“I realized that all along I was wrong,” al-Shayea told The Associated Press in a two-hour interview at a Riyadh hotel before returning to an Interior Ministry compound that serves as a sort of halfway house for ex-jihadists rejoining Saudi society.

“There is no jihad. We are just instruments of death,” he said.

His head and hands were wrapped in bandages and his uncovered face looked like bubbled tar.

The young Saudi man told investigators this month that he wants revenge against the Iraqi terrorist network that sent him on the deadly mission that he survived.

Ahmed Abdullah al-Shaya, 18, told Iraqi investigators during an interrogation early this month that he was recruited to drive a car rigged with explosives to Baghdad and blow it up.

He said the objective was "to kill the Americans, policemen, national guards and the American collaborators."

But Shaya said he was injured even before he went on the mission when insurgents detonated a truck bomb he was supposed to leave at a target site.
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Shaya's video statement describes the journey of a young man ready to die in his zeal to drive Americans from Arab lands.

Shaya says he left Saudi Arabia for Syria in late October, right after the start of the holy month of Ramadan. A smuggler he knew as Abu Mohammed took him over the border into Iraq and into the hands of other Islamic extremists who call themselves mujahedin, or holy warriors.

In Iraq, he traveled first to Qaim, then Rawa, and finally to the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, where he spent 1? months with like-minded Muslims from Morocco, Jordan, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen and Macedonia. Most, however, were Iraqis, he says, gesturing with his gauze-wrapped arms.
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Shaya moved to Baghdad in December to prepare for his final mission, which he expected to be as the suicide pilot of a bomb-laden car.

But on Dec. 24, he was given a preliminary job of driving a butane-gas delivery truck that was rigged with bombs. It wasn't supposed to be a suicide mission.

"They asked me to take the truck near a concrete block barrier before turning to the right and leaving it there," he says. "There, somebody will pick up the truck from you," they told him.

"But they blew me up in the truck," he says.
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Shaya told the interrogators that he regretted his mission now.

"I want the Iraqi people to live in peace," he says, and he can no longer support Osama bin Laden because "he is killing Muslims."

As for the Zarqawi network that sent him on the mission that left him permanently disfigured and in prison, he says, "I want revenge for what they have done to me."

Can a man of such unique experience be redeemed? Back to today's story:

At the time he was first approached to join the insurgency, al-Shayea was already becoming a devout Muslim in his ultraconservative town of Buraida. He grew a beard, prayed five times a day and stopped listening to Arabic love songs he used to enjoy. He was 19 and jobless.

Then he was contacted by a school friend whom he doesn’t identify.

“My friend started telling me about Iraq, how Muslims are getting killed there and how we should go there for jihad,” said al-Shayea. “He told me there were fatwas (edicts) and DVDs issued by Saudi and Iraqi clergymen that called for jihad.”

“We didn’t think of jihad as something that would lead to our death. It was a fight against occupiers,” said al-Shayea.

Finally the friend told him he was going to Iraq, and invited al-Shayea to join him.

He was told to shave his beard and pack Western clothes to avoid looking like a would-be jihadist. He got a passport and an airline ticket to Syria. And he managed to save $1,600 — travel fees, he was told, that would go to smugglers, weapons training and al-Qaida’s coffers.

On a cool November night toward the end of the holy month of Ramadan, he donned a black T-shirt and jeans and told his parents he was going camping in the desert with his friends.

He and his friend flew to Syria, a favored transit point for Iraq-bound fighters because Syria doesn’t ask visiting Arabs for visas, and its 360-mile border with Iraq is thinly policed. A network of al-Qaida operatives sheltered him in Damascus, Aleppo and the border town of Abu-Kamal, and about two weeks later he and 23 other men were smuggled into Iraq.

Four Iraqi teenagers guided them to the Iraqi border town of al-Qaim. They saw Syrian border guards in the distance who fired in the air. “They didn’t try to stop us. We were already in Iraq,” al-Shayea said.

At al-Qaim, the men were split into two groups. Al-Shayea said his group of 12 met an al-Qaida leader who had direct links with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida chief in Iraq who was later killed by a U.S. airstrike. He took the men’s money and gave each $100.

“Then he asked us a question: ’Those who want to carry out martyrdom (suicide) attacks, raise your hands,”’ said al-Shayea. “No one did.”

Al-Shayea’s group then spent a week at the Sunni fundamentalist stronghold of Rawa before al-Shayea and another Saudi man were taken to Ramadi and finally Baghdad.

Al-Shayea met his new “emir,” or leader, an Iraqi who told him his first assignment was to take a fuel tanker to a Baghdad neighborhood to be collected by others.

“I felt scared. I didn’t know Baghdad at all, and I also didn’t know how to drive heavy vehicles,” he said.

Also, he says, he was never told that the truck would contain 26 tons of butane gas, rigged to explode outside the Jordanian Embassy.

“That evening, we performed the last prayer of the day and had dinner — a dish of chicken and aubergines,” said al-Shayea. “The emir gave me a crude map of my route.”

Two al-Qaida militants drove with al-Shayea, but then jumped out 1,000 yards from where he was supposed to park the truck and fled in a waiting car.

“I felt something bad was about to happen,” he said.

The farther he drove, the more nervous he got until, 60 feet from the embassy, an explosion — believed triggered from afar — turned the back of the tanker into a fireball.

“I saw the fire and I started to scream and pray,” he said.

“I looked around me and I saw everything had melted. My hands had turned black. I jumped from the window and started running without thinking of what I was doing.”

The blast killed nine people.

Thinking he was an innocent victim and a Shiite by his fake ID card, passers-by took al-Shayea to a Shiite-run hospital. There he kept silent for several days until he finally told his doctors the truth.

The world’s first encounter with al-Shayea was on footage of his interrogation which was sent to Arab TV stations. Back in Buraida, his parents saw their son, face charred, head heavily bandaged, but alive. They were stunned. They had been notified he was dead and had held a wake for him.

Al-Shayea said he told his interrogators where to find a senior al-Zarqawi aide in Baghdad, revealed all he knew about al-Qaida, and denounced al-Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden as killers of innocents.

He says he hasn’t seen nor heard from the friend who accompanied him since they parted soon after entering Iraq.

Today his hair has grown back, he sports a thick black beard and he can move without difficulty. He credits the medical care he received, including 30 operations, at the hospital of U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison.

He says that when he was handed over to the Americans a couple of days after his interrogation at the Iraqi Interior Ministry, he was scared because he had heard about the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

“But the care with which the American officers carried me down to the car when they came to take me made me relax,” said al-Shayea. “One spoke Arabic and tried to put me at ease.”

“The aim is to reform the youths, to listen to them and talk to them,” said Ahmed Jailan, one of the clerics. “We also try to instill a sense of hope in them by telling them they still have the chance to make up for what they lost if they follow true Islam.”
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Saudi authorities don’t say how many have passed through their rehabilitation program, but they are thought to number several hundred, including returnees from Guantanamo.

While 's story might be unique, others are similar:

A suicide bomber captured before he could blow himself up in a Shiite mosque late last week claimed he was kidnapped, beaten and drugged by insurgents who forced him to take on the mission. The U.S. military on Sunday said its medical tests indicated he was telling the truth.

In a confession broadcast on state television Friday, Mohammed Ali, who claimed to be Saudi-born, said he was kidnapped and coerced to agree to the mission. He said he fled after another suicide attacker killed at least 12 worshipers Friday at a mosque in the northern city of Tuz Khormato.

Results from medical tests on the young man were "consistent with his story and characterization of his treatment," Col. Billy Buckner, a U.S. military spokesman said.

The suicide attack that was performed on an election center in one of Baghdad's districts (Baghdad Al-Jadeedah) last Sunday was performed using a kidnapped "Down Syndrome" patient.

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 watched a car bomb burn at a police check point in Tall 'Afar, the explosion killing no one but the people inside the car -- a man, a woman and two young children.

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

A suicide attacker steered a car packed with explosives toward U.S. soldiers giving away toys to children outside a hospital in central Iraq on Thursday, killing at least 31 people. Almost all of the victims were women and children, police said.
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"It was an explosion at the gate of the hospital," a woman who had wounds on her face and legs told the AP. "My children are gone. My brother is gone."

With no room left at the hospital, emergency workers rushed victims to hospitals in Baghdad, about 15 miles to the north. And when the hospital morgue was full, the workers were forced to place the dead in the hospital garden so family members could find them.