Cyberstrike, James Barrington [short story to read .TXT] 📗

when my men kicked down this door and they saw what he was wearing they took him down straight away.’

‘Good decision.’ Montana was looking at a different piece of paper and comparing the image printed on it with what he was seeing.

‘That’s not al-Baghdadi,’ the Iraqi lieutenant said. ‘He’s a much younger man, but he does look familiar.’

‘He should. Unless he’s got a double, that’s Abū Ayyub al-Masri. Until about ten minutes ago, he was ISI’s Minister of War and the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. He’s been on the wanted list for months, so this is a real good result.’

Montana led the way into the other upstairs room, where another dead terrorist lay in an untidy heap on the dusty floor. He hooked the toe of his boot under the shoulder of the corpse and flipped the dead man onto his back.

‘And I’m sure this is Abū Omar al-Baghdadi,’ he said, holding the sheet of paper next to the face of the corpse, ‘or at least this is the man in this photograph.’

Montana was right on both counts. Ten minutes later he called for extraction of his men and also a couple of trucks to haul away some of the stuff they’d discovered inside the property.

The raid was considered a massive success by the coalition forces. At a subsequent press conference in Baghdad the deaths of Abū Omar al-Baghdadi and Abū Ayyub al-Masri were hailed as a ‘most significant blow’ to the insurgency. As well as the two high-value targets, al-Baghdadi’s son had also been killed in the attack and one of the two women who had survived was al-Masri’s wife. Even more significantly, the coalition forces seized computers that had been used to communicate with Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri by email, producing an intelligence windfall of massive importance in combating the rebels.

But the mood of the press conference was tainted by the knowledge that in the hours after the raid at Tikrit, a series of reprisal bombings orchestrated by the ISI had taken place in the Shi’ite areas of Baghdad and had killed almost sixty people.

25 April 2010

Iraq

Early on the following Sunday morning, the Sharia Minister of the ISI, Abū al-Walid Abd al-Wahhab al-Mashadani, admitted on a militant website that the two leaders had been killed by enemy forces, but did his best to downplay the damage this had done to the organisation, claiming it was nothing more than an ‘illusory victory’, though he did not trouble to explain what that expression was supposed to mean.

What al-Mashadani didn’t say was that shockwaves had been driven through the whole of the ISI by the attack on the safe house, a house that had proved to be anything but safe. And while the insurgents believed themselves more than capable of facing the coalition forces in ground combat, the total air superiority enjoyed by the Americans was something they had no way of combating.

What they really needed to do, the ISI leaders admitted to themselves after the statement on the website had gone live, was to hit back at the Americans – and at the British, who had left the country almost exactly a year earlier – in a way that could not be countered by their military hardware. In short, they needed to move the battleground from the war-torn deserts of Iraq and Syria and away from the military superiority possessed by the West and into the heartlands of the countries of their enemies, which meant onto the streets of New York, Washington and London. They needed to change both the location of the battlefield and the type of combat, the glorious success of the World Trade Center attacks and individual acts of violence on the streets of Europe now almost forgotten. Instead of facing aircraft and tanks, the forces of radical Islam would cut a swathe through the soft underbelly of the enemy and hit the weakest and easiest of all targets, a target that was completely unprepared and utterly unable to defend itself: the unarmed civilian population.

And there was one very obvious way they could do that. It wasn’t even a new idea.

In November 1980, during the Iran–Iraq War, a thirteen-year-old Iranian boy named Mohammad Hossein Fahmideh lashed RPGs – rocket propelled grenades – to his body and detonated them and himself under the belly of an Iraqi tank. Fahmideh was hailed by the Iranian leadership as both a national hero and an inspiration for others to emulate.

That was considered to be the first istishhad attack in the modern era, the Arabic word translating as ‘martyrdom’ or the ‘death of a martyr’. Originally the word implied that the martyr was a victim, a person killed because of his or her religious beliefs or, quite often, a refusal to change to or to accept a different religion, but increasingly the term is now used to suggest an act of heroism and self-sacrifice. A martyr who kills himself in this way, by inflicting damage upon his perceived enemy as a consequence of his own death, is given the honorific title shahid.

In the West such actions are commonly referred to as suicide bombings, but in Arabic they are known as al-amaliyat al-istishhadiya, or ‘martyrdom operations’, because classical Islamic law forbids Muslims to commit suicide. Perhaps surprisingly to most non-Muslims, there is a body of Islamic law that governs the conduct of istishhad actions and operations and other aspects of warfare and jihad. In fact, embarking upon a jihad – the word translating literally as a ‘struggle’, though it is normally thought in the West to mean a ‘holy war’ – is not just an option for Muslims: it is both a religious requirement and an obligation. If a Muslim community of any size, from the smallest group up to an entire nation, faces danger or hostility, the members are required to resist. That is enshrined in Islamic law, and that is the basis of what radical Muslims consider to be their holy duty, to