Threat of suicide bombers changes the face of war

All the ingredients were there. For days, state media called for a holy war in defence of the sacred soil of Iraq. For weeks, masked men, dressed in white suits the colour of funeral shrouds with mock explosives on their chests, marched through Baghdad in ritualistic displays of defiance. For years, Saddam Hussein demonstrated with cash handouts that he realised the value of suicide attacks.

Then Iraq produced a human bomb of its own on Saturday, the first such martyr of this war, when a non-commissioned army officer in plain-clothes drove a car up to a US military checkpoint in Najaf, killing four soldiers.

In so doing, the bomber, identified by Iraqi officials as Ali Jaffar Hammadi al-Namani, a father of five, sealed the transformation of this war from a struggle for survival by Saddam Hussein's regime to what is being billed in Baghdad as a patriotic rising of the weak against a vastly more powerful force of invaders.

Iraqi officials immediately hailed Namani as a hero, and warned that Saturday's bombing could unleash waves of suicide attackers. "This is the beginning, and you will hear more good news in the coming days. We will use any means to kill our enemy in our land, and we will follow the enemy into its land," the Iraqi vice-president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, told a press conference. "The US administration is going to turn the whole world into people willing to die for their nation."

Such predictions gained fur ther currency yesterday when Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president and no friend of Saddam Hussein, warned that war on Iraq could produce 100 new Osama bin Ladens.

President Saddam granted the Iraqi soldier and suicide bomber two posthumous medals - maintaining a tradition of supporting such tactics that extends well beyond his borders.

During the uprising against the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the Iraqi leader has paid handsome cash rewards to the families of bombers, lending his sanction to the most sustained suicide campaign in history.

As the Palestinian intifada dragged on, he increased his payment to the families of suicide bombers from $10,000 to $25,000 (£6,350 to £15,900). He also paid out to those who were maimed or lost their homes in the intifada, and by the time war broke out in Iraq, his largesse had run into the tens of millions of dollars.

The parallels between Palestinians and Iraqis have sharp ened with this war. President Saddam has been quick to portray the Iraqis, in tune with their Palestinian brothers, as struggling against occupation and a whole swath of the Arab world has clearly been galvanised by the idea of an American invasion of Muslim lands. A busload of would-be fighters from Syria and Algeria was intercepted by US forces only last week.

Arab journalists escorted around a training camp for Arab volunteers on the perimeters of Baghdad a few days before the start of the war encountered Palestinians from refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria, along with Algerians, Tunisians and a Moroccan architect and father of four, resident in Germany. Most, the journalists said, were Islamists.

Iraqi officials claim that several of the Arab recruits are intent on committing suicide attacks. "The martyrdom operations will continue not only by the sons of Iraq but by thousands of Arab volunteers who have come to Iraq," the military spokesman said.

The culmination of this alliance between Islamist militants and the once avowedly secular Ba'athist regime in Iraq has been more than a decade in the making. During the Kuwait war, President Saddam decreed that the words Allahu Akbar (God is most great) be enshrined between the stars of the Iraqi flag, and five years later launched a faith campaign.

As new mosques appeared on the Baghdad skyline, the Iraqi regime began including verses from the Koran in their public addresses, a practice that has shown a steep increase since the start of the war.

In recent days, Iraqi clerics have preached about the value of martyrdom operations - suicide being forbidden under Islam. Iraqi officials have also said the moral right to resist takes precedence over any qualms about suicide attacks.

"The resistance of France against the Nazis was a just fight but killing the civilians by invading armies is a racist crime," Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Iraq's information minister, said yesterday.

Though the idea of martyrdom has yet to assume the widespread sanction it enjoys in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, in the 12 days since war began there has been a discernible rise in popular feeling that Iraqis have a religious duty to repel the foreign invaders, and that divine intervention will overcome America's undoubted technological superiority.

"They cannot convince us of anything by force," Tariq al-Amin, a doctor, said yesterday. "We will form guerrilla gangs and fight them for thousands of years."

Although the regime has resorted to suicide bombers in religious terms, Iraqi officials maintain a practical attitude towards the utility of such attacks.

Like Hamas, the main purveyors of suicide attacks in Israel and the occupied territories, which argues that the overwhelming military might of the Jewish state leaves it no recourse, Iraq, too, admits purely strategic compulsions for its embrace of controversial methods.

As the Iraqi vice-president noted, Iraq has no airforce, and its army is no match for America's technological supremacy.

"If the bombs carried by B52s can kill 500 people or more than I am sure the bombs carried by our martyrdom operations can kill 5,000 people," Mr Ramadan said. "What is Iraq to do when it doesn't have an aircraft, and it doesn't have missiles? Capitulate?"