Marwan’s Road to Terrorism?

Marwan Abu Ubeida is Iraqi, 20 years old and dreams of killing Americans. This is how American magazine "Time" is describing the young "martyr", member of the group of Jordanian Abu Mussab al-Zarkawi. Romanian daily newspaper "Evenimentul Zilei" published a few excerpts from the innovative interview in which the suicide-terrorist makes his shattering confession: "first, I will ask Allah to bless my mission with as many American victims as possible. Then, I will ask him to purify my soul, so that I would be worthy of seeing him and I will ask him to see my brothers, who are standing next to him already. However, the most important of all is for him to let me kill as many Americans as possible."

In December 2003, I wrote an article called "The After-Effect Capture", published in the book "The Upside-Down Romania". There, I was saying capturing Saddam was a useless victory, because "this means the beginning of the concerns for the invaders of Baghdad, that have recently celebrated their victory, clearly confessing that >". Actually, Iraq became a place of endless deaths from that moment. There were no natural causes for that. A very serious disease kills the people, terrorism, and the soldiers with bushed brains have brought its germs in the old Mesopotamian hearth. Marwan himself admits that, even if he didn’t agree with the Saddam regime, he was expecting the "hamburgered" rescuers to leave, "but they kept on staying". He, like many other Iraqi people, decided to die only after he would have killed a few cursed Yankees. He cannot forgive them, because, in the summer of 2003, they shot to death 12 people gathered in the yard of the Falluja school. That was the moment in which he sworn to revenge the unhappy people killed in front of his eyes. He chose Allah to be his guide by putting his mind to order and clearing his needless soul. He had too much injustice, humiliation and sufferance inside himself. He didn’t need those anymore. He had to free his soul, to give it to the Father in the Skies. He took refuge in the gunpowder and human blood smelling basements, waiting for the moment of his departure to the Skies. Like many others before, the ones that Abdullah Azzam, one of Osama bin Laden’s mentors, talks about eulogistically in the "Angels Lover" volume. A Paradise that seems to be full of suicide assaulters that became angels. They are some very profoundly religious and fierce angels, which have on their wings the signs of death, taken over from the once-upon-a-time pirates. They are some fundamentalist angels, fed up with their condition of slaves in their own country. After all, they don’t ask much. Freedom is what they want. They want their freedom, not the one that Bush’s henchmen are cynically and gracelessly using as their mission. (We must have felt the same when the Soviets "delayed" their departure from Romania for tens of years, saying they were the ambassadors of the communist Heaven, stealing our treasures and violating our traditions. Unlike the Iraqis, the Romanians understood that the pathway to God, which was also put away by the masters of those times, meant collaboration to the red occupant. They never thought of killing them or starting guerilla combats to frighten them. Some of the most courageous people ended up in the "hoosegows" that had appeared everywhere and, unfortunately, they didn’t have their names in the great books with angels, like the Islamic militants. Outcast and forgotten, those anonymous heroes "vaporized" and this meant nothing for the Government members who didn’t withdraw the Romanian troops in Baghdad). A war against "petrocracy" tantalized the "angels" of terrorism and brought agony to the living people of the Globe. "This is a crazy, arrogant and heartless strategy carried out by Bush and his myrmidons", said the mother of an American rifleman who died for nothing in the Iraqi desert.

"We expected them to put down Saddam and leave, but they kept on staying", is the simple explanation of Marwan for the Islamic terrorism. Marwan is not alone and his name doesn’t even matter. The idea he believes in is dangerous and important. It might also be infusive, if we look at it from Mecca. The belief that killing is the only way to Heaven. Like him, the other candidates to the "martyrdom" dream of killing Americans. As many Americans as possible. In the same way we wanted to kill Russians fifty years ago. Give me an honest answer: can you blame Marwan?