Boy Needs Girl's Attention

We have all been witness to the classic game of "boy does something stupid to attract a girl's attention." When I was growing up we would toilet paper a girl's house. (Hopefully the statute of limitations has passed for misdemeanor mischief). In Shakespeare's time, Romeo threw rocks at Juliet's window. I recently read about an Iraqi twist to the longtime courtship ritual:

Lovelorn Iraqi Men Call on a Wartime Skill By ROD NORDLAND BAGHDAD

 

- It goes like this: Boy meets girl. They exchange glances and text messages, the limit of respectable courting here. Then boy asks girl's father for her hand. Dad turns him down. Boy goes to girl's house and plants a bomb out front.

The authorities call it a "love I.E.D.," or improvised explosive device, and it is not just an isolated case. Capt. Nabil Abdul Hussein of the Iraqi national police said that six had exploded in the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad alone in the past year.

"These guys, they face any problem with their girlfriends, family, anyone, and they're making this kind of I.E.D.," Captain Hussein said.

There have been no reported deaths or injuries from the devices used in this way, in Dora or elsewhere. "Usually they're putting them in front of the doors of their houses, not to kill, but to scare them," Captain Hussein said.

After six years of war, Iraq is a society with a serious anger management problem. That, along with a lot of men with a lot of experience fashioning bombs and setting ambushes, makes for a lethal mix.

The police say that many of the men are former insurgents who are no longer trying to kill foreign troops but who have an array of bomb-making skills and a stash of TNT. Even without explosives, a popular type of explosive device can be made from common household items including gasoline, a soda can and a plastic water bottle, with the innards of a cellphone as a remote detonator.

"I'm a detective, and I don't even know how to make one of these, but all these kids do," the captain said. "There was a percentage of young men who were cooperating with the Al Qaeda organizations, or the Shia militias. They've changed their minds about fighting now, but they still have good experience in how to make I.E.D.'s."

As in the days when the insurgency raged, it is pretty hard to trace a homemade bomb, of any variety, to its perpetrator. Once a device explodes, forensic evidence pretty much goes up in smoke.

The police in Dora have recorded only one arrest, involving a young man caught and convicted of planting a love I.E.D. He is Omar Abdul Hussein, 18, known by the nickname of Cisco, a former supporter of the country's main Sunni insurgent group, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, according to Captain Hussein.

Cisco was rejected by his girlfriend's father three times, and then one day she called to tell him that her father was bringing another suitor over to meet her. Cisco planted a bomb by their garden wall and set it off.

Since he lived just next door, it was a short manhunt. Cisco was tried and convicted - of terrorism.

"Another guy shot up his girlfriend's house to force the family to give her in marriage," Captain Hussein said. "We've faced this many times."

Another police official, Col. Samir Shatti, said he recalled a recent case of a student who had been upset with his grades. So he planted three soda-can bombs in his teacher's office, wired them in a series with a timer set for 7:30 a.m., when the teacher would normally arrive.

The teacher showed up on time, but nothing went off.

Col. Yassir Shinoon relates a variation on the theme worthy of Shakespeare, though the Capulets and Montagues were possibly more civil than the two Iraqi families living on the same street in the Shurta neighborhood of south Baghdad.

The colonel laughed. "We had to put a permanent police checkpoint in to keep them apart," he said.

The family on one side of the street was Shiite, and their son wanted to marry the daughter of their Sunni neighbor across the street. The son pumped gas when he was not night-riding with the Mahdi Army militia, in the days when the group went out looking for Sunnis to kill. She was studying at Baghdad University and could not stand the sight of him.

In Iraqi society, it was not up to her. But her mother took her side.

"How could I accept to marry my daughter, who has a university education, to someone who didn't even finish primary school?" she said.

Spurned, the young man planted a bomb - but in front of his own house, according to the police. Then he called the authorities and accused the neighbors of being Sunni terrorists who were trying to blow his house up.

"We could tell he planted it himself," said Colonel Shinoon, himself a Shiite, like 90 percent of Iraq's National Police force. "He thought we would take his side against the Sunnis." The police refused to arrest the girl's family, but they also had no hard evidence against the frustrated suitor. The bomb was a dud, anyway.

Then the young man planted a second bomb, and this time it exploded, damaging the houses of both families.

The neighborhood by then, in 2007, was full of people sympathetic to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The Shiite family had to flee after receiving death threats. The police said that as they left, they sprayed the Sunni family's house with automatic-weapons fire.

The girl's mother showed a visitor the bullet holes in her steel external doors, outside walls, window frames, inside walls and garden walls. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

Then a measure of peace came, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia was more or less extirpated from Shurta, and last year the Shiite neighbors were among the many displaced Iraqis who moved back to what was once the scene of Baghdad's worst communal violence.

They returned to a changed Dora, in an Iraq that in many places is edging toward a post-sectarian society. Colonel Shinoon said the police had visited the Shiite family and told them that they knew their son had been planting bombs, and they warned that he should not expect the police to take his side just because they were co-religionists.

"If it weren't for Colonel Shinoon," the girl's mother said, "we would be dead by now."

Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim, commander of the National Police's Seventh Brigade, met with the young man. Colonel Shinoon said the general's advice was: "Get over it."

Link

 

Comments

[Kath]

So -- marry me or I bomb your house? Wow, what a decision-maker!

But, I guess, the good part of that story is the family has moved back and the police talked to them. Just those two things right there show how much things have changed -- the fact that they even moved back and they are now expected to get along with their neighbors. As in any neighborhood the world over, you don't have to like all your neigbors, but you don't put bombs on their doorsteps either!

[Yogi]

Every time I think that I can't be surprised by anything new. Along comes something like this. Great post on a side of Iraq that I'd never seen before.