Why Young Muslims Line Up to Die

Thursday, June 19, 2003

(time)

By Marianne Bray

The Cable News Network

Leaders from JI, an al Qaeda-linked group seeking to set up a pan-Islamic state spanning Southeast Asia, eyed captivated students at mass gatherings. They then indoctrinated those deemed suitable into the clandestine group over 18 months. During that time they were taught "JI-speak." Those who believed in the "truth" of JI doctrine became closer to Allah. They learned the "true" JI knowledge of jihad -- that innocents, both Muslim and non-Muslim, could be sacrificed.

CNN
When Bali bomber Amrozi was sentenced to death by firing squad this month, he turned around, smiled broadly and turned his two thumbs up in the air.

"It's a martyr's death I am looking for," Amrozi said during his trial in Denpasar, following the October Bali nightclub blasts.

The 40-year-old mechanic from a village in East Java was happy because he had a chance of joining a growing horde of Muslims from Gaza, Iraq, and Afghanistan willing to die as heroes in the name of Islam.

While there are many reasons young Muslims sacrifice their lives -- including the honor and money bestowed onto their families after their death -- it is the martyr's afterlife that captures the imagination.

In the late 1990s, Pakistani journalist Nasra Hassan interviewed nearly 250 prospective bombers, their families, as well as their trainers, from within militant Palestinian camps.

In remarkable accounts, members of the Palestinian fundamentalist group Hamas described how potential bombers came to believe that paradise was on the "other side of the detonator."

* The struggle

* Persecution

(More: CNN.com)
2003 © Cable News Network LP, LLLP.

Dan