Monday, October 17, 2005
KIDS TODAY
Modern parenting. It’s tough! All manner of difficulties must be dealt with: the Wiggles, school selection, sex ed, communist teachers. And then there are those awkward questions:
“Daddy, I want to be a martyr. Can you get me an explosive belt?”
When Abu Qaqa al-Tamimi’s 9-year-old son asked for his help in becoming a suicide bomber, he was, to say the least, taken aback. “This is not what you expect to hear from a little boy,” says al-Tamimi, an Iraqi man in his late 40s with close-cropped hair and a thin beard lining a round face. “I didn’t know what to say.” The son had even come up with a proposed target. “There was an American checkpoint near his school, and he said, ‘They won’t suspect me because I’m a kid, so I can walk right up to them and explode the belt.’”
Luckily, Abu Qaqa al-Tamimi’s abundant life experience enables him to to cope with this tricky parental dilemma:
For the past 13 months, al-Tamimi has played a crucial, and murderous, role in the Iraqi insurgency: he is one of a small number of operatives who provide would-be suicide bombers with everything from safe houses to target information and explosives. Al-Tamimi says he also acts as a guardian, religious guide and all-around father figure in the final days of a bomber’s life. “Once a volunteer is placed in my care,” he says, “I am responsible for everything in his life until the time comes for him to end it.” Al-Tamimi is often the last person bombers talk to before their deadly mission.
Touchingly, al-Tamimi ends up telling his nine-year-old that he is “too young to become a martyr” (he also tells his sister and brother that “suicide bombing should be the last resort ... It should not be a shortcut to paradise”). The piece is by my old Time magazine pal Aparisim Ghosh, who includes this (intentionally) hilarious line: “Like other Iraqi parents, al-Tamimi frets about the emotional toll on his child caused by the daily onslaught of suicide bombings.”