He talks, not surprisingly, of being at peace:
"It doesn't matter whether people know what I did," he says. "The only person who matters is Allah—and the only question he will ask me is 'How many infidels did you kill?'"
And talks about not wanting to kill civilians although not so much that he would abandon the mission:
"I pray no innocent people are killed in my mission," he says. "But if some are, I know when they arrive in heaven, Allah will ask them to forgive me."
Not much surprising there, but here are two things that caught my eye:
He would like to understand Americans better, he says. He was arrested by U.S. patrols twice and detained for short spells, but because he speaks no English, he was unable to communicate with his captors. But this is a small regret, he says, of the kind he is determined to put out of his mind. "When you get ready for the final mission," he says almost to himself, "you can't think about the past.
I've written often about how the U.S.'s lack of cultural knowledge in Iraq (including speaking the damn language) has resulted in the detention of thousands of innocent Iraqis--thereby getting more people pissed off at us. But there's another side of operating blind: Sometimes it means you'll miss the guilty guy.
Finally, the Time piece has this bit of myth-busting: Iraqi gov't officials have recently been claiming that many suicide bombers are forced to do the job. "In a majority of cases, you find hands chained to the steering column, so these were not volunteers," said an Interior Ministry spokesman. Here's Time:
U.S. investigators who have looked into scores of cases believe coercion is rare. Navy Commander Fred Gaghan, head of the Combined Explosives Exploitation Cell, which has investigated more than 60 bombings in the past five months, has not found any evidence of fetters. "They don't need them, because they have plenty of volunteers who will do it willingly," he says.
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