True Story
According to USA Today
Oct., 2004 – Ahmed Abdullah al-Shaya, 18, leaves Saudi Arabia for Iraq to become a mujahedin, or holy warrior, or suicide bomber, depending on how you look at it. Anyway, he was pursuing his dreams (ah… youth!)
Eventually, he reaches “Ramadi, west of Baghdad, where he spent 1½ months with like-minded Muslims from Morocco, Jordan, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen and Macedonia. Most, however, were Iraqis….â€
December – Shaya moves to Baghdad to prepare for his final mission, which he expects to be as the suicide pilot of a bomb-laden car.
Dec. 24 – Shaya was given a preliminary job of driving a butane-gas delivery truck that was rigged with bombs. He claims: “They asked me to take the truck near a concrete block barrier before turning to the right and leaving it there. There, somebody will pick up the truck from you. But they blew me up in the truck.”
While a house full of people who didn’t know what the hell was going on gets blown up, Shaya survives, though he now looks like the marshmallow no one wants at the campfire.
Shaya told the interrogators that he regretted his mission now.
“I want the Iraqi people to live in peace,” he says, and he can no longer support Osama bin Laden because “he is killing Muslims.”
As for the Zarqawi network that sent him on the mission that left him permanently disfigured and in prison, he says, “I want revenge for what they have done to me.”
So, if he ever gets out, he’s going to become… an anti-terrorist terrorist?
Right now, there’s a Vietcong reading a USA Today somewhere thinking, “Dude, that’s fucked up.â€
