Sign Up for Heaven

At the start of the current war of terror I sketched out several fictional scenarios as to how such a war could be waged. One idea was that of multiple suicide bombers blowing themselves at multiple locations disrupting life simultaneously in different locations, and ultimately bringing the civil and military response and health systems to a state of collapse. To accomplish such a feat would require hundreds of suicide bombers, an idea so alien and foreign to me that I totally refused to pursue it. Someone just brought the following old news item to my attention. All of a sudden my wild fictional idea begins looking more and more like a possible nightmarish reality.

Tehran, Iran, Nov. 17 Fifty thousand Iranians have signed up for martyrdom-seeking operations and 1,000 of them have already beeen organizeded into operational units, Mohammad-Ali Samadi, the spokesman for a government-orchestrated campaign to recruit suicide bombers told an Iranian news agency.

Samadi was speaking a day after a rally on Tuesday in the city of Shahroud, north-east Iran, where 1,000 volunteers signed up for suicide attacks against the West and Israel. A video film of the full speech by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on October 26, in which he called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and threatened the leaders of other Muslim countries, was shown to the audience.

My thanks to AbbaGav for the tip.