Waiting List

So this young Iraqi, a wannabe suicide bomber “martyr”, was radicalised by the Fallujah schoolyard massacre in 2003, when US troops fired lived rounds into a protest march, killing 12 and wounding dozens. Now he’s on a waiting list to blow himself up. There are apparently now so many suicide volunteers in Iraq that they have waiting lists, and waiting periods before they can even get on the lists. Such is the bureaucracic backlog of religious resistance.

Marwan asked his commander to consider him for a suicide mission last fall but had to wait until the beginning of April for his name to be put on the list of volunteers. “When he finally agreed,” Marwan recalls, “it was the happiest day of my life.” There are, he says, scores of names on that list, and it can be months before a volunteer is assigned an operation.