Suicide brigade enlists 15,000; goals include killing GIs, Israelis, Rushdie

By Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson
Knight Ridder Newspapers

KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS A disabled veteran who served during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s enrolls in a fledgling suicide brigade in downtown Tehran. "This is simply self-defense as prescribed by our faith," explains organizer Forooz Rejaeifar.

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According to Rejaeifar, those deemed fit would be trained for one of three missions: killing members of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, slaughtering Israelis (all are deemed "occupiers of Palestine," according to official Iranian policy) or assassinating author Salman Rushdie. The late Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sentenced Rushdie to death in absentia in 1989 on charges that he blasphemed in his novel "The Satanic Verses."

For now, her group is mostly a paper exercise, with as many as 15,000 volunteers but no money and weapons. No training or missions are planned for the foreseeable future, Rejaeifar said, adding that she hopes the shock value of her brigade will be enough to send the Bush administration and its allies packing.

Rejaeifar considers her group a natural reaction to U.S. activities in the region, despite the fact that American troops toppled Saddam Hussein, Iran's archrival.

"Is what we're doing extreme, or is what the United States doing extreme when it sends its soldiers to take over a country thousands of kilometers from their home? Or when American occupiers torture and degrade Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison?" Rejaeifar asked, sitting in the sparse basement office of her defunct political weekly, from where she and four co-founders run the "Committee for the Commemoration of the Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement."

"This is simply self-defense as prescribed by our faith," she added.

Donning explosives belts and engaging in suicide bombings is a Palestinian phenomenon, not an Iranian one, Rejaeifar said. "But our people are so angry they are willing to do this," she added. "Americans shouldn't squeeze people's throats to the point where they are willing to kill themselves to seek relief."

Televised pictures of American forces fighting Shiite militiamen in and around Iraq's holiest cities in recent weeks have swayed many religious Iranians toward Rejaeifar's way of thinking. She and her committee began recruiting in earnest at the end of May, staking out mosque entrances in the capital city and Friday prayers at Tehran University.

They'd collected some 15,000 signed applications that are being entered into a computer for easy retrieval, she said. In some cases, entire families volunteered, including a child as young as 7 and a man as old as 80.

There are some doubts that all the recruits would do what they signed up for. According to the moderate Iranian daily newspaper Shargh (or "East"), some recruits had mixed feelings as they filled out their applications.

"I would like to go now, but I don't know when the time comes if I will go or change my mind," Mustafa Afzalzadeh, 24, an English translator, told the newspaper. But some of Rejaeifar's words — "Our group gives people a chance to express their anger" — indicate the idea might actually be as important as the action.
 
Rejaeifar wants her movement to renew Iran's commitment to Islamic hard-liners who oppose the United States. She doesn't include al-Qaida or the Taliban, which she describes as American-sparked movements born in the Cold War and are inspired by an extreme form of Sunni Islam called Wahabism that came from Saudi Arabia. But she does want to back Muslims who support the kind of Islamic revolution preached by Khomeini, the Islamic republic's founder, and embraced by Lebanon's Hezbollah and Palestinian militant groups, she said.

Iran's current government has abandoned that revolutionary zeal, she and other committee members complained. Privately, some Iranian government officials rolled their eyes when asked about Rejaeifar's group. The movement isn't publicly endorsed by the elected government, which under the leadership of President Mohammed Khatami has sought to moderate the tone of Iran's revolutionary fervor to the outside world. Khatami said in 2001 that the death sentence against Rushdie was for all intents and purposes lifted.

Even Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the nation's extremist armed wing, has sought to distance itself, according to the Shargh article, with one general saying his attendance at a recent group function didn't mean he supported it.

That's OK with Rejaeifar. The group isn't seeking government help or acknowledgement, save for an order from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, without which they won't launch any attacks, she said.