So Easy, So Easy

"You see our demands are so easy, so easy if you want to negotiate with us. We want the prisoners you have, the comrades who were arrested and imprisoned 15 years ago. We want 100 of them."
Abd Rahman al-Nigiri, kidnappers head

This was a multi-purpose event. Improbably, to garner bargaining power by taking Western hostages for use as bargaining chips in offering their exchange for that of imprisoned terrorists. Jihadists often boast that they have no fear of death. Rather, they welcome it. Death makes martyrs of them, and there is no greater honour than to give one's life for Islam. Islam reciprocates handsomely by proffering a bevy of beauties for the martyrs' pleasure, in Paradise.

There are now quite a few of them crowding Paradise. But there is no lack of takers. The allure is simply too irresistible. What greater honour can possibly be bestowed upon the pious, those dedicated to the elevation of Islam through divine conquest. Doubly honoured; becoming a martyr whose exploits are the stuff of legend, heroes of Islam, on Earth and in Paradise. Not fearing death, they also offer it, in wholesale numbers, to others.

And so, Algerian bomb squads busy scouring the gas plant for the opportunity to do their own duty in de-mining the area, also discovered "numerous" new bodies in their search for explosives. The discovery of the bodies was an explosive event in its own right. Is it not rather incredible how many human beings a determined group of jihadists can succeed in murdering?

Photo: Lamine Chikhi

But this is a play we've seen before. In places like Mumbai where a handful of jihadis did their duty to fanaticism; ten Pakistanis succeeded in terrorizing central Mumbai in a 62-hour standoff with the police, killing 180 people altogether, and wounding 295. In Algeria, in the remote Saharan desert gas field, 40 militants who came from six countries with a Canadian said to have co-ordinated the attack, released almost 600 Algerians and attempted to take Westerners hostage.

The plan went awry, attempts to set the explosives failed; attempts to escape with hostages, failed; the terrorists are uncompromisingly dead, and they took with them to death, but not to Paradise, 37 foreign nationals.