The suicide bomber who stopped for coffee
Diana Moukalled/Arab News/Tuesday 24 January 2017
He smiled at the café waitress and ordered a cup of chocolate Frappuccino, before starting to gaze at the other customers. Then he asked the waitress about the low customer turnout in the place. She guessed that it could be due to the cold weather.
These details are not about an ordinary customer; they are about the young man who was planning to blow himself up in a café in Beirut’s famous Al-Hamra neighborhood. His attempt was foiled by the security forces who managed to preemptively arrest him.
The story is a bizarre one. It is strange for a suicide bomber to choose a café that does not serve alcohol and is not frequented by many people.
The people of Beirut have become scared of visiting nightclubs since Istanbul’s New Year’s Eve massacre. But the Beirut suicide bomber turned his back on nearby pubs and nightclubs.
Did he wish to decrease the number of casualties? Or did he suddenly have crisis of conscience over his awful crime? What makes it more ambiguous is that the suicide bomber did not, unlike in similar cases previously, rush to blow himself up as plain-clothed security forces approached him.
As Lebanese people, we are not removed from the crises of our surroundings. We have several times suffered from fighting and suicide bombers. So the reality that the security forces managed to preemptively arrest a suicide bomber, who himself felt hesitant over committing the crime, gives us a sense of temporary relief, despite the fact that the political disappointments, exploited by extremist organizations to recruit suicide bombers, do still exist.
The Lebanese public have been very busy discussing the life of this would-be suicide bomber, after his name, identity and photo were revealed. He apparently took part in clashes in 2013 between the Lebanese army and supporters of the militant preacher Sheikh Ahmad Al-Assir. Those confrontations thereafter produced a number of suicide bombers who implemented operations in Lebanon and Syria.
Lebanon has avoided one disaster, yet the existing political and sectarian disappointments, the weakness of the state and the strength of militias are factors that could produce more suicidal bombers.
Suicide operations do not often give us the opportunity to approach the offenders to understand their motives or gauge the prospects of their retreat from carrying out their plots. When considering the life stories of suicide bombers, we find that most of them had very defective, flawed lives. Most of them suffered disorders at home or in their surroundings, which turned to be weak points through which terrorists managed to recruit these young men, deceived by the illusion of defending major causes.
The potential suicide bomber at the Al-Hamra café ordered a cup of coffee before reflecting on his own fate. Perhaps he concluded that coffee and chocolate are better than a futile death.
• Diana Moukalled is a veteran journalist with extensive experience in both traditional and new media. She is also a columnist and freelance documentary producer. She can be reached on Twitter @dianamoukalled. http://www.arabnews.com/node/1043426/columns
