Originally posted by straffo
Paying the families of suicide bombers was a PR stunt made by Saddam to convince the other arabic country to protect him.
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LMAO!!! PR stunt eh? Boy I bet these were PR documents too!
:D:D
The Iraqis maintained a hierarchy of mayhem when handing out financial rewards to the families of dead terrorists. Until the Passover bombing in March, the families of suicide bombers were paid $15,000, whereas "ordinary" martyrs got $10,000. Realizing that more money meant more attacks, the Iraqis later upped the price for a "quality" suicide operation to $25,000, the equivalent of several years' wages for an average worker there. The documents show the Iraqis also distinguished between suicide bombers who successfully carried out their missions and those who blew themselves up without killing Jews. In the warped economy of terror, failure has a price greater than death.
At times, the documents have a macabre quality. In an internal memo sent from Jenin on May 9, the local Iraqi representative relays a dispute over how to classify a Nov. 27, 2001, attack against the Afula Central Bus Station in Israel. "The Arab Liberation Front representative in Jenin claims that this attack cannot be described as a suicide attack since its perpetrators did not carry explosive belts," the letter reads. The families of the two terrorists who emptied their automatic rifles into the crowd, killing two and wounding 48 persons, rejected this reasoning. "They insist that it was a suicide operation and demand that it be recognized as such in order to receive the [due] respect and financial;rights." If accepted, they will receive a "President Saddam Hussein Grant" of $25,000.
According to the captured documents, the Iraqis show a remarkable ecumenism when it comes to paying the assassins, giving equally to the families of bombers working with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Arafat's own Fatah movement. Often the Palestinian groups themselves appeal directly for the Iraqi grants. In one such case, the Ramallah district office of Fatah issued an official declaration on June 17 certifying that one of its members successfully had carried out a suicide-bombing attack. "The Fatah movement in Ramallah and al-Bireh hereby declares that the martyr Amer Muhammad Issa Shakukani is one of the Intifada al-Aqsa martyrs, who committed suicide during a suicide attack by exploding a car bomb in the Tel Aviv area on 24 May 2002." It worked: The bomber never passed "Go" but his family collected $25,000 from their rich Uncle Saddam.
Captured bank statements of the Iraqi groups showed they had received more than $9 million in direct payments from Iraq during the last two years, with the effect of dramatically escalating the violence. In Arab press accounts, the Iraqis boasted of having spent more than twice that amount to support and promote "martyrdom" attacks.
The captured documents also make it dramatically clear that Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA) not only winked and nodded at the Iraqi terror payments but actively encouraged them. "The Palestinian Authority, for its part, enables the Iraqi regime to freely operate in the PA areas via the Arab Liberation Front, the Palestine Liberation Front and the Ba'ath Party," an Israeli military-intelligence analysis states. "It cooperates with Iraq in providing aid to the families of killed and suicide terrorists and enables Iraq to freely disseminate the propaganda messages of the Iraqi regime [hostile to Israel and to the United States] in Palestinian society and media."
