Bomber’s End: Flash of Terror, Humble Grave

By BARRY BEARAK

KABUL, Afghanistan, June 30 — The two men had come to the common end of all human journeys. Their bodies, swathed in bloody white sheets, lay on a rocky hillside. Awaiting them were two thin rectangles of shallow graves. The city of Kabul was responsible for the burial. No mullah had been asked to preside over this earthly farewell.

“One of these guys needs a smaller hole,” one gravedigger said, laughing.

The bigger of the bodies belonged to an old man, Khan Mir. His body had gone unclaimed, and the obligations of an Islamic funeral were forgone because he was a pauper. The identity of the other man was unknown. He was only half a body really, a headless torso with but a right arm and a right leg. His interment was meant to be ignominious because he was a suicide bomber, or yak enteher kunenda.

“Cover them with rocks and throw on the dirt,” the chief gravedigger called out.

In Kabul, the burial of a suicide bomber occurs at a secret time in a secret place, the forgettable end to what most here consider an unforgivable act. Of course, it is easier to bury the remains of a bomber than the fearsome consequences of the bombing. At least 193 suicide attacks have been reported in Afghanistan during the past 18 months, enough to contaminate much of the nation with the persisting malady of terror.

The Taliban and other insurgents may control only a fraction of this country, but their campaign of fear — reiterated with suicide bombings, roadside explosions, rocket attacks and assassinations — has proved an effective menace. These tactics inhibit travel. They slow development. They shake confidence in the government. In a nation that has known war for nearly 30 straight years, they leave the future as unpredictable as the past.

The supply of suicide bombers appears to be unending, and countermeasures are hard to conceive. The Ministry of Defense sponsors a television advertisement intended to denounce such attacks. In the spot, a mullah arrives at graveside to oversee a burial. When he is told the deceased is a suicide bomber, he waves his hand derisively, proclaiming as he stalks off: “We do not say funeral prayers for someone who kills himself. We are Muslims, and Islam does not allow anyone to shed either his own blood or that of his brothers.”

This is hardly a unanimous interpretation, however. On this topic, the vocabulary itself is hotly contested, for there are those who believe suicide bombers are martyrs whose sacrificial deaths are lavishly rewarded by God in paradise. “Suicide is condemned in Islam, but it is not for me to judge whether a man blows himself up as a matter of suicide or in the righteousness of jihad,” said Noor ul-Haq, a mullah in Kabul.

His tiny mosque, Masjid-e-Fazilbeg, sits along Company Road, where on June 16 a man driving a taxi blew himself up near a military convoy. Five people died. Four were passers-by; the other was the bomber, left with only a right arm and a right leg.

Tracing the worldly disposition of his remains required an endeavor. Afghanistan’s government, not known for efficiency, is accomplished with red tape. Permissions to attend the burial were needed from the Ministry of Public Health, the Ministry of the Interior, the National Security Directorate and the municipality of Kabul.

“Yes, we do have a procedure for suicide bombers,” Mahtabuddin Ahmadi, director of the city’s Culture Department, said confidently of the burials, which are conducted by his agency. “The body is washed according to Islamic custom and then when we bury it, there is a mullah who says the appropriate prayers.”

But as he described the practice, one of his assistants shook his head no and politely corrected his boss. Finally, the director confessed, “I don’t know what we do.”

Actually, the body is first given a medical examination. Dr. Muhammad Mohsin Sherzai did the autopsy, which took less than 30 minutes. “We have limited staff and equipment,” he said apologetically. “The police would like to know the man’s identity. But we have no facilities for DNA testing. What we discover is very little.”

An assistant opened a refrigerated locker and rolled the body out on a sliding tray. The discolored remains were loosely encased in plastic. Dr. Sherzai pointed to the midsection: “It’s a male, as you see. We know his blood group. He was probably 30 or 35.”

Then he shrugged.

The body remained at the autopsy center for 11 days, allowing time for someone to claim it. Permission for burial was then sent to the Culture Department, which in turn notified the police and the national intelligence agency.

Finally, the body was loaded into an ambulance to be taken to a clandestine cemetery. The white vehicle had black lettering on both sides, which said that it had been “donated by the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.” Dr. Sherzai found this an amusing coincidence. Many Afghans believe the suicide bombers come from that same place.

This is certainly the view at the intelligence agency, where officials routinely tie much of the Taliban insurgency to the government of its distrusted neighbor. Pakistan emphatically denies such broad allegations, but there is no doubt that many suicide attackers originate from its midst.

Intelligence officials here on occasion open their detention center to a journalist, allowing interviews with prisoners. The lockup is a busy place with small, crowded cells. On Thursday, officials said, the inmates included 11 Pakistanis and 14 Afghans who were thwarted suicide bombers. Two who were arrested on June 18 were Pakistanis.

“My target was Gul Agha Sherzai, the governor of Nangarhar Province,” said a 17-year-old who uses the single name Farmanullah. Though the interview was unmonitored, the teenager nevertheless made exaggerated efforts to sound contrite. He presented himself as little more than a specimen of cannon fodder.

Pakistani members of the Taliban “came to my high school to recruit volunteers and told us if you didn’t join the jihad, you would go to hell and never see the brides in paradise,” he said. So he underwent suicide training in the Pakistani tribal areas.

But now hindsight, as well as capture, had made Farmanullah realize he was being used as a political plaything, he said. “We were told that everyone in Afghanistan was an infidel,” he said. “Now I know this is not so.”

Farmanullah’s accomplice in the planned attack was another 17-year-old, Abdul Quddus, who was spoken to separately. Suicide bombers are often disdainfully described here as impoverished, uneducated and physically or mentally handicapped. But Mr. Quddus said he was the son of a businessman in Peshawar and the graduate of a good private high school. His diction displayed refinement. His bearing was calm and prideful.

He said he had been attending a madrasa, or religious school, near the border and later agreed to take a blindfolded journey to a far-off camp for suicide bombers. He spent 40 days there with 20 other young men, he said. “There are two types of bombs,” he said. “One has a button, the other a fuse like a hand grenade. Explosives are packed in waistcoats that look completely normal. The maximum is 11 kilos, the minimum is 6,” a range of 13 to 24 pounds.

He was carrying such a coat in a bag when stopped by policemen in Jalalabad. His arrest had not entirely doused his jihadi enthusiasms.

At first, he said he was sorry he had not completed his suicidal mission. Then he expressed ambivalence. “At the training camp I had allowed myself to become too emotional,” he said, mentioning that movies he had been shown were probably one-sided and had overstoked his zealotry. But while he was now glad he had not killed the Afghan governor, some of his suicidal resolve remained. “U.S. soldiers are still killing Muslims,” he said. “I still believe in jihad against America, and some things are worth death.”

Many others before him have paid that price. The ambulance moved through central Kabul, where in wealthier enclaves the fear of suicide bombers is evident in antiblast walls, massive twists of barbed wire and guards wielding machine guns at gated checkpoints. The vehicle then bumped along dirt roads toward the city’s outskirts. A dust storm was kicking up, and the gravediggers were impatient.

“Why isn’t everything ready?” demanded Ghulam Sarwar, the leader of the crew.

These were coarse men, accustomed to off-color banter. Routine had conquered any reverence they might have felt for the dead, though they did interrupt their raunchy humor when it was time to put the bodies in the graves.

As the old pauper was lowered into the ground, Khwaja Nuruddin, representing the city’s Culture Department, swiftly mumbled: “God is great. There is only one God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.” But when the suicide bomber was laid to rest, only the insistent wind broke the silence.

Pieces of slate were positioned to cover the rectangular plots, with small rocks used to fill any gaps. Then the graves were sealed with mud that had been made by emptying a 10-gallon jug of water into a small pile of excavated soil.

With the work finally finished, Mr. Nuruddin brushed the dust from his gray business suit. He then paused to consider the situation and opted to recite a few Koranic verses, standing first by the suicide attacker’s grave, then by the pauper’s.

He wondered aloud if even this was too much Islamic ceremony for a man who had converted himself into a bomb. But he declared that he was not sorry he had gone ahead.

“After all,” he said, “the man was a human being.”