A darkly amusing tale of betrayal out of Iraq, by way of USA Today:
BAGHDAD — His head and hands were wrapped in bandages and his uncovered face looked like bubbled tar.I tell ya, it just breaks my heart...
[Indeed it does look that way; it's really quite extraordinary. See the image here of the jihadi who somehow survived, though considerably worse for wear, an involuntary martyrdom operation.]
It wasn't supposed to be a suicide mission.
"They asked me to take the truck near a concrete block barrier before turning to the right and leaving it there. There, somebody will pick up the truck from you," they told him. "But they blew me up in the truck," he says.
When the gas truck ignited into a fireball near the Jordanian Embassy, nine people were killed, including a family of seven whose house collapsed on them. The explosion burned Shaya on his face and hands but he was thrown from the cab and survived.
Authorities at first didn't know who he was. But then a local Baghdad newspaper carried a report from Saudi Arabia about his family mourning his martyrdom.
Shaya told the interrogators that he regretted his mission now.
"I want the Iraqi people to live in peace," he says, and he can no longer support Osama bin Laden because "he is killing Muslims."
As for the Zarqawi network that sent him on the mission that left him permanently disfigured and in prison, he says, "I want revenge for what they have done to me."
Here you are, expecting to mass-murder a bunch of inoocent people indiscriminately, and your face gets char-grilled for your trouble. And by your supposed "friends", no less!
Oh, the humanity!
