We are in Chechnya, it is 1994.

Shiram is eight years old.

She lives with her father, her mother and five sisters. Her father is part of the resistance movement against Russian rule. Suddenly the door to their home is kicked in, Russian troops pour in and everyone is seized. The Russians take their father and in front of his wife and daughters is brutally tortured. He cries in fear and pain, and begs to die. Before they allow him that luxury, they rape and sodomise his wife and each of his daughters in turn. Shiram, the youngest, as well as her sisters, is brutally gang raped and sodomised by the soldiers, and is left for dead. Learning nothing, the father has his throat slit in front of his daughters, his wife is already dead from her injuries. Only three daughters survived the brutality.

Shiram was one of them.

Her sisters later described the young Shiram as cheeky, talkative, fun-loving and boisterous. Shiram never spoke again. Eight years later, at a rock concert in Moscow, a young 16 year old woman detonated a bomb strapped to her chest, killing twenty others and ripping herself apart. Her name was Shiram, and she came from Chechnya.

Suicidal assasins are not new, records go back to the origin of the word Assassins in 12th century India. Traditionally suicide assassins have been assumed to be poor, ignorant, manipulated. But as the 9/11 terrorist atrocity showed, this is not necessarily the case. Most were educated, intelligent and had good prospects.More recently, in Palestine, a young female lawyer with the world at her feet blew herself up and killed several innocent bystanders. She left behind her a young child.

What is it that makes a suicide assassin tick?

If there is a pattern, it appears to be that it is a decision that they somehow come to, be they educated or uneducated, religeous or secular, wealthy or poor, in order to transform a feeling of powerlessness into a massive and final statement. You cannot threaten people that have no desire to survive. If the suicide assassins do belong to organised groups, there is little evidence that these groups do anything other than reinforce a prior decision, to emopower themselves by taking their own lives and those of others.

There are exceptions of course.

In WWII Japanese kamikaze pilots, often high on opium, were 'simply obeying orders'. Their behaviour was really little different from those soldiers of the allies told to storm Utah, Omaha or Gold Beach which we will soon remember on the 60th anniversary of D-Day. Their prospects of survival were minimal, yet the troops on that dreadful, glorious day laid down their lives for something that they believed in. In the Iran-Iraq war of the early eighties, some 10,000 Iranian children, with a little symbol, the key to paradise around their necks, were thrown across minefields and into the line of fire of Iraqi guns. These people of Imperial Japan, the Allies, the Irania children had little choice in surrendering their lives for the 'cause' for one reason or another.

Suicide assasins have also enjoyed considerable success. In the 1980's Hizbullah used their suicide assassins sparingly, and to maximum effect. One car bomb killed 240 US marines and was instrumental in the eventual US retreat from Beirut. This success inspired other groups to adopt this low-cost highly effective strategy against an otherwise invincible enemy. It also inspired Osama bin Laden to consider this method of removing the 'Great Satan' from the holy soil of Saudi Arabia. This was realised to great effect on that awful day of September 11th 2001.

Many people today connect Al'Qaeda and Palestinian suicide assassins together, but the truth is that Palestine has next to no connection with Osama and his henchmen. In 1993, the first Palestinian suicide assassin detonated himself and killed and injured many innocent Israelis.Within the Palestinian community, there was widespread revulsion and condemnation. The Israelis, perhaps understandably, reacted harshly. Within a year, the Palestinians began to look on suicide assassins as the only effective weapon that they could use against their enemy. Arafat latched onto this and declared that he could defeat the Israeli tanks with an 'army of roses'. Women that were margianalised by the conservative Palestinian society - women that were divorced, pregnant and unmarried, pressurised into marrying someone that they did not want, humiliated by intimate searches at Israeli checkpoints, have indicated that these reasons, rather than some Islamic martyrdom itself were the driving force behind their contemplation of becoming suicide assassins. There is also evidence of infatuation of such women of their handlers, men that suddenly seemed to give them a fresh chance of dignity and approval against a society that had shunned them. Added into this is the Che Guevara syndrome. There's hardly a Western students digs that doesn't have the enigmatic, romantic poster of Che's idealistic struggle agains oppression of the poor. Most of these poster protestors would run a million miles before engaging in any form of military protest, the way that Guevara did. But every now and then there is one.

Al-Qaeda is not and never has been a coherent, pan-national fighting force. They can be described as Islamist, Jihadi or Salafi but that's about where any connection stops. This isn't a coherent enemy any more than all Christians can be regarded as Catholic. An increasing number of young Muslims now regard resistance against the West as a way of life, a struggle that involves not just simply religeon, but economics, culture and Western Imperialism. One intelligence source underlines the problem when saying,

However the intelligence community now recognises something that their political masters refuse to acknowledge in public; they are not fighting an organisation or an army, they are fighting a mindset. And nobody has yet perfected a way to read minds. There is no single organisation that can be decapitated and bought to a halt, the war should be re-defined as not agaisnt terrorism but against ideas and ideals.

When looking at the subtle shift in the profiles of modern terrorists, something becomes apparent. Increasingly there are more and more educated people willing to carry out atrocities such as terrorist bombings. Most of the 9/11 bombers were reasonably well educated, if not rather well off compared to their fellow Saudis. In Palestine recently, a young female newly qualified lawyer blew herself up and murdered Israeli citizens. She had everything to gain, yet she rejected it. Why should this be so?

Islam is an inclusive religeon in some senses. It lacks the skin colour based racism of the West; as long as you are a Muslim you are a brother. But the message of Islam is essentially a socialist one, everyone is equal. An injustice against a fellow Muslim half the world over is an injustice against your neighbour. It is a unifying force that transcends geographical boundaries, something that the West struggles to comprehend. There is a nation of Islam, even though it is often bloodily split with its own factions and infighting, just as any other nation experiences.

There is a conflcit that is easily discernible, rampant Capitalism vs rampant Socialism. Radical Islam seems now to be taking the intellectual highground of the same old battles that have been fought over thousands of years, the Peasants vs the Overlords. But now it is global. And strange bedfellows as it might seem, radical Islamists have much more in common with eco-warriors and anti-capitalists than they do with the pitiless heel of globalisiation.

Increasingly, the wealth of the many is being squirreled away into the coffers of the few. Those that have money make more money, those that have no money serve those that do. Doesn't this ring a bell? How many Peasant revolts do we need to recognise that inequality breeds injustice which in turn breeds resentment and violence? That current struggle that has been so sadly misrepresented as a war against terrorism is really nothing new. It still really boils down to something far simpler. It is a class struggle.

Between those that have; those that need the oil in the middle east and profit hugely from it, and those that have not; those that live in the lands where the oil is and yet see little or return for their enduring poverty and oppression. Religeon, terrorism, freedom however you want to phrase it, the term remains a euphanism for oppression, those that have against those that do not. What we are seeing is indeed a war, but not against an abstractive nonsense such as terrorism but agaisnt a clash of cultures; those included vs those that are excluded.

Most modern wars have this basis. We can ask the question what do the terrorists want?, but this beggars the assumption that they want anything from us at all. The real question should be why do they feel the way that they do? If Islam is the perfect way to run a society, which once could have been argued in their Golden age, then why is it in such a parlous stage now? The obvious answer is to blame Western influence, their leeching of their resources (oil), and any laxing of traditional devotion to Islam is therefore in part to blame for the abject misery that much of Middle Eastern Islam currently suffers.

The most powerful weapon that the West possesses is the moderation of 95% of the worlds 1.3bn Muslims. This is being squandered on a daily basis, whereas we should be fighting to keep it; this is where the war between the clash of cultures will be won or lost. And in the idiotic folly of the invasion of Iraq, it is being comprehensively lost.

yechydda,