An uncle’s sorrow: how terror turned my good nephew into a suicide bomber. AT a sombre gathering this week in Sydney of Alawite Muslims, mourning the victims of a suicide bomber in their Lebanese homeland, one head hung lower than the rest. It was that of Saeed Khayal — and his was a complicated kind of bereavement. The suicide bombing in Tripoli on Saturday was not only close to Mr Khayal’s birthplace, but the 20-year-old assailant who strapped on an explosives belt and detonated it, killing nine, was also the migrant’s flesh and blood. Mr Khayal’s nephew Taha al-Khayal, a Sunni, blew himself up on the northern outskirts of Tripoli at the popular Abu Omran cafe in the Alawite-dominated neighbourhood of Jabal Mohsen, close to where he was raised. Yesterday, speaking to The Australian in southwest Sydney, where he lives, Mr Khayal, who emigrated to Australia in the 1980s and raised his six children here, is trying to piece together exactly how the deadly hand of international terrorism came to reach inside his family. Where were the gaps in their familial armoury? How could he know they required such defence against what was, in the beginning, only words from a shadowy preacher whose power they could barely have imagined? “Watch your kid, what he is doing, what he is talking, where he is going, and with who,” Mr Khayal said. “That is my advice to every father or mother.” The conflict in the Middle East plays out on the smartphones and computers of young men and women in migrant diasporas in countless nations, even though most are citizens of their family’s adopted homes. For this reason, Mr Khayal’s message is as relevant to Muslim parents in Australia as it is to those in the Arab world. “When the parent doesn’t know what is happening, he does not see the little mistakes. And then there is a big mistake, and it’s a shock, but he doesn’t see the little mistake before,” he said. Taha was always a quiet, obedient boy, he said. But in the months before the attack his allegiance shifted from family to global terror network. The Nusra Front, al-Qa’ida’s official affiliate in the Syrian civil war, claimed responsibility for the double suicide bombing carried out by Taha and another man, 26-year-old Bilal al-Mariyan, who blew himself up 10 minutes after Taha on Saturday evening as onlookers rushed to the scene after the first bomb. A native of a poor Sunni-dominated suburb on the northern outskirts of Tripoli that sits directly adjacent to Alawite-dominated Jabal Mohsen, Taha was no stranger to the community he attacked. As a boy, the Alawites were his friends: schoolmates, neighbours, local shopkeepers. But, as the conflict in neighbouring Syria escalated, radicalising conservative forces across the world that advocated violent jihad, Taha began to spout a twisted version of Koranic teachings that deeply concerned his uncle, who travels home to Lebanon several times a year. “He spoke to me about the Koran,” Mr Khayal said. “He told me that the people who teach him, they start telling him, ‘Your father is kaffir, he is not a Muslim, your mother is kaffir’.” In October, two months before Taha left Lebanon for Syria to take up arms, the two sat up until four in the morning as Mr Khayal tried to guide his nephew towards a more moderate path. “I told him, ‘That’s not good, that’s not right’, I try to prove it to him. I understand my religion. But what’s happening in the Middle East in the last two years, the last three years, and on the internet and the websites, it’s very dangerous. The stricter groups, they start with just five people, they start gathering and then they’re getting bigger. And their teachers, they know which one to bring to his side. We’ve got plenty of young people here in Australia (at risk).” Mr Khayal had no idea of his nephew’s intentions to become a suicide bomber, and nor did any of his family. The last contact Mr Khayal had with Taha was last month, when Taha sent his uncle a message from Syria. It was immediately clear the nephew had joined the terrorist cause and Mr Khayal told his family that they must cut off any contact. “I said, ‘You can’t see Taha anymore, he’s fighting in Syria, he’s killing’. “But I can’t believe he went back to Lebanon and did what he did. That’s very hard to understand. That’s not in Islam. It’s not even human being. It’s animal. If you have to complain, complain, but don’t kill innocent people.” The victims have been named in the media as a 62-year-old father of six, Issa Khaddour, policeman Yousef Abdo, 15-year-old Ali Ibrahim, Muhammad Suleiman, Ali Issa, Mahmoud Hassan, Muhammad Berro, Hassan Ibrahim and Yehia Abdel Karim. There were an estimated 37 injured, including amputations. In the aftermath of the Tripoli bombing, there were fears in Sydney that tensions between Alawites and Sunnis could spill over. Instead, Mr Khayal was part of a delegation that knocked on doors of local Alawite leaders and attended a ceremony where community members, some of whom were relatives of the victims of the Tripoli bombing, mourned side by side. In the midst of crushing forces that rattle the security of ordinary people even in the most free of nations, those who lost loved ones in the Tripoli bombing were not the only victims. Mr Khayal showed The Australian a photograph on his mobile phone, sent in the early hours of yesterday. It is his brother, Taha’s father, Samir, just released from a police station in Tripoli, where he was assisting authorities, his face wracked with grief, and Taha’s mother weeping beside him. “They removed him (Taha) from the family, they had full control, they break up the family,” Mr Khayal said of the terrorists. “But I care even more about the innocent people that are being killed in these wars. Too many children, too many old men and women. What for? For politics. Just stupid politics. The God doesn’t tell us to do that. The God is peace for everyone.” Mr Khayal’s nephew, bomber Taha al-Khayal. Natasha Robinson THE AUSTRALIAN JANUARY 15, 2015
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 22:04:12 +0000
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