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too. I knew that PUK people were kufr and our duty was to fight against the kufr to free the umma. I told Abdullah al-Shami that I was ready and then during the night they called me on the radio and asked me to come to them. I drove to Biyara, the village where they were, and they showed me the jacket and showed me how it worked. Then we had lunch.’
    Didar was talking to me in the office of the PUK security chief. The chief went to a cupboard and pulled out the jacket that had been taken off Didar when he had been arrested. It had two slabs of TNT over the chest and in the small of the back and was made of blue nylon. A belt, made of the same material, contained more explosives. There were two metal switches, one for the jacket and one for the belt. I sat and clicked them back and forth, listening to the metallic tick, as Didar continued.
    ‘After seeing the jacket I went back to our base.’
    ‘What date was it?’ I asked.
    ‘It was the June 12,’ he said, ‘because it was during the World Cup.’
    ‘You were watching the World Cup?’
    ‘There were no televisions because they were haram [forbidden]. But I was following it in the newspapers.’
    ‘What was your favourite team?’
    ‘England. Michael Owen and I like David Beckham and David Seaman.’
    ‘England is your favourite team and you are about to blow yourself up in the jihad against kufr?’
    ‘Politics is one thing. Football is something else.’
    After lunch with Abu Abdullah, Didar was driven to a house on the outskirts of Halabjah. He was told that when he heard shooting the next morning he was to make his way to the local PUK office and blowhimself up. He had dinner at the house of a sympathizer. Then they watched a Jackie Chan film on a DVD.
    ‘I didn’t dream. I slept fine. I knew I was going to paradise so was very calm.’
    ‘Didn’t you think about your mother?’ I asked.
    ‘Just about paradise.’
    ‘Did you have an alarm clock?’
    ‘I woke up at 3am and put the jacket on with the help of the owner of the house. But there was no shooting so I thought the plan had gone wrong so I took it off again and went back to Biyara. I was sad that I was not able to die. I went to Abu Bakr al-Tauhidi [another of Ansar ul Islam’s senior figures] and spent three days with him. He spoke to me about ishtishad and faith and jihad and my duty. On the third day after morning prayer I went in a car to the same house again and I slept until lunchtime and then prayed and ate and then waited until Ushr prayers and then put on my jacket and went with my host to the bus stop. It was just after 5pm, I think, but I had no watch. I was calm and not at all nervous. I was thinking about paradise. He paid one dinar to the driver and I got on the bus that went through the bazaar and I got down just before the PUK office and walked up to it with the switch in my pocket and my hand on it. I walked up to the peshmerga at the door and gave him the name of a man who I thought would be inside and said I had come to see him and he said what is that underneath your shirt and he spoke with the accent of my home town and I said nothing and he asked again and I said “it’s TNT” and then they arrested me.’
    Analysis of the backgrounds of the thousands of individuals of whom the modern Islamic militant movement is composed is a fraught business. It is very difficult to impose any analytic order on the huge variety of different people involved with their diverse motives, backgrounds, experience and culture. However, three broad groups can be distinguished. The first can be termed intellectual activists. These are men who can justify their attraction to radical Islam in relatively sophisticated terms. They share many common elements, particularly in regard to their backgrounds, with more moderate political Islamists.This group would include Hekmatyar, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden himself, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Omar Saeed Sheikh, Amar Makhlulif, Abu Qatada and many