A telling omission

In New Republic Online Husain Haqqani and Daniel Kimmage attempt to glean what they can from biographies (posted on the internet) of suicide bombers in Iraq:

[O]f the fighters expressly identified by country of origin, 175 are Saudi, 50 are Syrian, 28 are Iraqi, 15 are Kuwaiti, 13 are Jordanian, and a handful are from other Arab countries, including a few young men who had lived in France, Denmark, and Spain.

Many of the jihadists profiled held good jobs or were well-educated...
.....
[M]issing are some of the issues most commonly cited as driving anti-Americanism in the Arab world. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict barely registers on the jihadist radar, and Abu Ghraib merits few mentions. The motivation for jihad is almost always, in keeping with Salafi ideology, the plight of the humiliated Muslim nation, victimized by the joint evil forces of kufr (unbelief, embodied by the United States as the enemy bent on the destruction of Islam) and tawaghit (tyrants who have set themselves up, or are propped up, as gods on earth).
.....
They are even less comfortable articulating the fact that the vast majority of victims in suicide bombings are ordinary Iraqis. Take the description of Walid Al Asmar Al Shammari's death: "Walid Al Asmar Al Shammari was martyred in Iraq on 14 June, 2004... His family received condolences in Hail, northern Saudi Arabia, after they got a call from Iraq confirming his death when he carried out an operation with a car bomb. He drove it into a crowded area in central Baghdad last Tuesday. In addition to Al Shammari, the operation killed 16 people, including two Britons, a Frenchman, and an American." The other twelve were Iraqis but were not identified as such, a telling omission.

That omission suggests a critical weakness in the jihadist movement and its recruitment efforts. Imagine how the biography of the "hero" Al Shammari would read if it were juxtaposed with the biographies of the people he killed? What might readers in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and elsewhere in the Arab world make of a companion volume to "The Martyrs" in which each suicide bomber faced his victims, not as statistics in a war against the infidels, but as individuals in their own right? No such expanded edition is likely forthcoming from Muhib Al Jihad and his ilk. Perhaps it's a job for those fighting them.

(Thanks: TH.)