What If Suicide Bombers Wage Wars in Luzon, Visayas

 By Mortz C. Ortigoza

While in a huddle with some politicians,TV reporter, radio commentators, and a priest who came to me and introduced himself that he reads my blog, I told them my apprehension how nerve wracking to the people in Luzon and Visayas in case a Muslim suicide bomber gets inside the huge Catholics’ Redemtionist Church in Baclaran, Pasay City, the Saint Therese Church in Dagupan City, or those churches  in Cebu City.

“Can you see the psychological effect to people in Luzon or in the Visayas in case a human clad with a vest of 10  to 20 kilograms of TNT and shrapnel blows himself just to kill dozens if not hundreds of parishioners,” I opined.

BOMBER - A feature of a suicide bomber with his lethal 5 to 20 kilograms of explosives. A packed vest or belt is armed with a detonator. The vest is usually packed with ball bearings, nails, screws, bolts, and other objects that serve as shrapnel to maximize the number of casualties in the explosion. (Photo grab from the internet)

My remarked was anchored on the television news recently that an Indonesian spouses blew themselves and killed 23 people in and out of the Mt. Carmel Cathedral in Jolo, Sulu and maimed and wounded 100 others mostly Christians, civilians and soldiers supposedly well-cordoned ala Israeli security blanket Catholic church.

In case radical Muslims, just like what they do in India, Afghanistan, Iraq, and in Indonesia, resort to this kind of warfare and wage it in Luzon, then we are damned and doomed, son of a gun!

Between 1981 and September 2015, a total of 4,814 suicide attacks occurred in over 40 countries killing over 45,000 people, according to Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (2016). During this time the global rate of such attacks grew from an average of three a year in the 1980s, to about one a month in the 1990s, to almost once a week from 2001 to 2003 (the Moral Logic and Growth of Suicide Terrorism) to approximately one a day from 2003 to 2015

This is another kind of warfare much different to the wars I saw and heard when I was a kid growing up in the 1970s with my soldier father in Cotabato and the latest urban warfare where the labyrinth of buildings, tunnels, and other mode resorted by the Maute group versus the state troopers in the devastated Marawi City.

These suicide freaks, especially the male Muslims, are motivated with the 72 virgins supposedly gift, by golly, from Allah in heaven where many of them want to be a martyr.

In their mind this gruesome death that “annihilate” those heretic Christians around them will reward them with six - dozen of these virgins  who probably look like South African and American actresses Charlize Theron (present GF of Brad Pitt) and Filipino “looker” Carla Abellana to copulate.

Son of a gun, if I will be a Muslim I will rather die a coward than indulge to sex with these 72 virgins. 
I fear dying in exhaustion since copulation as a condition should be done Till Kingdom  Come or forever with a little exception "ihi lang ang pahinga".

I dread to die in heaven like that stroke victim’s septuagenarian mayor in Pangasinan who was found by cops and funeral parlor attendants lifeless and naked in prostrate position against his very young mestiza but hysterical naked secretary at a motel in one of the cities of my province.

Suicide bombing is different and more lethal done those modern marvels’ weapons and gadgets I saw at the 2018 Asian Defence and Security (ADAS) Trade Show at the World Trade Center in Pasay City like the ReTWis (I will write a news on that interview later with the Czech top honchos) that becomes passé’ eventhough the venue was in Pasay.

The ReTWis, according to one of them, is a unique small portable radar detecting living entities behind a wall or non-metallic barrier.
An innovation against those Islamist radicals who hide in the buildings as they wage their wars ala those in Iraq and Chechnya in Russia.

Can we prevent this looming human bombing mayhem?

Here are some answers I read from New York Times titled “Preventing Suicide Bombing” and bylined in 2005 by Paul Tough.

One of the measures, according to Edward H. Kaplan, a professor of public health at Yale, was to heroically hug the bomber so both of the would be victim and the bad guy die in the explosion but will save the people around.

Damn, I will not do it since I still have a lot of things to write and expose for my beloved Filipino Nation especially against the greedy Pinoy senators who sold their souls to the oligarchs in the name of 60%-40% business equity that created a huge number of poorer Filipinos.

I will probably run as fast, and jumped just like over our 5 feet gate, as my father chased me when I was in high school with a tabas or panabas (a large, forward-curved sword or battle axe machete used by Muslim Maguindanaons) after I, intoxicated with tuba (coconut wine), threw stones at our house in Mindanao as my grievances to my  ram rod soldier father, a Korean War Vet, who punches me whenever I went home drank with Tanduay.
I digress again, salamabit!

 Kaplan collaborated my thesis in not hugging the bomber. The measures, he said, that I summarized from the article’s “Preventing Suicide Bombing” in the New York Times by lined by Paul Tough in 2005.

He pointed out, these physics create an unusual moral dilemma. If you suddenly find yourself next to a suicide bomber about to set off his charge, there is what he calls "a huge conflict between what's best for you as an individual and what's best for the group." Soon after his paper was published, Kaplan came across one blogger who had read about his research and concluded that the heroic thing to do in that situation would be to approach the bomber and hug him or her, sacrificing yourself but saving the lives of many people behind you.

“Not surprisingly, homeland security experts are still looking for other neutralization techniques, ones that don't involve hugging. And here there is another divide in the field. The association of police chiefs in the United States recommended that police on the scene simply shoot suspected bombers in the head,” Tough cited.

But Chaim Koppel, one of International Security & Defence Systems trainers, explained that it is extremely difficult to shoot someone in the head perfectly, and added that a shot to the head could in fact set off a suicide bomb as the bomber has his finger the detonator.

Koppel said there are other techniques to disarm a bomber, though, that don't involve guns. A company called International Security Defense Systems in Dallas, Texas offers antiterrorist advice to airlines and airports and employs several former high-ranking members of the Israeli security services. Koppel and his colleagues instead teach an array of moves based on Krav Maga, the self-defense martial art used by Israeli soldiers, that would disarm but not kill a potential bomber.

He explained that If a person is behind a bomber the best thing to do is grab him around the shins (part of the lower legs), lift up and push forward.

“The bomber will instinctively use his hands to block his fall. Once his hands are away from the trigger of his bomb, you grab them. If you are facing a bomber head-on, you use a different move, one that basically amounts to punching the bomber in the face and grabbing his hands. Violent, but certainly not deadly. And if you get the wrong person, as the London police did, you don't have a corpse on your hands,” he stressed.

  Koppel's colleague Clive Miskin quipped: "You brush his coat off and say you're sorry”.


READ MY OTHER COLUMN:

U.S Military Rescue Operation: Things Filipinos Could Learn

(You can read my selected columns at mortzortigoza.blogspot.com and articles at Pangasinan News Aro. You can send comments too at totomortz@yahoo.com)