“We can’t lie to our commanders: they can check to see if there was a fight in that area. We get money if we capture equipment too. A gun can fetch $1,000 [£690],” said a commander from Khost province who controls about 60 fighters.
The money usually reaches commanders via the traditional hawala transfer system found in many Muslim countries. They then share it among their men and sometimes celebrate with a feast.
“It’s a lot of money for us. We don’t care if we kill foreigners: their blood allows us to feed our families and the more we kill, the more we weaken them. Of course we are going to celebrate this,” said a commander from Ghazni province.
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This post is about what the enemy is doing to create an industry out of killing us. This is a disgusting topic to go over, but I still think it is important to study what the enemy is doing and learn from it. ‘Know your enemy’ is what I am all about, and this is what I am attempting to do here.
So let’s talk about this. I guess the big difference between our bounty system, and their bounty system, is that they actually want people to either kill or capture folks and that there are no legal restrictions for that process. It is the purest form of a free market based killing mechanism.
The west though are the only ones in this fight putting restrictions on how the bounty system is to be used, and in turn making the bounty system ineffective in my opinion. We have a 50 million dollar bounty on Usama Bin Laden’s head, but the only way to collect on it is that you can only give information on his whereabouts. A company or individual could not go after UBL and kill or capture him because the west abhors such things. It infringes on this so-called monopoly on the use of force that the we love to embrace, and meanwhile our enemies are mocking us.