Suicide bombing wait list? Must be the Saudis ...

Saudi members of ISIL are apparently using nepotism to ensure friends and family members get bumped to the top of suicide bombing wait lists, according to a frustrated Chechen extremist. In a recent post on the website Qonah, which is believed to be linked to a Chechen ISIL battalion, a poster named Kamil Abu Sultan ad-Daghestani complained that Chechens are being robbed of their hard-earned chance to blow themselves up because of the Saudis. Abu Sultan wrote that one of these fighters told his leader, “Those Saudis have got things sewn up. They won’t let anyone in. They are letting their relatives go to the front of the line using blat (connections),” according a translation on the Radio Free Europe website. A recent ISIL guidebook explicitly mentioned the high supply of suicide bombers, telling potential “martyrs” to be patient after their training period, as they’d have to deal with a waiting list. Some of these militants have become so desperate to get to the top of the list that they’ve travelled to different areas of the battlefield in hopes of speeding up the process, according to the post. “Amir (leader) al-Shishani told me about a young lad who went to Iraq for a suicide mission, and he went there because in Sham (Syria) there is a very long queue (of several thousand people).” A British ISIL member first revealed suicide bombing waiting lists during a July 2014 BBC Panorama episode. The fighter, Kabir Ahmed, was in Syria during the time of the interview, and told the BBC that he was trying to “get his name pushed up the list.” Ahmed’s efforts were successful after a move to Iraq, where he killed himself and a senior police official during a suicide-bombing mission in November.