In Iran, Terrorism Remains A Matter of Perspective

Tehran Tries to Shed Radical Image as 'Army of Martyrs' Forms

ALAMUT, Iran -- One man's terrorist is another man's herbalist, Ali Reza Safari said, leaning against a wall of the ancient castle that illustrates his point.

From the daunting fortification that looms over the valley here, a ruler named Hassan Sabah 900 years ago dispatched young men who believed so ardently in his vision of Islam that they gave up their own lives in order to snuff out those of their enemies. Hassan Sabah's sect first defined the word "assassin."

But in recent years, scholars have seized on the way Hassan Sabah managed to make fear a weapon in itself. Using stealth, discipline and patience, his small group of fanatics spooked governments into restricting the entry of camel caravans, among other immigration barriers.

"They may well be the world's first terrorists," wrote Bernard Lewis, a Middle East scholar and Princeton University professor emeritus.

"I am illiterate," said Safari, 75, gazing diplomatically at the ground before him. "I haven't read any books. What I know I heard from my father and grandfather.

"Hassan Sabah was a good man," he declared. "He helped the poor. He planted herb gardens. And because he was a saint, he could make the medicine himself. He treated everybody."

When it comes to terrorism, perspective is almost everything in Iran.

The Islamic government that rules this country routinely rates as the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism in the State Department annual report. Iran rejects the label and insists the organizations that it supports, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, are resistance groups.

And if that distinction often ends up lost in the bloody debris, in recent years Iran has nonetheless taken conspicuous pains to shed its radical image. It arrested al Qaeda operatives from neighboring Afghanistan who had found refuge here, discontinued attacks on U.S. targets and, earlier this year, erased from street signs the name of the man who assassinated President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981.

So heads turned this month when the Army of Martyrs of the International Islamic Movement made its public debut.

The group, which claims to be private, began gathering the signatures of Iranians who would be willing to become suicide bombers. So far, the group says, 15,000 people have completed a one-page form headed "Preliminary Registration for Martyrdom Operations." The form has space for a phone number and asks applicants to indicate whether they would prefer to explode themselves against U.S. forces in sacred Shiite Muslim cities in Iraq or Israeli forces in the Palestinian territories, or to kill Salman Rushdie, the author who went into hiding for years after a religious edict demanded his death for mocking Islam in his book "The Satanic Verses."

Mohammad Ali Samadi, the group's spokesman, said he believed the number of volunteers "could rise to a million, and we have serious concerns about our capacity to support that many people."

The gravity of this threat is widely questioned here.

Diplomats, Iranian analysts and -- when pressed -- even Samadi acknowledge that the Army of Martyrs movement exists chiefly for public relations. The group solicited news coverage when U.S. troops were pursuing insurgents in the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, the two most sacred cities in Shiite Islam, the official religion of Iran. But as the troops receded, so did what Samadi called the "sensitivity" of the Iranian public.