Would-be suicide bombers got to meet their 72 virgins a bit early Monday when their clumsy tutor accidentally detonated an explosives-packed car during a how-to-bomb lesson at their Iraqi terror camp.
The blast, at a training camp disguised in an orchard in a Sunni area north of Baghdad, killed the instructor and 20 of his students, Iraqi officials said.
Security forces who rushed to the scene because of the deafening explosion arrested 22 men who tried to flee, several of them wounded by the blast.
The security officers searched two houses and a garage in the camp, and found a stockpile of terrorist weapons, including seven vehicles prepared to serve as car bombs, several explosive belts and handmade roadside bombs.
The camp, outside Samarra, was run by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, an extremist Sunni group that recently broke with al Qaeda and has specialized in car bombings, officials said.
A police officer said the camp members were attending a lesson on making car bombs and explosive belts when a glitch set off one of the devices.
Even more embarrassing was that the group was filming a propaganda video on how to conduct car-bomb attacks when the explosives detonated, according to Majeed Ali, the head of the Sahwa militia force in the city.
The instructor was described as a master recruiter and bomb maker for the ISIS.
Officials said camps like this explain the spike in sectarian violence in Iraq, which has become as bad as during the peak 2006-2007 period. More than 1,000 were killed across the country last month.
The Samarra camp was surprising because it was located just 60 miles from Baghdad, authorities said.
“The discovery shows that “the terrorist groups have made a strong comeback in Iraq and that the security problems are far from over, and things are heading from bad to worse,” said Hamid al-Mutlaq, a member of the Iraq parliament’s security and defense committee.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s parliamentary speaker, Osama al-Nujaifi, one of the most prominent Sunni officials in the country, escaped an assassination attempt in the northern city of Mosul.