I Was Told to Come Alone Page 15

  6

  The Lost Boys of Zarqa

  Jordan, 2007

  The war in Iraq created a sectarian rift in the Middle East on a scale not seen since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Iran had always sparred with its neighbors, but those had been conflicts between nations. Now, Sunni militants in Syria and Jordan recruited suicide bombers from around the world, not just to fight the Americans in Iraq but to fight the Iraqi Shia as well.

  In Zarqa, Jordan, the hometown of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, this narrative was unfolding in real time. While I was talking with Shaker al-Abssi in Lebanon, a source in Zarqa got in touch and told me about a group of young men—all friends from the same neighborhood—who had gone to fight in Iraq, where suicide bombings were averaging more than forty a month. “One of them is my cousin’s son,” the contact told me.

  My source was an Islamist community leader in his early fifties whom I’ll call Abu Yasmina. He felt that the American invasion of Iraq had opened the door to vast Iranian influence in the region, which was motivating young men in Zarqa and elsewhere to join the jihadi struggle. For many Sunnis, Shia power and Western intervention were equally oppressive. Abu Yasmina didn’t support the young men’s decision to fight, but he understood it.

  “Zarqawi was a terrorist,” he told me, but he believed that Iran and the West had turned him into a hero for many young people.

  In March 2007, shortly after my visit to Abssi, Michael and I traveled to Zarqa and met with Abu Yasmina in his modest home. He served us small cups of Arabic coffee with cardamom and Jordanian pistachio sweets soaked in honey and sugar water.

  “Most of these young people … when they see the news and what is going on in the Islamic countries, they themselves feel that they have to go fight jihad,” he told us. “Today, you don’t need anyone to tell young men that they should go to jihad. They themselves want to be martyrs.” Was this what Abssi had meant when he said that this new generation thought the West was at war with Sunni Islam?

  Abssi’s words and what I would see in Zarqa raised the specter of an epic battle between Sunni and Shia that had already spread far beyond the boundaries of Iraq. The war was a Pandora’s box whose contents might transform global Muslim identity. No longer would people ask, are you Arab or Iranian? Instead they would ask, are you Sunni or Shia?

  Michael and I wanted to talk to the young men who had left Zarqa to fight in Iraq, at least the ones who were still alive, and their families. I had another source in town, a former close aide to Zarqawi, who offered to help. I met him alone at a coffee shop in the middle of a busy shopping area.

  “I talked to the brothers, and they are okay with meeting you for sure, but some of them were nervous about your colleague the American.”

  I explained that we wanted to understand how these young men had been recruited and how they’d gotten to Iraq. And I asked for guidance. I needed him to tell me when things were getting too dangerous, when it would be possible to take Michael along, and when I would need to work on my own.

  “Insha’Allah all will be fine,” he said. He looked at the long wide trousers and long shirt I was wearing, the same clothes I’d worn in Iraq. “Is this how you wanted to meet them?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Come with me.”

  I followed him to a nearby shop. Long scarves in all colors were on display in the window, as well as different styles of abayas, all black, but made of different kinds of cloth.

  He looked around, touching the fabric, and saying things like “This feels like it was made in China,” or “This will be too warm.” Finally, he held one up. “This one, I think, would be right for you.”

  I felt my eyes widen. This man with a long beard and traditional Arab clothes, a man who preached the gospel of an Iranian-American war against Sunnis in Iraq, was holding an abaya covered with sequins and pink embroidery, the funkiest one in the shop. He even insisted on paying for it.

  “Let me pay for this, please, Sheikh,” I told him, explaining that as a journalist I couldn’t accept a gift from one of my sources.

  “You are crazy,” he said.

  “I have to pay for it, but you chose it, so thank you for that,” I told him.

  “May this one bring you good luck, and you will always be dressed right for these brothers,” he said, laughing.

  I still wear that abaya for difficult interviews. In some circles, the fact that one of Zarqawi’s deputies chose it wins me added respect; in others, it’s just a good conversation starter.

  Michael and I were staying in Amman, about fifteen miles from Zarqa. On what we hoped would be our first morning of interviews, we met the Islamist community leader Abu Yasmina at his house. He had good news. Some of the families of the young men who’d gone to fight in Iraq had agreed to meet with us.

  The six young men had all been between nineteen and twenty-four years old. Some had known each other as small children. Their jihadi adventures were no secret in the neighborhood; everyone knew what they’d done and what had happened to them. Two apparently had died as suicide bombers, and a third by gunfire; one had been arrested by the Americans and was being held in Iraq; two others had been turned back.

  Michael and I wanted to talk to as many of those involved as we could: the families of those who had left; the people who’d recruited them; and, if possible, one of the men who had been sent back home.

  Abu Yasmina said that two of the families were open to talking, but he added, “I doubt that you’ll be able to meet the other ones.” He didn’t know that my other friend the Zarqawi aide was already working on that.

  “Insha’Allah khair, God willing, all will be good,” I said.

  Dressed in my new abaya, I drove with Michael and Abu Yasmina to a house nearby. A man who looked to be in his early sixties opened the door and invited us in. Other men stood behind him in the hall. The first thing we saw were two large photographs on the wall showing the faces of two young men who looked a bit alike.

  “These were my sons,” the older man told us. “They both died in Iraq. Jihad, the older one, in 2005, and Amer just weeks ago.”

  I looked at the pictures. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

  “Why sorry?” said one of the men in the hallway. “He has to be happy. His sons are martyrs now.” He gave me an angry look.

  The forty-day mourning period for Amer was still under way, and the men filling the house were neighbors who had come to pay their respects. People in this neighborhood didn’t see young men like Amer and Jihad as terrorists but as heroes who had been forced into a war of self-defense. In front of his neighbors, their father had to pretend he was proud of their sacrifice. But I could see that he was deeply hurt. From time to time, tears filled his eyes. He didn’t look proud; he looked broken.

  He led us to a different room. I understood that he didn’t want to speak to us in front of his visitors. His name was Kasem, and he’d had six sons, including the two he’d lost. “Amer left without even telling us,” he said. “He was just nineteen years old.”

  Amer had been very close to his older brother Jihad, whose name could either mean “struggle” or stand for the Islamic obligation to defend the faith. When Jihad died fighting in Fallujah in 2005, Amer was seventeen years old, a senior in high school, his father said. He started reading religious books.

  Shortly thereafter, Amer made his first trip to Iraq. He called his family when he got there. His father sent two of Amer’s older brothers to fetch him. “I was thinking and hoping that we lost one son and that was enough. But I could tell Amer was thinking, ‘This life doesn’t count anymore, and I will follow the way of my brother,’” Kasem told us.

  He stood up, left the room, and came back with a tray with sweets, coffee, and tea. When he bent down to pour the coffee into cups, I saw his hands shaking.

  “Please allow me,” I said. “You’ve been too kind already to welcome us to your house.”

  Kasem sat back in the chair. “No, I need to thank you. Please t
ell the stories of my sons, so other families don’t lose theirs,” he said. “I lost my sons because of the false politics of America, and thousands of other parents did, too.”

  He told us about the struggle he and his wife had, trying to hold Amer back from going to Iraq. They even offered to find him a wife.

  “No, this is not important to me,” Amer told them. “Jihad is.”

  Amer left again for Iraq the previous October, toward the end of Ramadan, when border security is looser. Shortly afterward, his parents received a letter he’d written before leaving and handed off to a contact in Jordan to send. He was going to fight for the sake of Allah, he wrote. He would reach martyrdom and he would see his parents again in heaven. He asked them to pray for him and not to mourn. As on his first trip, he phoned home three weeks after he’d left to tell them he’d made it to Iraq.

  They heard nothing further from Amer until one of his brothers got a call in January. A man told him that Amer had been killed when the bomb in the truck he was driving exploded. There were reports of a truck bombing in Kirkuk on the day Amer is believed to have died, but his family didn’t know for sure whether he was the bomber.

  I asked the father if he knew who Amer’s friends were or where he used to pray.

  “Yes, I know some of them, but they didn’t come to our home often,” he said. “He used to go to the mosque of Sheikh Abu Anas because the sheikh gave good Friday sermons.”

  We said good-bye, and Michael, Abu Yasmina, and I drove to visit the next family, who lived nearby. This house was smaller, the family less prosperous. The young man’s mother showed us into a small room, where we sat on mattresses on the floor.

  Her son, a twenty-year-old engineering student, was missing. He was one of seventeen children born into a poor family. His father was old and asthmatic, with a persistent cough and missing teeth. The family had heard that their son had gone to Iraq, but they had no proof. We asked his mother if we could see some of his things, any possessions he’d cared about.

  “All he did was read and study,” she said. She brought us a physics book, and as she showed it to us she began to cry. She was absolutely sure, she said, that her son had gone to Iraq to study and work. She’d heard about other boys who had gone to fight but was adamant that her son couldn’t be one of them, unless someone had tricked him. The family begged us not to print his name for fear of jeopardizing his future, should he return.

  The young man’s sister sat with us that day, but out of respect for her mother she said little. Later, though, we talked on the phone, and she told me that her brother was being held in an American prison in Iraq. The family had received a letter from him, delivered by the Red Cross. He said that he wanted to let them know he was alive and sent his regards.

  About two years before he disappeared, his sister said, she’d noticed a change in him. “He stopped listening to music. He isolated himself from us. At family gatherings, he sat by himself, thinking.”

  The young man felt pressure to excel but believed he couldn’t build a successful career for himself in Zarqa, she said. Wealthier students at his university had their own apartments, while he lived at home to save money. He wanted to study medicine, but he’d failed to win a scholarship to continue his schooling in England. “He wanted to be somebody,” his sister told me, “and he couldn’t.”

  He and his sister had talked about the war in Iraq, which he described as a battle against Muslims, particularly Sunnis. He knew his family would oppose his going there.

  When we visited the family, I asked the young man’s mother the same question I’d put to Amer’s father: Had she known her son’s friends?

  “No. How should I know them?” she asked. “Our home is not large enough for his friends to come here. We are not rich.”

  She said her son had attended the same mosque that Amer’s father had mentioned, and he listened to the same imam.

  “The imam is living just here in the neighborhood, not far from us,” the young man’s father said.

  I asked if he could show us the way, but he said he had a better idea. “Let me get him for you.” He stood up and left the house, returning five minutes later with a man in a sparkling white tunic and wide-legged pajama pants.

  “As’salam alaikum,” the imam said. “I heard you were looking for me.”

  He had glasses and a beard, and his skin was very dark, almost black. He didn’t seem the slightest bit aggressive. In fact, he was very friendly. His name was Ahmad Salah, but he went by Abu Anas. We learned that Zarqawi had prayed at his mosque before leaving to fight in Iraq. Michael and I couldn’t believe our luck.

  Our host invited the imam to sit and offered him coffee. Abu Anas said the young engineering student had prayed at his mosque and tutored youngsters in the Koran. He said that if he had known his plans, he would have tried to talk him out of going to Iraq.

  “It’s very difficult at the moment,” Abu Anas said. “If you do a suicide operation, the Muslims are mixed up with non-Muslims, and maybe you [will] kill Muslims.”

  But he didn’t consider the Shia to be Muslims. Like Abssi, he called them Rafidah, an insulting term. In his view, the Shia were killing Sunnis, which made them legitimate targets for retribution. “They hate Sunnis and will do everything to destroy us. That’s their mission,” he said.

  As I translated, I noticed the lanyard around Michael’s neck. I knew that he liked to carry important documents and flash drives on a lanyard, and the one he wore today was yellow with green Arabic lettering.

  I knew this lanyard. We had bought it together in the Dahia neighborhood in Beirut a month earlier. Lots of fighters and their families from the Shia militia Hezbollah lived in that area, and the neighborhood had its own security service provided by the group.

  On one of our visits to the neighborhood, our driver, Hussein, took us to a shop that sold Hezbollah flags, books, and DVDs featuring the speeches of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. There were lighters, wallets, and computer cases, all with the yellow flag and green Arabic letters of “Hezbollah”; some even had pictures of Nasrallah’s face. The store also sold lanyards that people used to carry keys. “That is very practical for flash drives,” Michael said. We bought some, along with a few other souvenirs, as tongue-in-cheek gifts for colleagues back in New York.

  Now Michael was speaking to a preacher who had clearly inspired young men to fight in Iraq and who couldn’t help showing his hatred against the Shia. I needed to warn Michael before anyone else noticed.

  “Sheikh, what do you think about Hezbollah?” I asked the preacher. They had been heroes to many Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, during their war with Israel, so it seemed fair to ask.

  “Hezbollah? They are the devil’s soldiers. They hate us. They are very bad, and anyone who supports them is an enemy of Islam.”

  I turned to Michael to translate. I spoke much more slowly and in a louder voice than usual.

  “He says, Hezbollah”—I pronounced the word very slowly—“are the devil’s soldiers, they hate us, they are very bad and anyone who supports them”—now my eyes opened wider and I put my hands up at my neck while looking at Michael—“is an enemy of Islam.”

  Michael looked at me questioningly. “Okay,” he said and then made small circles next to his head, as if to say, “Are you nuts, or what?”

  “He said Hezbollah is very bad, you got that right? Enemies of Islam.”

  He still didn’t get it, so I turned toward him and whispered, “Dude, you are wearing the Hezbollah band around your neck. Go to the bathroom and take it off.”

  Michael nodded and excused himself.

  “So you are working on a story about Zarqa?” the sheikh asked me when Michael was gone.

  “In fact, Sheikh, it’s about the boys who have left and their families and all who knew them.”

  “You must come for tea today to my house. I can show you more of what these Shia are doing to us, these Rafidah,” he said.

  “Thank you, Sheikh. We are
happy to visit you at home.”

  “You don’t need to call me ‘Sheikh,’” he said. “Just call me Abu Anas.”

  When Michael came back from the bathroom, I saw that the lanyard was gone.

  * * *

  DURING THE TIME we’d worked together, Michael and I had grown close. When I visited the United States, he invited me to his home in Brooklyn, where I met his wife, Eve, and their two sons. I had promised Eve that Michael’s security and safety would be the priority wherever we went.

  But the more time we spent in Zarqa, the more unsettled I felt. I watched the faces of residents in Abu Anas’s neighborhood when they saw an American man walking with an Arab woman in an abaya. I saw anger and hatred in their eyes: What are those two doing here?

  In his home, Abu Anas showed us a newly released video titled “The True History and Aims of the Shia.” It showed Shia clerics in Iraq and Iran apparently insulting Aisha, one of the wives of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as some of the Prophet’s companions. It was impossible to tell whether the video had been manipulated, but according to the voice-over the men were calling Aisha a prostitute. Their anger at Aisha had its roots in the old schism between Sunni and Shia Islam.

  The video showed scenes of Sunnis tortured and killed by a Shia militia in Iraq. Sunnis from Iraq spoke about the alleged abuses and asked their “Sunni brothers” to come and help. The video clearly enraged Abu Anas. The Shia “have traditions that are un-Islamic and they hate the Sunnis,” he told us. “We didn’t see the Shia like that before, but now in Iraq, they showed their real face.”

  When the Shia in the video insulted Sunni caliphs, calling them sons of whores, Abu Anas turned to me. “Did you hear what they said about Abu Bakr and Omar?” he asked.

  “Yes, I did, but Sheikh, not every Shia thinks like that, and then there are even Shia from the Ahl al-Bayt, descendants of the Prophet, and you said you honor the Prophet, no?” I was thinking of my mother and her family.