I Was Told to Come Alone Read online

  How he and the others got there was a story in itself. They worked with jihadist facilitators who functioned like travel agents, helping connect them to smugglers and giving them the address of a safe house in Iraq.

  Abu Ibrahim spoke of his growing disaffection with his parents: “I started to tell them that God wants us to give up our lives for jihad. They didn’t like it. They told me, ‘You’re still too young. Wait.’ You know how mothers and fathers are. They didn’t want to hear such things.”

  Carrying only a duffel filled with clothes, he paid eleven dollars for a seat in a shared cab to the Syrian border. The Jordanian border guards didn’t ask many questions, he said, and neither did their Syrian counterparts. He showed us his passport, which confirmed he’d entered Syria the previous fall.

  He broke after six days in a dark and drafty Syrian jail, telling officials how he’d made his way from a hotel in Damascus to the Iraqi border via bus. His plan had been to find a smuggler who he’d been told could spirit him across the border for $150. But the police dragged him off the bus for questioning, detaining him before he had the chance to find the man.

  “Later, they put me in a cell with other prisoners and most of them had been less religious ones, so we, the religious ones, took one corner and we prayed and talked about the Koran,” he said.

  Three weeks later, the Syrians handed him over to Jordanian authorities. “I became much stronger,” he said of his time in prison. “But most of the days I was very upset I didn’t arrive, and I pray to God that he will get me what I wish to get.”

  Back in Zarqa, his parents told him it was enough. God didn’t want him to go to Iraq, they said. He should stay home and get married. “It is hard to leave our families,” Abu Ibrahim said. “But it is our duty, and if we don’t defend our religion who should do it? The old people or the children?”

  He had returned to something resembling a normal life, working with his brothers during the day and hanging out with like-minded friends at night. They would visit Islamic websites and talk about the news from Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq.

  Asked to name his enemies, Abu Ibrahim said, “First, the Shia. Second, the Americans. Third, anywhere in the world where Islam is threatened.”

  * * *

  THE DAY OUR story was published, when I was back home in Germany, I got a text message from one of the militants we had interviewed in Zarqa. “To the beautiful rose,” it read in Arabic. “When I think of you and you are far away, my heart starts bleeding from the pain. The one who sees you once, he will always carry you in his heart.”

  I was sure he’d sent me the wrong message by mistake. It was embarrassing, so I decided to ignore it. Then a second message arrived. “Why can’t I take you to my garden?”

  I called him. “Sheikh, I am sorry,” I said, “but I am getting some text messages from you, maybe by mistake?”

  “Souad, no, I must admit, you are in my thoughts, you have entered my heart. It is a feeling so strong I can’t hide it.”

  I thanked him for his honesty, but I reminded him that he had a beautiful wife and several children, adding, “May God always give them good health.” I told him that I was going into a meeting and would have to call him back.

  I hung up and called Michael in New York. When I told him about the texts, he started laughing. “You must let us know before it gets serious,” he said, “so we can make plans for the wedding in Zarqa.”

  7

  The Value of a Life

  Algeria, 2008

  In December 2007, militants staged twin suicide truck bombings in Algiers, outside a government building and the United Nations headquarters, killing 41 and injuring 170. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb claimed responsibility for the attacks, the latest in a series of ambitious assaults against the government and Western interests in Algeria.

  Islamist militants had been active in Algeria for decades, but their affiliation with global jihadist groups like Al Qaeda was relatively recent. A powerful local insurgent movement had existed in Algeria since 1830, when France invaded and colonized the North African country. The Algerians finally won their independence in 1962 after a brutal eight-year war that cost as many as three hundred thousand Algerian lives.

  After more than twenty-five years of authoritarian socialism and increasing social unrest, an Islamist party known as the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) swept the 1991 elections. To hold on to power, the secular Algerian military staged a coup, imposed martial law, and banned and repressed the FIS. In time, the most radical members of the FIS split off and formed the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which pursued urban guerrilla actions. At the heart of the GIA were some fifteen hundred Algerian Islamists who had returned home from the battlefields of Afghanistan.

  The GIA went to war against the military government, aiming to end the secular state and establish Sharia law, a war that left more than a hundred thousand dead. But by the end of the decade the GIA had splintered; one of the branches, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC), turned to kidnapping, smuggling, and human trafficking to bring in cash, but the GSPC soon found itself running low on money and weapons.

  In 2004, a GSPC commander named Abdelmalek Droukdal became the group’s emir. That fall, he got in touch with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. The Algerians needed support, Droukdal told him. In return, their organization would become an Al Qaeda franchise, operating under the distant leadership of Osama bin Laden. In 2006, the alliance between the GSPC and Al Qaeda became official. A year later, Droukdal announced the group was changing its name to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM.

  This evolution had happened in plain sight, but no journalist had managed to talk to Droukdal or gain deep insight into what quickly became one of Al Qaeda’s most powerful regional affiliates. I had been talking to one of Droukdal’s deputies, who thought it might be possible for me to interview Droukdal if I came to Algeria. In the spring of 2008, a few months after the Algiers bombings, Michael Moss and I decided to make the trip together.

  Michael learned about an American business delegation going to Algeria and asked the organizers if we could tag along. We were curious: Which politicians would the delegation meet? How would they handle security, given the recent attacks and kidnappings? The delegation also offered us some cover, a reason to be in the country so that we could learn more about the militants without arousing undue suspicion from intelligence agencies.

  We arrived in Algiers near the end of May and checked into the hotel where the delegation was staying. The Americans were telecom and oil industry executives, most of whom had never been to Algeria before and knew little about its history or recent political upheaval. From their five-star hotel, the country looked peaceful and prosperous.

  Two men in the group stood out. They said they ran an Internet company that specialized in telecommunications. It sounded a little vague, but we didn’t inquire too deeply. They were tall, handsome, and fit; they spent a lot of time in the hotel gym, and one told me he had previously worked as a hand model. They sought out Michael and me, and sometimes joined us for dinner. The former hand model was especially charming and gentlemanly, opening doors for me and pulling out my chair when we ate together.

  Things seemed normal, but I felt certain that we were being watched. I’d been to Algeria before, and I knew that there, as elsewhere in the region, intelligence services took a keen interest in foreign visitors, especially journalists. While reporting on Laid Saidi, the Algerian who had been held alongside Khaled el-Masri in Afghanistan, I’d spoken to Algerian human rights activists and lawyers who advised me never to leave anything in my hotel room. Even while you sleep, they told me, intelligence operatives come in and take things.

  I always took precautions after that, and most of the time I carried everything with me. While I was sleeping, I slid my computer, phone, passport, a notebook full of contact numbers, and a flash drive under my pillows before turning in.

  Michael and I tried to get rooms next door to each other, but
this time, his was at the other end of the corridor. On our second night in the country, we said good night at about 11:00 p.m., and I fell into a sound sleep. Sometime later, I heard the door click open. A very small, soft light floated into the room. After a few seconds, the door closed again, very softly. Exhausted, I quickly fell back asleep. When I woke early the next morning, I thought I must have dreamed it. Then I noticed that the spare notebook I’d left on a table in my room was gone. Fortunately, I hadn’t yet written anything in it. That night, before getting into bed, I stacked two chairs against the door.

  We spent a few days in Algiers, talking to people about the security situation and joining the American delegation for meetings with Algerian businesspeople and government officials. At one of those gatherings, a government minister insisted that the country was ready for foreign tourism. “Take a car and go to Jijel, go to Boumerdès,” he said. “It’s very nice, and it’s all very safe.”

  “The minister says we should go and take a look,” I told Michael later. “So let’s go.”

  We would travel with our driver and a coordinator from a major international nongovernmental organization, who asked us not to identify his employer. The coordinator, an Algerian, had agreed to take us to the area around Naciria, where AQIM had a presence. Algeria’s wealth rarely trickled down, and the locals in Naciria felt forgotten by the central government, which they viewed as corrupt and punitive.

  The morning began promisingly, when we managed to shake off the secret police, who had been following us since the day we’d landed in Algiers. These police weren’t hard to spot. I’d tell our driver to go around a traffic circle three times, and if a car followed us around all three times, I knew we were being tailed.

  On the way to the NGO compound, I told our driver to pull into a gas station. The car behind us passed by and made a U-turn farther down the road. The driver likely thought we would spend a few minutes getting gas. Instead, we quickly pulled out, leaving the other car behind. The police eventually found their way to the NGO compound and waited outside, but the place had two exits, and we left through a different gate than the one we’d come in.

  Naciria was more than an hour north of the capital, in the direction of the mountains. I’d made contact with my source in AQIM, a commander in charge of the group’s media operations, to let him know we’d be in the area, but we didn’t schedule an appointment. If we met, it would be on short notice so as not to alert the authorities, who might be watching.

  My source and I had devised what seemed, at the time, a novel and safe way to communicate. We avoided the phone completely. At first, we had been in touch by regular email. But at some point, worried about government surveillance, he and I had set up a joint email account using a German provider. We both had the log-in and password, which meant that we never had to send each other a message. Instead, as former CIA director David Petraeus and his mistress would do years later, we wrote emails and left them in the drafts folder, where each of us could log in and read them.

  As an Algerian, our friend from the NGO felt a personal connection to the communities he helped, and he was outraged by the economic inequality in the area we were visiting. He told us that young Algerians particularly resented the government’s penchant for importing Chinese workers instead of using local labor.

  On the way to Naciria, we stopped to talk to some of his colleagues, who were handing out children’s clothing and groceries to poor families. One of the recipients was a woman with a mentally challenged son about four or five years old. Her husband had died, and she said there were no services for her child and that she didn’t get any support from the government. If it weren’t for the NGO, she told us, she wouldn’t be able to feed her children. Dilemmas like these, our guide told us, were part of what convinced boys from poor families to join AQIM. People had nothing, and they didn’t trust the government to take care of them.

  Our driver was a bit nervous about the trip to Naciria. He didn’t ordinarily work with journalists but had recently lost his job, so he was helping us out. I told him to keep his ID cards and car registry documents ready in the well under the radio. If the police stopped us, he was to let me do the talking.

  For security reasons and so as not to get our guide in trouble, we’d taken two cars. That way, if we wanted to stay on and do interviews after the NGO workers left, we wouldn’t inconvenience them. Michael and I sat in the backseat of the first car, a white Renault, while our driver and the NGO coordinator sat in front. The VW bus behind us, packed with food and clothes, carried the Algerian woman and two Algerian men who had been handing out aid. They were locals who had worked with the organization for many years.

  By then, it must have been about midday. We were driving toward Boumerdès when we saw a police checkpoint. An officer stopped us and asked our driver for his identity papers.

  The driver opened the door and started to move his right hand down his back, as if he were reaching for something in his back pocket.

  “Stop! Don’t move!” the policeman yelled, pointing his AK-47 at the driver, his finger on the trigger.

  “Please don’t shoot!” I screamed. I turned to the driver. “You idiot, what are you doing with your hand?”

  “I have the documents in my back pocket,” he said.

  “The idiot has the documents in his back pocket,” I shouted to the policeman. Then I heard Michael say my name slowly in a worried voice. Turning toward him, I saw that his hands were raised and that another policeman was pointing an AK-47 at his head. To my right, yet another policeman was pointing an assault rifle at me. I also put my hands up and screamed at the driver, “You idiot! Didn’t I tell you to keep them in front? Do you want to kill us?”

  I knew we were in mortal danger. The police were nervous and trigger-happy. I screamed at the driver because I was scared but also because I suspected that if the police saw a man taking orders from a woman, they would know he wasn’t a jihadi. I turned to the policemen and said, “It’s okay, officers and friends! We aren’t terrorists.” They looked a little surprised, and I thought, Yes, who the hell would say this to the police? “This idiot driver has his documents in his back pocket, so please, if you need to see them, he has to reach behind him.”

  They finally allowed him to get out of the car and searched him while we waited. Armed police still surrounded us. Then they asked him to open the trunk. “These people in the car with you, are they foreigners?” the police asked.

  “Yes, yes, they are foreigners,” he replied.

  “That’s it, friend,” I whispered to Michael. “We’re done.”

  “You need to come to the police station,” one of the cops said. He asked Michael to move over so he could sit in back with us.

  One police car led the way and the other drove behind the second car in our convoy. I was more worried for the Algerians, our driver, and the NGO workers than for us.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked the policeman sitting with us.

  “No,” he answered in Arabic.

  I turned to Michael and told him in English that we would now be taken to the police station. Still speaking English, we agreed to try to ask as many questions of the police as possible while not revealing immediately that we were journalists. We also agreed that we would take full responsibility for keeping the locals out of trouble.

  “So what were you guys doing here?” the police chief asked when we got to the station.

  I said that we were traveling with this NGO, which was helping us to learn about its work and the area.

  “Here? In this region? Are you out of your mind?”

  I translated to Michael, who said, “Okay, keep asking them why.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with this region?” I asked.

  “Lady, this is Al Qaeda land. Don’t you know we are having lots of attacks here?”

  “Really? Who is attacking you?”

  “Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Droukdal and his people,” the police chief said.


  “You got Al Qaeda here?” I tried to play naïve.

  “Yes, of course. You see these pictures here?” He turned around and motioned toward three pictures, each showing the face of a different man. “These are my men, who have been killed by Al Qaeda. But wait. First let me ask, who are you?”

  He began with the Algerians, asking for their ID cards and affiliations. When he got to Michael, he asked me, “Is he American or what? And you?” I told him my name and said that I was a German citizen.

  “Mukhnet?” he asked.

  “No, no, Mekhennet.”

  “Yes, Mukhnet. Where does this name come from?”

  I gave up trying to get him to pronounce my name correctly. When I told him I was Moroccan German, he turned to the Algerian NGO workers.

  “Are you guys crazy or what, bringing a Moroccan woman and an American man to this area?” he asked.

  I interrupted, trying to deflect his anger from the Algerians. “Sir, they didn’t bring us. We asked them to take us. We wanted to see the region here and the work these NGOs are doing.” I didn’t lie, but of course also didn’t tell him that we knew the region had suffered from terrorism.

  “Wanted to see the region? And if anything happens to you guys? Lady, you don’t know these people. They will kidnap you and force you to marry one of them and ask for ransom for the American, and then I will have his president and your king asking for my head.”

  We all started laughing.

  “That’s nothing to laugh about,” he said in an angry voice. “Maybe I should take you guys downstairs and give you some chickpeas. Would you like to eat some chickpeas?”

  The Algerian NGO workers grew very quiet and looked at the ground. I translated to Michael: “Wow, he asks if we want to eat chickpeas.”

  I turned to the police chief. I was excited about eating chickpeas, the way I knew them from my childhood in Morocco. My grandmother would sometimes cook chickpeas and add cumin and a bit of salt for me.