A week later, Michael and I boarded a flight to Beirut. The city had always had a nostalgic attraction for me. As a child, my parents listened to famous Lebanese singers like Fairuz, and Beirut played a key role in the classic Arab movies my siblings and I grew up watching on VHS. In these films, Beirut was a beautiful, sunny place filled with unbelievably good-looking people. Lebanese women were chic and powerful; Lebanese men were famous for wooing them with poetry.
The movies were as formulaic as they were romantic: a man falls in love with a gorgeous, alluring woman in a short skirt, black eyeliner, and blue eye shadow, but some obstacle—usually a family conflict—keeps her from marrying him. For people of Arab descent, the movies were culturally familiar, yet they also celebrated Western freedoms. No one wore a head scarf, and the eccentric, demanding Lebanese women always got what they wanted. I wasn’t into miniskirts, but I loved the long Marlene Dietrich–style trousers the women wore. When I was eight, I sneaked into my parents’ bedroom, climbed onto a chair in front of the mirror, and experimented with my mother’s lipsticks and eye shadows. When my mother found me using her makeup, I told her I wanted to be like the Lebanese women in the movies.
But what the movies didn’t show were the rifts among the different religious and political factions in Lebanon. Each religious group—Sunnis, Shia, Christians, Druze—essentially had its own political wing, and some areas of Lebanon had been carved up along religious lines. This was the legacy of the country’s fifteen-year civil war, which began in 1975 and killed as many as 150,000 people. Groups such as Hezbollah and the PLO had for years operated freely in Lebanon, and the country had increasingly become a haven for international terror suspects. One of the September 11 hijackers came from Lebanon, as did six men accused of planting bombs on German trains in the summer of 2006. Another Lebanese man was among those accused in 2006 of plotting to blow up the train tunnels connecting New York City and New Jersey.
When Michael and I got to Beirut, Leena was waiting for us in the hotel lobby, where she introduced us to a slim, pale, lightly bearded man named Fakhr al-Ayoubi. Fakhr was a local journalist who came from a region outside Tripoli in northern Lebanon, not far from the Nahr al-Bared camp that had become Abssi’s base. Fakhr was friendly but quite traditional. Like many conservative Muslim men, he believed that touching a woman who was not his relative was sinful. He declined to shake my hand.
“He knows the group you are interested in,” Leena said.
We told Fakhr we wanted to meet Abssi, talk to him and his people, and see how Fatah al-Islam operated and what was happening in the camp. Fakhr listened patiently. When we finished, he sipped his tea and glanced at Leena before looking directly at us. “You really want to go into the camp? You want to meet him in person? No way! Impossible!”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because he won’t agree. But even if he did agree, it would be very dangerous. These people are jihadists. They don’t trust Westerners, and they don’t trust Western newspapers.”
I’d heard this before, but in recent years I’d covered terrorist attacks in Casablanca and Spain, and I had developed a network of sources among the militants in North Africa and Europe, including Moroccans and others who had fought in Afghanistan and had links to Al Qaeda. I told him I’d dealt with jihadists who had never wanted to talk to journalists but who for some reason agreed to speak with me.
“I saw your work,” Fakhr answered. “That’s the only reason I’d even consider working with you. But going in there is very dangerous. These camps are extraterritorial ground. If they kidnap you there or decide to kill you, no one can help you.”
“Still, let’s try it,” I said brightly. “We should try to get his side of the story.”
The next day, Fakhr came back to the hotel. “The good news is, Abssi knows your work and didn’t say no on principle,” Fakhr told us. “The bad news is, Abssi thinks it’s not the right time for an interview, and his deputy and other advisers said it’s better not to talk to you now.”
Anticipating this response, Michael and I had already decided that I should still try to meet Abssi in person to explain our plans. Then at least I would get a sense of the situation inside the camp.
“I would like to speak to Abssi,” I told Fakhr. “Tell them I insisted.”
Fakhr laughed. “So you don’t accept no for an answer?” he asked. “Have you turned into a Lebanese woman?” I smiled at the memory of all those old Lebanese films.
He dialed a number, and I could hear him talking to the group’s media man. “I’m here with the sister I spoke to you about from Morocco,” he said. “She wants to talk to the sheikh in person.” He was told that somebody would call him back in a few minutes.
While we waited, I tried to figure out what I should say to Abssi. How could I convince this man, who knew that various security and intelligence services were hunting him, to meet me?
After a couple of minutes, Fakhr’s mobile rang. Abssi was on the line. Fakhr handed me the phone.
“As’salam alaikum, Sheikh!”
“Wa’alaikum as’salam,” he answered.
I told Abssi that I’d heard he didn’t want to grant an interview. “But how about I come for tea?” I said. “It won’t be an interview, I give you my word, but I came all this way to get your side of the story, so let’s at least meet. I know the custom among us Arabs—you can’t let a visitor go home without a cup of tea.” I’m not sure where I came up with this idea, except that I was thinking of my grandmother and how she would never let anyone leave her house without a cup of tea.
I heard him laughing on the other end of the line. Fakhr was smiling and shaking his head.
“You want to come for tea?” Abssi finally asked.
“Yes, only for a cup of tea. No interview.”
“God willing, you can come tomorrow with Fakhr for tea, but no interview!”
“You have my word, Sheikh. It won’t be an interview.”
I handed the phone back to Fakhr to arrange the time. “He has refused to see any journalist, and especially from the Western media,” Fakhr said when he hung up. “You’re lucky. Your family must have prayed a lot for you as a child!”
“You’re going to have tea with the devil?” Michael responded when I told him. “Excellent!”
The next day, I put on a head scarf and a long black abaya that Leena had loaned me. Before I left, I had handed Michael a piece of paper with phone numbers for the Fatah al-Islam spokesman, who would be at the meeting, and for various Al Qaeda members and their associates from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe who could put in a good word for me in case anything went wrong. I knew that the Lebanese authorities had limited access to this camp and that Abssi and his people wouldn’t listen to them anyway. I needed people with strong reputations in the jihadist world to vouch for me.