“Oh, shit,” I blurted out, ducking behind Fakhr.
“That won’t help you much,” Fakhr answered. He and the commander laughed. “I’m so thin that every bullet would go through me and hit you.”
“Don’t worry, this is just training,” the commander said. “They don’t have bullets in their AKs.” Somebody gave an order, and all twelve men turned and lunged in another direction. “Allah hu-Akbar!” they shouted, firing their assault rifles into a wall.
“No bullets?” I asked the commander.
“This must be the advanced class,” he said, laughing.
The commander told me they had an arsenal of explosives, rockets, even an antiaircraft gun. Fakhr and I were escorted to the gateway we’d come in. A group of fighters, including a handful who’d attended the interview, stood outside. I heard the voices of children.
Four boys with plastic pistols ran toward the men. They must have been about five or six years old. The man who had taken notes through both my meetings with Abssi scooped up one of the boys.
“How was it?” he asked.
“We were at the camp, Baba, and they showed me a real gun,” the boy answered. “And then I played jihad and killed the kuffar,” he added, using the Arabic word for “unbelievers.”
The man started laughing. “You killed the kuffar?”
“Yes, Baba, with the pistol.”
The man kissed his forehead. “I am very proud of you, my son.”
It hit me like a knife. In Fakhr’s car I put on my sunglasses and didn’t speak much the whole way back to Beirut. This didn’t end with Zarqawi, I told Michael later, and it won’t end with Abssi.
After Michael and I went over my notes and transcribed the interview, I went up to my room. I took off my clothes and got into the shower to wash away the dust. But when I thought of what I’d heard the boy say to his father, I broke down and cried.
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.