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 tell 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.