“Yes. They need to see who the enemies of Islam are,” she answered. “The earlier, the better.”
It reminded me of what I’d seen in the Nahr al-Bared camp in Lebanon, when the Fatah al-Islam fighter had praised his son for “killing” an infidel. A feeling of sadness and disgust swept over me.
In the garden, the angry-eyed man stood near the door that led to the street. I could see Michael and Marwan standing next to the car outside, but as I approached, the man closed the gate. I was trapped in the garden.
“One moment,” he said.
I wasn’t sure what he was planning to do, but I feared he might try to take out his anger on me. Hadn’t he said that I wasn’t supposed to work with kuffar?
“I need to talk to you alone,” he said. “You want to know why I hate the Americans so much?” He was not shouting, but there was aggression in his voice, and his hands were shaking. “You know what they allowed the Shia to do to me in Iraq? I swear by God I had not even been a jihadist then, but after the torture I saw, I became one. These militias, they put electroshocks on every part of my body; they raped me; they pissed on me, spat on me. I need to take medication now because of my nerves.”
“Sheikh, I’m really sorry for what happened to you,” I said as calmly as I could. “But what happened to you, it’s not the responsibility of every American or even every Shia. There are people who are fighting for human rights.”
“Human rights?!” he shouted. “Human shit! All these groups, they are just liars, just using human rights for their interests.” He clenched his hands into fists.
The host, who had been in the street, opened the door and said, “Please, sister, get into the car.”
I looked at the other man one more time. “I am sorry for what happened to you,” I whispered.
*
“IT WAS WEIRD what happened there,” Michael said as we drove back to Amman. “Those men seemed so nice, and you were so tough with them.”
I took off my niqab and turned to him. “Do yourself and us a favor: please stop with your Arabic lessons!”
“Why?” he answered.
“You know what shukran means, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“They were arguing about whether they should behead you and make a video, and you were saying ‘thank you’ to them.”
I explained the whole situation. I also apologized for not telling him what had been said while we were there, and Michael agreed that I had been right not to. “I would have totally freaked out, and then they would have thought I indeed was a spy or something,” he said.
“Yes, that’s what they would have thought, but you were protected. We three would never have allowed them to harm you in any way.”
“Shukran, shukran,” Michael said, and we all started laughing.
*
WE FELT WE were making progress, but we wanted to find someone who had been friends with the young men who’d left for Iraq. “You may need to go back to Abu Anas and ask him,” Michael said.
I drove up to Zarqa again with my abaya and niqab in my bag, pulling on the abaya before Abu Dania, the driver, and I met Abu Anas at his house.
“There is someone who I think was close to them,” he said. “But I’m sure he won’t talk to you.”
“Why are you so sure?”
He leaned in and whispered: “Because he is only doing what the emir is telling him.”
“What emir?” I asked.
“He has the key to everything here in this neighborhood.”
He gave me the emir’s kunya—his nom de guerre—and said he had done all he could. I reached out to another source, the Zarqawi associate, and asked to meet him at a coffee shop in the center of Zarqa.
“Who is this emir?” I asked.
The man was another longtime associate of Zarqawi’s, my source told me. They’d fought together, and the emir had spent several years in prison in the 1990s, when Zarqawi was building and strengthening his network from behind bars. When Zarqawi went to Iraq, the emir had helped supply his old friend with fighters. These days, he divided his time between mentoring suicide bombers bound for Iraq and helping to organize militant operations elsewhere.
“He is the key,” my source said. “He is a strong man, very strong.”
“So you know him?”
He nodded. “Let me talk to him and see what I can do.”
I smiled. “Please, can you do it now? We are running out of time. I even wore the abaya just for this.”
He laughed, stood up, and said I should have another juice or tea. He would be back. About a half hour later he returned, a smile on his face. He told me that he’d told the emir who Michael and I were. They’d looked up our stories on the Internet and discussed the possibility of a meeting.
“He agreed to see you both tomorrow,” he said. “See, I told you the abaya would bring you good luck.”
*
THE NEXT DAY, as Michael and I were about to head to Zarqa, my source called. “You need to come alone, and come now.”
I told Michael that I needed to see what was going on, and drove off to Zarqa with Abu Dania, the driver.
I met the source at the coffee shop.
“He canceled the meeting.”
“What? Why?”
“He said because of tooth problems, but I think he got nervous. He doesn’t seem certain any longer.”
This was a setback. We knew that in order to explain to Americans why young Jordanian men were leaving their families and homes to fight in Iraq, we had to have their voices. But without “Abu Jihad”—as some people called the emir—we wouldn’t be able to reach them.
“Please, can we visit him with no interview?” I begged, thinking about how well that had worked before with Abssi in Lebanon.
My source shook his head. “Don’t you ever give up? Let’s go now, but we’ll drive in my car. Your driver has to stay here.”
It was risky, but two things comforted me: it was the middle of the day and I trusted my source. I told Abu Dania to wait for me at the coffee shop and gave him the paper with the jihadist contact numbers in a sealed envelope, with instructions to give it to Michael if I wasn’t back in a couple of hours. Then I called Michael.
“He wanted to cancel because of tooth pain,” I told him.
“Please try to convince him,” Michael answered. “I can offer him some Advil or Ambien.”
Abu Jihad was surprised to see us, but he wasn’t upset. He was tall and strong-looking with long hair, but on this day his face seemed a bit pale.
“Sheikh, I heard you wanted to cancel the interview because of a tooth problem?” I asked.
“Yes, I am sorry but I am in pain. Let’s do it some other day.”
I tried to explain that we had only a short time left in the country and that the interview with him was crucial. Without it, I told him, we wouldn’t be able to tell the whole story.
He said he couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t believe that a mujahid who had fought alongside Zarqawi and spent years in prison was canceling the meeting because of a toothache.
Then a door opened and an older woman came into the room. She greeted Abu Jihad and asked how he was doing. Then she asked who I was.