“She is a visitor, Mother,” Abu Jihad answered. His voice was much softer than before.
She hugged me and kissed my cheeks. “Welcome, my daughter. Where are you from, habibti, Morocco?” she asked, using the feminine form of the Arabic word for “beloved.” She told me she loved Moroccan sweets. “But why are you looking so sad?”
I explained that I had come all the way from Europe to meet with her son, who was so important for this story, and my colleague had come from the United States. And now he wanted to cancel because his teeth hurt.
She began to scold him. “Son, this nice girl and her friend have come so far to see you. Of course you will meet with them, or I will curse the milk that I fed you from this breast.” She pressed her right hand to her chest.
Abu Jihad jumped up and kissed his mother’s head and hand. “Of course, Mother! As you wish!”
My source watched from a corner, trying not to laugh. I turned to Abu Jihad. “So, Sheikh, can I bring my colleague?”
“Yes, daughter, go and bring your colleague,” his mother answered.
“I promise we will bring some medicine for your teeth as well, but I should go now, to bring him from Amman.”
*
MICHAEL AND I often used a “good cop, bad cop” routine to throw our interview subjects off balance. They expected him to ask the tough questions. Instead, he played the friendly conciliator, while I raised thorny subjects like 9/11, militant infighting, or the documentary proof we needed to check the veracity of our sources. We felt they would be more forgiving with me, because I’m a woman and I speak Arabic, whereas Michael was an “infidel” who could easily be suspected of spying.
We took this approach with Abu Jihad. I asked about his affiliations with terrorist networks and whether he had been involved in funneling money to fighters, while Michael asked how his time in prison had affected him.
Abu Jihad really was the big boss people made him out to be. He knew everyone. We told him we wanted to meet the young men who’d gone to Iraq. Within an hour, he’d found one of them for us. Every time I feared he was losing interest, I’d ask after his mother and remind him how far Michael and I had come to talk to him.
Abu Jihad asked us to wait while he fetched the young man, who also spoke on the condition that his name and some personal details be withheld. We called him Abu Ibrahim—the name he would have used if he’d ever gotten to fight.
He spoke to us with some trepidation, often glancing at Abu Jihad, as if for permission.
“It’s okay, you can tell them everything,” Abu Jihad said. “They gave their word that they won’t use our real names.”
Abu Ibrahim was twenty-four and shy and lanky, with brown eyes. The oldest of the six friends who’d gone to Iraq, he wore white traditional clothes. As a teenager from a secular, middle-class family, he’d played billiards, listened to pop music, and had girlfriends. He had wanted to be a professional soccer player.
“I was just looking to have fun, but I was not alive,” Abu Ibrahim said. “I was missing something. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt it inside.”
Abu Jihad and other more religious men reproached him: Why are you not praying? Why not follow the rules of God? Abu Ibrahim and the other young men started going to Abu Anas’s mosque and watching videos like the ones Michael and I had seen. He considered his dead friends the lucky ones.
“I’m happy for them, but I cry for myself because I couldn’t do it yet,” he said. “I want to spread the roots of God on this earth and free the land of occupiers. I don’t love anything in this world. What I care about is fighting.” Zarqawi had been a hero, he told us, but it was his friends’ departure that had convinced him to go to Iraq.
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.”