“Do you know Abu Maleeq from Germany? The one who sings hip-hop?”
“You mean the rapper?” Abu Khaled responded. Then his face suddenly changed, as if he knew he had said too much.
I tried to make him feel better, telling him he had nothing to worry about. I had already known that Abu Maleeq was in touch with them, that there was some kind of link, so technically he hadn’t violated the order not to say anything.
I arranged to meet Salah that evening in a hotel in a nearby town to talk about his life and upbringing. I learned that he had come from a rural part of Tunisia. Born into a lower-middle-class family, he knew that even though he did well in school, he would have no chance to go to university. “I have eight brothers and sisters, and I am the oldest, so I had to start working to help my parents,” he told me. He began selling drugs in a larger neighboring city and dreamed of going to Europe.
Then one day in 1999, when Salah was nineteen, he ran into another young man who had grown up in the same neighborhood. This man told Salah about a preacher who had fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and who had deeply influenced him. “I went with him and met this sheikh, who is today our emir,” Salah said. “He told me that this life wasn’t important, but the afterlife was, and that whatever I was doing today would count in the afterlife.”
He stopped selling drugs and began to study with the sheikh. The man gave Salah and his other students a monthly salary so they could help their families.
The more time he spent with the group, the more he saw how “wrong” Tunisian and Western policies were. “No one cares about Muslim lives,” he said, but he apparently believed his sheikh did. Salah’s mentor planned to send him and others to Iraq in 2004 to fight alongside Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but Tunisian authorities arrested them and charged them with being members of a terrorist organization. Salah and his friends were sentenced to fifteen to twenty years in prison.
“All for helping our sisters and brothers in Iraq,” Salah said. The Tunisian security forces and prison guards tortured him and his comrades, even raping some of them, but he believed they had grown stronger in prison. I’d seen this before in other places. Militants were sent to prison and tortured, further radicalizing them. While there, they often met and connected with like-minded people who reinforced their views.
“And what now?”
“Now, Allah has freed us from the dog Ben Ali and the dogs of America in Tunisia. Next is Libya, then Algeria, then Morocco and all of the Islamic world.”
He told me that some of his “brothers” had already traveled to Libya and were fighting there alongside Libyans against the Gaddafi regime. “We also send brothers to Syria,” he said.
“And when the rulers are gone,” I asked, “what is your aim?”
“The caliphate,” he answered. I remembered my conversations with Shaker al-Abssi in Lebanon, who had given me the same answer several years before.
I flew back to Germany in mid-August. I called the imam in Berlin again and asked if he had heard anything from Cuspert.
“Yes, he is still here in Berlin,” the imam answered. “He had to change his phone after the story broke about Arid Uka, but he asked me to give you his number.”
I called right away. “I must see you,” I told him.
He began to laugh. “Yes, I heard you met some of my brothers in North Africa.”
11
Threats
Bahrain, Iran, and Germany, 2011–13
As protests erupted across the Middle East in the spring of 2011, one small country in particular drew my attention: Bahrain, an island emirate in the Arabian Gulf, off the coast of Saudi Arabia. The more time I spent there, the more convinced I became that Bahrain contained another clue to the true nature of the so-called Arab Spring. Much as Islamist groups were gaining ground under the banner of democracy in places such as Egypt and Libya, Bahrain was a shining example of the way religious and sectarian groups were hijacking old enmities for their own opportunistic ends. Only the players and the goals were slightly different in Bahrain. And Iran had a dog in the fight.
A former British protectorate, Bahrain gained independence in 1971 and quickly established itself as an important business and security partner to the United States and home to its Fifth Fleet. Prosperous and developed, it is also comparatively progressive for the Gulf region: in 2002, it became a constitutional monarchy, expanded suffrage to women, and allowed them to run for office. Two years later, the country named its first female minister, and in 2008 it appointed a Jewish woman, Houda Nonoo, as its ambassador to the United States. She is believed to be the first Jewish ambassador in the Arab world.
The main thing that sets Bahrain apart from its Arab Spring neighbors is its religious composition. Though there are no official or independent statistics, Bahrain is a Shia majority state that has long been ruled by a Sunni royal family, giving rise to decades of sporadic protests over sectarian discrimination. Iran also has a long-standing territorial interest in Bahrain. It officially renounced its claim to sovereignty over the island in 1970, when a UN report showed that the Bahrainis wanted independence, but that wasn’t the end of the story.
Some Shia opposition figures who for decades had called for the overthrow of the royal family emerged as key leaders. While Western observers, diplomats, and journalists tended to see in Bahrain a nascent prodemocracy movement, some influential Shia religious leaders were also keen to convert a relatively progressive state into an Iranian-style Islamic republic. I saw how depressed some Shia women were in the more conservative parts of the country, wrapped in chadors with no right to divorce, even when their husbands abused them. The sectarian unrest and the push to make religion a bigger part of political and everyday life reminded me of what I’d seen in Iraq. The consequences, I knew, could be terrifying.