And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East (16 page)

I arranged an interview with a low-level al-Qaeda-in-Iraq operative called Abu Zaal, who sold songbirds from his pet shop. A dwarf of a man, bent by his hunched back, he launched a harangue against the United States with the villainous glee of a character in a James Bond movie. But his tone turned deadly serious when he talked about fighting for al-Qaeda in Baghdad, Fallujah, and Ramadi: “America is dirtier than the devil because they kill Muslims. There is going to be a day when all Muslims become al-Qaeda.” In the meantime, he wanted to kill American soldiers. And Iranian soldiers. And Shiites, whatever their nationality. As for me, I was just an average American guy he was proud and happy to talk to. He was living in a great historic moment and reveled in what he was doing. He had punched his jihadist ticket. He was bubbling with the kind of energy I saw among many Sunnis during that period.

My next stop was Amman, to interview Abdullah al-Mujahir, who had been one of Zarqawi’s henchmen. I would not have chanced a meeting with him in Zarqa; it would have been too dangerous. Abu Zaal was more of a fixer, a low-level logistics man. Al-Mujahir, as he called himself, was a stone-cold killer. In later years he probably would have ended up in ISIS, happily setting people on fire. The interview was set up by
NBC’s fixer in Amman and took place in a private home. As I look back, I’m thankful I met Mujahir in Jordan in 2007. If I encountered him in Syria in 2015, he probably would have been standing behind me with a knife at my throat.

He arrived (and left) with his face mostly covered, taking care not to be spotted by Jordan’s efficient intelligence service. Thickly set, he was forty or so, but his weather-beaten face—I could see around his eyes—made him look older. I was particularly interested in him because I had heard that he’d produced a number of al-Qaeda’s beheading videos. Tapping his laptop with gnarled fingers, he brought up some of the videos on the screen. Not only was he the producer, he was also an actor. He claimed to have participated in attacks.

He showed me how easy it was to make the videos. Point and shoot, and edit with the same software that you’d use to record your family sitting in front of the fireplace on Christmas morning. “The slaughter videos,” he said, “are meant to show that we can kill who we want, whenever we want—and to terrify American soldiers who don’t want to die this way.”

Mujahir said he was unconcerned about having his videos tracked by US and other foreign intelligence agencies. “There are so many different ways to avoid them,” he said, declining to be specific. In any event, he said, the Muslim warriors occupied the moral high ground: “Our death sends us to heaven; your death sends you to hell.”

His companion that day was a barefoot man named Jaffar, who looked to be in his early twenties. He had seen “his brothers” fighting in the Palestinian territories and Iraq and decided he wanted to be a mujahid, a career choice supported by his family. He was, to be blunt, a moron. He was also a dreamer
(“I will be married to maidens in Paradise”) and had been thoroughly brainwashed. I asked Mujahir, in Jaffar’s earshot, what Jaffar could possibly do since he didn’t have any training and didn’t seem very bright. “He will most likely be a suicide bomber,” Mujahir said. “He could drive a car or wear a suicide belt. He won’t be wasted.” If Jaffar was disturbed by his expendability, he didn’t show it.

My next stop was Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, to meet with Sheikh Bilal Baroudi, who had recognized early on that the conflict in Iraq was creating hundreds of video clips and photographs that could be useful in the jihad. If they were in the movie business, Mujahir would be running a movie studio and Bilal would be overseeing Netflix. While the two were pursuing the same end, they couldn’t have been more different. In contrast to the grizzled fighter Mujahir, Bilal was so smooth that he could have been poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was a dandy. He kissed both my cheeks. He was well perfumed. He was friendly, jolly, and charismatic. He gave me tea.

Bilal and I talked in his basement media center where he was training young men to use jihadist websites and chat rooms without being traced or entrapped by foreign intelligence services. “The jihad has become open to everyone,” he said. “Someone from Turkmenistan can come to a camp in Lebanon to fight. But at the same time, it is a weak point because [the Internet] causes young men to get excited about things without preparing, and then they are easily caught.”

Images of Abu Ghraib prison, where the US Army tortured and abused detainees, and the Haditha killings of twenty-four unarmed Iraqis by US Marines, were immensely powerful propaganda. But al-Qaeda in Iraq figured out that the Internet could be more than a recruiting tool. Militants no longer needed to travel
to Afghanistan or Pakistan for training. They could simply stay at home and train online. But as Bilal pointed out, digital training requires special caution: “There are many sites that claim to show how to make a bomb, but many of them are put up by intelligence services just fishing for young people.”

After visiting Jordan and Lebanon it was already clear the Iraq war was both attracting Islamic extremists and radicalizing the new recruits. US troops, it seemed to me, were creating more enemies than they were killing.

To get another look at Sunnis who went to Iraq to join the al-Qaeda resistance, I went to Ain al-Hilweh, the largest—and probably most dangerous—Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. I found it revealing, and disturbing, that Palestinians were leaving the camp to fight in Iraq, their long grievances with Israel morphing into a hatred of the US presence in Iraq. It wasn’t that their anger had shifted away from Israel—they still hated Israel—but there was little they could do to attack Israel, which tightly controls its borders. They could, however, go to Iraq to join the fight to defend Muslim pride, specifically Sunni pride—and through it their own pride. I thought it was dangerous that Palestinians and other aggrieved groups were finding a common cause in the Iraq war. If a Muslim was oppressed in Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt by his own oppressive US-backed government, but couldn’t express his anger, US troops in Iraq were an inviting and open path to vengeance, redemption, and if you believe the rhetoric, to Paradise. In the Internet age, Iraq was becoming a jihad meme, a trending topic for millions of Muslims angry for his or her own reasons.

It was even more predictable than the way al-Qaeda was created. Al-Qaeda was founded when jihadists were used and then
abandoned by Muslim governments and the CIA, until they eventually found a home in Afghanistan under the Taliban. This time, a new breed of Islamists was being created because of the Iraq war and Sunni humiliation. I feared the consequences would be worse, and this new crop of extremists was forming under our eyes.

Established in 1948, when roughly seven hundred thousand Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes after Israel declared itself an independent Jewish state, Ain al-Hilweh was crammed with seventy thousand people.

The camp was seething with anger, mostly at Israel but also at the United States, Israel’s patron. The refugees also resented the Arab states for not doing anything about the camps and not integrating them into their societies—a policy designed to keep the Palestinian “cause” alive. In short, the refugees hated everybody, and because Ain al-Hilweh was a tinderbox of splinter groups—Marxists, socialists, Palestinian nationalists, the PLO, Islamists, and countless groups that have died out everywhere else on the planet—they often hated one another.

So it was no surprise that militant leaders in the camp claimed to have sent at least fifty suicide bombers to Iraq, among the most from any single location in the world. I went to Ain al-Hilweh primarily to interview Munir Hadad, who was reputedly recruiting young people to fight in Iraq. A news outlet in Lebanon had called the camp the “zone of unlaw,” and once I was inside, it was easy to see why. Our team would be safe in Munir’s section, but getting there was a hair-raising affair. Every street seemed to be controlled by a different gang, with checkpoints between sections of the camp. Men walked around with rifles slung over their shoulders. Islamists with long beards rode motorcycles and gave us hard stares. Even the Lebanese Army steered clear of Ain al-Hilweh.

“You see mujahideen who are volunteering and going to Iraq by themselves,” Munir said. “Iraq is the closest place they can go and fight Americans.” He said they were aroused by the American “massacres” of Iraqis: “When they see these massacres on television, they cannot handle it. Violence creates violence. Terrorism creates terrorism.”

One of the mujahideen was Asid Jabr, thirty-six, an unemployed security guard and father of four. As he walked down an alleyway to meet us, he carried a semiautomatic rifle. A gaggle of children skipped in front of him. He cleaned his gun as he explained why he was going to Iraq. “Our duty is to fight the occupation in any Arab country. God has given us the right to fight whether it is in Palestine or Iraq.

Fear goes with the job when you’re covering this part of the world, and you depend on a sixth sense to make sure you go when the going is good. “We’re leaving the camp,” I said on my broadcast sign-off. “We noticed we were being followed. Men riding motorcycles who weren’t affiliated with our contact were circling, watching us. We’ve decided to just pack it in and leave right now.”

The more I traveled, the more it became clear that the fighting in Iraq was impacting the entire region, and not for the better. I went to Syria to gauge its effects, as reflected both in attitudes toward the United States and in tangible social consequences. Iraq and Syria share a long border drawn by the European powers after World War I. Despite their interwoven histories, the two countries have had long periods of disagreeable relations since their partition. But at the time of my arrival—four years before the onset of the Syrian civil war—the Syrians were sympathetic to their neighbor, holding the US government responsible for the bloodshed in Iraq.

The people I spoke with took pains to distinguish the American people from President Bush and his policies. When Bush called for a “crusade” against terrorism in the week after 9/11, the word passed almost without notice in the United States, but it struck a deep historical chord in the Middle East, where a thousand years of history vibrate in the collective memory.

THE WORD CRUSADE TRANSLATES IN
Arabic as
harb salibiya
, or a “war of the cross,” a reference to the seven major European incursions sanctioned by popes, kings, and princes for several centuries beginning at the end of the eleventh century. The object of these military campaigns was to gain control of the holy places in or near Jerusalem, save Byzantium, the Christian Roman Empire founded by Constantine, and destroy the Muslim infidels. They were clashes of civilizations long before political scientists started using the phrase. Many in the Muslim world believe the Crusades have never ended, and Bush’s comments after 9/11 only reinforced their thinking. As I would hear over and over, from Zarqa to Lebanon and now in Syria, “The US war on terror is a war against Islam.”

Another source of anger in Syria was the flood of Iraqi refugees, most of them poor. (Rich refugees tended to go to Jordan.) The social and moral consequences of the influx were visible in neon on the outskirts of Damascus. What had been desert was now a strip packed with dozens of sleazy nightclubs, each featuring fifty to a hundred young girls, almost all of them Iraqi refugees forced into the sex trade to support their families.

The owner of a place called the Lighthouse let us film inside his club because he thought it would be good advertising. The girls were barely pubescent (and some clearly weren’t),
and they wore belly-dancing costumes covered with sequins. They didn’t strip and danced only occasionally. Mostly they marched around the stage like prisoners in a small exercise yard. They were displaying their wares for a few dozen men from Syria, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.

This was not the kind of prostitution bazaar you’d find in Moscow or in the lap-dancing emporiums in America. The Lighthouse was not a place for transactions. The men didn’t offer the girls money to come home with them for the night. If a customer was interested in a girl, he would talk to her father or uncle or male guardian. They would haggle over price and terms the next day. If a deal was struck, the girl would become the man’s sexual property for a week, a month, six months, or for as long as he was interested.

When a young Iraqi man watched his sister pimped out by his dad, the effect was grimly predictable. As likely as not, he would quickly be radicalized and eager to join the mujahideen. So the cycle of violence took yet another turn. Iraqis driven out of their country because of the fighting returned to their country to fight. The cycle of violence was a challenge for many countries in the region. A Sunni state might turn a blind eye to its nationals aiding the Sunni cause in Iraq, but the return home of battle-hardened veterans promised nothing but trouble.

Saudi Arabia caught on to the threat early on and, with its vast resources, was determined to prevent a new generation of extremists, battle-hardened in Iraq, from returning to the Saudi kingdom. The government set up a rehabilitation program for jihadists and released Gitmo detainees. The Saudi approach was similar to the kind of tough love used in alcohol and drug rehab
facilities in the States.

We were given access to the program’s “campus,” which was a large walled-in compound that had once been a resort. The al-Qaeda veterans were free to swim in one of four pools, kick soccer balls around manicured lawns, and play video games. Meals of lamb and rice were served Saudi-style from communal bowls. There was even room service. The main gate was locked, and the outside walls were topped by barbed wire, but no armed guards were in sight.

The only requirement was that “patients” attend daily classes, most of which were taught by Islamic clerics. The goal was to convince them that al-Qaeda’s interpretation of Islam was incorrect.
Jihad
is often translated into English as “holy war,” but in Arabic it means “a struggle”—to purify a soul, for instance, or to defend the faith with arms or with words. The message of the rehabilitation program was that true Islam was the Islam of peace, not of beheadings. The other message was: once you come home, leave your jihad at the door and all will be forgiven.