Black Flags (5 page)

“Where’s the medicine you promised for this one?” he would demand, according to Sabha’s recollection. Once, when one of the inmates left al-Jafr for a few days of hospital therapy, he fretted like a nervous parent, nagging Sabha for news about the man’s condition.

Sabha was particularly struck by the tenderness Zarqawi displayed toward the most fragile of the inmates, the double-amputee named Eid Jahaline, the unlucky bomber who flubbed the attack on the pornographic cinema. Jahaline, who suffered from a psychological disorder in addition to his physical disfigurement, had always bunked with the other Islamist inmates in spite of extreme disabilities. Zarqawi appointed himself as the man’s personal valet, and assisted him with his bathing, changing, and feeding. Most days, he would simply
scoop up the legless man in his arms and carry him to the toilet. Sabha suspected that the daily ritual had as much to do with Zarqawi’s peculiar sense of propriety as with genuine compassion for his comrade. Under the Islamists’ strict moral code, exposing the man’s naked body to others would constitute both a humiliation and a sin.

One evening, while Sabha was visiting the cell, Jahaline suffered one of his occasional meltdowns, a screaming fit that usually required treatment with antipsychotic drugs. Sabha grabbed a syringe and was preparing to administer the shot when Zarqawi stepped forward to block him. Without a word, Zarqawi took a blanket from one of the beds and draped it over Jahaline’s lower body. He held the blanket in place with one hand, and with the other he tugged at the elastic waistband of the disabled man’s trousers, exposing a narrow crescent of skin. Then he motioned to the doctor.

“Just make sure it’s in the right spot,” he commanded.

Sabha felt for Jahaline’s pelvic bone through his clothes and, satisfied, pushed the needle into the pale flesh.

When it was done and Jahaline was resting quietly, Sabha looked up to find Zarqawi watching him with a look of satisfaction. There was something different in the reptilian eyes, a quality that the doctor had not noticed before. He thought it might have been the stirrings of a smile.

—

The arrival of winter in 1998 brought freezing temperatures and scores of newcomers, as prison officials sought to relieve overcrowding elsewhere in the system. The Islamists remained cloistered together, as always, but now subtle cracks were beginning to show. Some of the jihadists were openly suggesting that Zarqawi should be the leader, replacing Maqdisi, whose professorial demeanor had begun to grate on some members of the group.

Zarqawi made no move against his mentor, but the feelings of many inmates were quite clear. Maqdisi’s nuanced theological arguments were lost on the high-school dropouts and petty criminals who made up much of the group. These men preferred someone with tough-guy credentials, like Zarqawi, a brawler who talked plainly
and refused to compromise. As he himself admitted, Maqdisi was no warrior. Even while living in Arab training camps in Afghanistan, he had given up on learning how to use a gun.

“
He was not a fighter who lived between the bullets, the missiles and the tanks, even for a day!” one of the Afghan veterans later explained.

Zarqawi clearly liked being in charge, and he gradually took on a still more dominant role, with his mentor’s blessing, leaving Maqdisi to oversee spiritual matters. For the first time, important people outside prison were beginning to hear his name. Maqdisi had many admirers within the Islamist movement’s diaspora, from London to the Palestinian cities of the West Bank, and some of them were men with resources and extensive connections throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. Now they were learning through Maqdisi about his impressive assistant, an Afghan veteran of unusual courage and natural leadership ability.

Sabha, meanwhile, found himself working more frequently with Zarqawi, and their interactions became increasingly cordial, if not exactly warm.

One evening, as Sabha was making his rounds, Zarqawi pulled the doctor aside to make a request. It was the first time the man had asked for anything on his own behalf.

“I think I have high blood sugar,” he began. “My mother has diabetes, so maybe it’s in the family. Can you check?”

Sabha was happy to oblige, but it was complicated, he said. The test could not be performed in the prison—the risk of infection was too high to draw blood in al-Jafr’s filthy, rodent-infested cells—so Zarqawi would have to be brought to the doctor’s private clinic in the village.

There was another complication: obtaining the official approvals needed to allow such a dangerous inmate to leave al-Jafr. As expected, the warden protested vigorously. What if it was a ruse to help Zarqawi escape? What if his allies were waiting in ambush in the town? But eventually Ibrahim relented, and arrangements were made for the armed escort that would deliver the prisoner to the village clinic and back again.

On the day of the test, Sabha decided to wait at the village clinic
for his patient to show up. It was well after dark when a convoy of ten vehicles arrived, with a complement of dozens of guards armed with assault rifles. It was the biggest military escort Sabha had ever seen, and he wondered at first if someone from the royal court had decided to call on the village. Instead, a solitary prisoner stumbled out of one of the vans and then disappeared again inside a moving cocoon of armed men.

Zarqawi was led into the doctor’s office in his prison garb, still wearing his handcuffs.

“Please take those off,” Sabha ordered, gesturing to the metal bracelets.

“Sir, the man is dangerous,” one of the escorts protested.

“You have fifty soldiers watching his every move,” the doctor replied. “I insist that the cuffs be taken off.”

Having succeeded in freeing Zarqawi’s arms, Sabha proceeded with his examination. He began to roll up one of the prisoner’s shirtsleeves to draw a blood sample, but was stopped again, this time by Zarqawi.

“I’m sorry,” the inmate apologized. Zarqawi lowered the sleeve back to its position before the doctor had touched it. Then he rolled it back up again, without help. Sabha had tripped on another of Zarqawi’s indecipherable codes on the touching of naked flesh.

As the blood was being drawn, Sabha worked up the courage to ask, finally, about the nature of the mysterious scar on Zarqawi’s arm.

“It was a tattoo. An anchor,” he replied.

“What happened?”

Zarqawi began to recount how he had gotten the tattoo at age sixteen, at a time when, as he put it, “I wasn’t very Islamic-minded.” After he joined the jihadist movement, his tattoo became an embarrassment. He tried scrubbing it off in various ways, including with bleach. The skin turned an angry red, but the tattoo would not budge.

Finally, he turned to one of his Zarqa relatives, who was visiting the prison with a razor hidden in his clothes. As Zarqawi sat, the kinsman cut two elliptical lines around the tattoo. He then sliced away the upper layers of skin. When the tattoo was mostly gone, he closed the wound with crude stitches.

Sabha’s face betrayed his horror at the story, but Zarqawi just
shrugged, as though the act of hacking off an offending piece of flesh were as natural as squashing a cockroach. Islam—his brand of Islam—required it. This was an indisputable fact. The rest was a simple act of will.

“Tattoos,” he explained impassively, “are
haram
. Forbidden.”

Sabha finished his exam, and Zarqawi, who showed no signs of physical disease, returned to prison with his escorts. The doctor remained behind to ponder, in his small clinic by the road on the edge of a dead lake, dwarfed by the vastly larger Arabian desert just beyond it.

Seventy years earlier, an Islamic army had traversed the same road, riding north on horses and camels with the intention of wiping out the country known as Jordan in the name of Allah. These Bedouin raiders, who
called themselves Ikhwan, or Brothers, had been armed and trained by Saudi Arabia’s first monarch, Ibn Saud, to help him defeat his political rivals. But the Ikhwan had ambitions beyond the Arabian Peninsula. Bloodthirsty fanatics who regarded all Western inventions and practices as works of the devil, they saw themselves as divinely appointed to purify the region by slaughtering all who allied with foreigners or deviated from their narrow vision of Islam. From the harsh wastelands of the interior, they thundered into the newly formed countries of Jordan and Iraq in the early 1920s with the intention of toppling governments and creating a unified Islamic theocracy, or caliphate, spanning all of the Middle East. They hacked and slashed their way through entire villages that stood in their path, slitting the throats of every male survivor, to ensure that all traces of Western modernity were wiped out.

Despite vain attempts by the Saudi monarch to control them, an Ikhwan army of about fifteen hundred advanced to within ten miles of Amman, the Jordanian capital, before finally being stopped. British warplanes spotted the approaching column and cut them down with machine guns until all but about a hundred of the raiders were dead.

Small bands of militants continued to control parts of the Saudi interior at least until the 1950s, menacing and sometimes killing outsiders who wandered near their villages. Eventually they vanished, yet the fierce hatreds that animated the Ikhwan never went away.
The unwavering intolerance, the embrace of an extreme and pitilessly violent form of Islam as a kind of cleansing fire—these would find acceptance into the late twentieth century and beyond, from isolated villages in the peninsula’s interior to the oil-rich cities of the Gulf Coast, and from the rugged hills of eastern Afghanistan to the crowded cells of an infamous Jordanian prison.

At al-Jafr, the contagion was contained within thick prison walls, at least for a time. Under the sentence handed down by the judge in Amman, Zarqawi’s confinement was to continue for another ten years, until 2009, when the muscular and vital young man would be entering middle age. Yet, as Sabha well knew, prison terms in Jordan were rarely what they seemed on paper. A sentence could be drastically shortened because of a change in government, or a perceived need to curry favor with a religious party or tribe. If that happened, Zarqawi could find himself, and perhaps his army of followers, suddenly free.

2

“Here was a real leader”

Two weeks before King Hussein’s death—in the calm before the deathbed farewells, the legions of mourners, and the lines of world leaders paying tribute to Jordan’s greatest and longest-serving statesman—the monarch called his oldest son, Abdullah, to the palace to share a decision that would transform the young man’s life and alter his country’s destiny.

The king had just returned from a six-month hospital stay in the United States to treat an aggressive form of lymphoma, but the cancer had returned with a fury, and the doctors were warning that his time was short. On January 22, 1999, he phoned Abdullah, then a thirty-six-year-old army commander at the pinnacle of his military career, and asked him to come at once.

“
I want to see you,” he said.

Abdullah bin Hussein got into his car and drove up the steep road to the palace at Hummar, with its stunning hilltop vistas of the capital city. Inside, he found the king in the dining room, looking alarmingly frail. At sixty-three, he was bone-thin, and his skin was sallow from jaundice. The gray hair and beard that in earlier years had given him a vague resemblance to the actor Sean Connery had long since fallen away, from extensive chemotherapy.

The king excused his aides and shut the door. He then turned to Abdullah, pale fingers grasping his son’s hands.

“I want to make you crown prince,” he said.

The words were all but incomprehensible. For more than three decades, the title had belonged to Prince Hassan, the king’s worldly and accomplished younger brother who had become heir apparent to the throne when Abdullah was still a toddler. The king’s athletic and boyish-looking oldest son had spent his adult years driving tanks and helicopters and jumping from airplanes. He had shown little interest in politics or palace intrigues, preferring the military’s cleaner lines of command. Now his father was seeking to propel him into a job whose perils included, among innumerable others, the near certainty of a clash with family members who had been waiting for years for a chance to run the country.

“What about my uncle?” Abdullah asked at last, according to his recollection of the meeting years afterward.

But the king had made up his mind. Days later, he would announce his decision publicly in the form of an open letter to Hassan, officially demoting him and hinting vaguely of his disappointment with greedy “climbers” in the royal family who he said were “meddling” and “disloyal.” After his death, he said, the crown would pass from father to son—in this case, to a son who, among the monarch’s brothers, nephews, and eleven children, was distinguished by his lack of ambition to be king.

Abdullah had been born a crown prince. Under Jordan’s constitution as well as a centuries-old Hashemite dynastic tradition, the title automatically belonged to the oldest male child. But in the turbulent 1960s, with war clouds looming and the monarchy under constant threat of assassination or palace coup, Hussein made his brother the heir apparent, to ensure stability in the case of his death. Removed from the line of succession, Abdullah spent much of his youth and early adulthood outside Jordan. He attended American and British prep schools and universities, which gave him a worldly education but relatively little insight into the inner workings of his own country.

Back home, he had immersed himself in the culture of Jordan’s lower and middle classes as a career soldier, sharing the same squalid barracks and dust-coated field rations as the other commissioned officers. He climbed the ranks to major general, but he retained his young man’s passion for fast cars and motorcycles. He relished
moments when he could personally lead his special-forces teams into operations against terrorists and criminals, as he had famously done the previous year, when his commandos stormed a gangsters’ hideout in a street battle captured live on Jordanian TV.