Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East (11 page)

When I asked to take a picture with them, they looked to their father for permission. He agreed, but only if he stood between me and his daughters dressed by choice in full chador.

At the University of Tehran, I met several girls who would not stand within several feet of me when we spoke. I stopped them outside of the on-campus mosque to see if I could ask them a few questions. Each was dressed in full black chador all the way down to her feet. Their faces were ovals surrounded by black head-scarves that covered every strand of hair, and they wore no makeup.

These girls were quick to remind me that they had no problem with the American people or the country, but they were very comfortable lashing out at the American government. They emphasized that it is America’s “support of Israel” and “oppression of the Palestinian people” that is creating problems in the world. The girls were emphatic about reminding me that they are tired of America pushing its weight around.

“But who is to blame for Iran’s domestic troubles, such as the economy?” I pushed.

The shortest of the three girls spoke up.

“America has the sanctions on Iran, America supports Israel, America attacks Islam; these are the things that make for our troubles in Iran.” The other girls nodded in agreement. She sounded as if she was muttering a propaganda headline.

“What do you think should be America’s role in the Middle East?” I asked, trying to deduce what they thought of the war in Iraq and the prospect of American intervention in Iran.

One of the other girls spoke. She was tall and thin, and unlike the other girls, she spoke with a very angry tone. It was as if she saw me as a representative of the government. She asserted that even though Saddam Hussein is the enemy of Iran, “the Americans should not have come to Iraq and should not have invaded the Iraqi regime, because there were other means to control the country and that regime, there were other options put forward by European governments, and the invasion was not worth all this bloodshed and this violence in the name of democracy.” She had a lot to say and there was little room for my words.

“It is doubtful whether American presence in the country, in the region, will actually enhance the chances of democracy,” she continued. “People will always see this American democracy as imposed on the regime, so it will always have this stigma attached to it. They do not feel emotionally attached to this democratic experience and it will have a boomerang effect and will result in the opposite and make it antidemocratic.”

This girl, at least four years younger than I am, had rendered me speechless. She was so articulate and so passionate in her words that I didn’t know what to say. She then issued what sounded to me like a warning.

“America should know that its presence in the region is a threat to Iran, this is part of the same old story of how the Americans are a danger,” she cautioned. “The Americans are no longer a danger; they are a
closer
danger residing in the east and in the west. Even if the economics change, the danger is still there with their presence.”

This stank of indoctrination for me. Indoctrinated youth were everywhere. In southern Tehran, I went into some of the poorer areas, where I encountered similar, if more populist-tinged, rhetoric. Some youth I met there believed that the regime protected them and safeguarded their livelihood. I couldn’t understand how they could have so much confidence in a government that squanders its country’s resources and wastes funds needed for the economy on corrupt enterprises and a radical foreign policy.

Every chance I got, I would ask students to explain to me, as I put it, “Who are the youth who chant ‘Death to America’?” What I learned is that there is not one answer to this question, as such “Islamic Republic fans” are pulled from various strata of society. One Iranian student explained that the youth who support the regime “come from the stomach of the Islamic Republic government.” This was a cute analogy, but I didn’t quite understand it.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Imagine you are thirteen or fourteen years old and you are confused about what happens around you because you don’t know the reality. Then someone appears and wants to bring you up the way he wants, so he tries as well as he can to change your mind.”

“But where do they find these youth?” I probed.

“Most of them come from poor families because they show them that rich people and the people who think modernly are taking their rights for life. So they wash their brain with the old model of Islam and they tell them that is justice.”

“And what do they tell them?”

“They tell them that anybody except them is evil, it doesn’t matter who they are. This can be America, Israel, or even other Iranians.” She continued by explaining that agents of the regime support the poor families with money, but she reminded me that this is not for the well-being of these families; it is to buy them off. Rather than actually changing the policies to provide for better social services and opportunities, the regime takes advantage of the short-term needs of the impoverished by giving them immediate cash. They take advantage of the lack of education by scapegoating others and casting themselves as the protectors of the poor in the face of Western secular imperialism.

Many of those targeted for indoctrination are the families of martyrs from the Iran-Iraq War. Following eight years of bloody war, hundreds of thousands of families had been affected by it. Some had lost fathers, husbands, and sons, while others had lost houses and businesses. With hundreds of thousands of soldiers throwing themselves before the front lines of the war in massive human-wave attacks, a substantial portion of the previous youth generation was killed, incapacitated, or disappeared. Immediately after the war, the Iranian government began investing in the minds of these families, in particular the youth who had lost one of their kin. The war was blamed on America, Israel, and the West; the Islamic Republic government was cast as the great protector of the people’s security and well-being. The Martyrs Foundation and government-sponsored schools, with their regime ideology, reached out to the impoverished communities and the slums. The ideology was believable to these youth simply because the only money they received was from the government and they didn’t have any other information. Some of these youth actually do buy into the ideology, but more often than not, subscribing to it is a reflection of ambition rather than loyalty.

U
ltimately, support
for President Ahmadinejad, even among the lower class, is based on little more than his rhetoric. He has failed in his actions and already lost much of his support base. When Ahmadinejad ascended to the presidency, he promised economic change at the expense of secularization; not only has society become more nonsecular but the economy has also worsened. The difficult time he had in getting his ministers confirmed illustrated his ineffectiveness within the Iranian government circles; given these circumstances, many are questioning how he can execute an economic agenda.

It is important to note that the small minority who support the regime are not limited to the impoverished. There is a very real, if minuscule, segment of the population who can be classified as true believers. These true believers are the ones who subscribe fully to the ideology of the Islamic Republic and want a fully nonsecular government. They attend Friday prayers, they participate in demonstrations (although many of them receive money for this), and they hope to become the next generation of the ruling elite. Almost perversely, these true believers are often driven more by ambition than by true belief, as such. The true believers I met in the universities aspired to be head of the Guardian Council, president of Iran, or ministers in the government, and becoming a true believer is the only way for them to do this. They are deeply religious, but so are other members of the population who despise the regime. The key difference is that the true believers show a willingness to sell out to ambition.

Among the true believers, there are also those who are the kin of the inner circle of the ruling elite. These families have prospered under this regime and know that whatever follows will lead to a lower quality of life for them and their families. As a result, they hope to keep the generational support alive by following in their fathers’ footsteps and by supporting the regime in all of its policies. Having been socialized in the homes of the inner circle, they have no reason to reject a status quo that has brought them wealth, opportunity, and personal prosperity.

While the impoverished and the true believers are key components of the regime’s support base, the most important and stable support base they have is among the youth who participate in military and paramilitary activities.

In addition to the traditional military, some elements of Iranian youth are actively involved in the Basij forces, Ansar-e Hezbollah, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Each of these organizations serves a different purpose, but they all allow for youth participants to hold positions of social and political prominence. It is empowering for these youth; they are given uniforms and authority to command over the population. For those who have grown up either humiliated or impoverished, the military is a great way to get ahead and is a way to experience a level of power and comfort that is not enjoyed by the vast majority of Iranian young people. These youth do not live in fear like the rest of the population; instead, they take part in evoking fear. Because many of these youth lack a strong education, they actually enjoy a relative position in society that far exceeds what they would otherwise have.

These military organizations are integrated into Iranian society so as to maintain order and keep the regime in control. While the traditional military are responsible for protecting Iran from outside threats, these state-sponsored paramilitary organizations are designed to maintain domestic stability, i.e., to keep the population suppressed. The Basij forces can best be thought of as volunteers for military service. Not surprisingly, they are usually young and come from the poorer and less educated segments of society. The Basij forces first came to prominence during the Iran-Iraq War by providing bodies for the human-wave attacks against southern Iraq. At present, the Basij are supposed to be role models for their peers and are tasked with enforcing proper ethical conduct. This enforcement has often been violent and has caught the attention of groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

My first encounter with the Basij forces came outside of the old United States Embassy on Taleqani Avenue. Just as I was taking a photo of a mural that read “America Shall Face a Severe Defeat,” I was grabbed on my arm by a Basij troop, who could not have been older than sixteen. He was a kid; his clothes were too big for him, his hair was disheveled, and he had but a little bit of scruff right above his upper lip.

He didn’t speak English, but he grabbed my camera and was able to mutter, “What are you doing here?!” and “What is this?” in an aggressive tone.

I tried to stay calm. I had encountered numerous child soldiers in Africa, who were hyped up on gunpowder and drugs and armed with loaded AK-47s. Those child soldiers viewed violence and murder as a game and I truly feared them. There were no consequences for their actions and they saw me as a figure in a video game. I had come into contact with these child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, and the Republic of Congo. They toyed with live grenades and fiddled with loaded guns the way I’d played with action figures when I was their age.

I didn’t consider myself too tough for the Basij forces, but I had become accustomed to staying calm when confronted by military and paramilitary figures speaking to me in ominous tones. Besides, the Basij troop that confronted me was about as threatening as a kid demanding my lunch money. In the United States, he would not even be old enough to drive; and more notably, unlike the child soldiers in Africa, he had a wooden club instead of a semiautomatic weapon.

Regardless, I was in a new place and I didn’t know in what ways this kid could cause trouble for me. So I played the game. Fortunately, I had just interviewed the former Iranian vice president and I had the picture on my digital camera. As soon as I showed this kid a photo of me shaking hands with Sayyid Muhammad Ali Abtahi’s, he left me alone, first admonishing me not to take any more pictures.

I saw the Basij forces in other parts of Iran, but I rarely saw them commanding much respect. At the universities, they have their own rooms where they watch over the activities of the students. The students, however, mock them as a “bunch of children and want to be Hezbollah students who know nothing about life.” One student explained that “they just sit there all day and wait for any motivation against their interests so that they can scream and yell and pretend they are important.”

In Shiraz, I saw an eighteen-year-old Basij trooper approach a group of girls and tell them to cover up. The girls were wearing multicolored hejabs, but pushed so far back on their heads that it looked like they would fall off. Outside of the hejab, they wore completely Western clothing. I was several yards away, so I couldn’t make out what was being said, but the reaction of the girls said it all: They just looked at him and laughed. As he persisted, they talked back to him and walked away. In theory, the Basij command respect and an important place in society, but in practice, they are scoffed at by the majority of the population for being uneducated parrots of regime ideology.

Ansar-e Hezbollah plays a similar role to the Basij forces, although it acts more independently. The organization is best thought of as the Iranian regime’s vigilante group of personal thugs. Their official duty is to uphold Islamic codes in Iranian society, but they are also used to do the regime’s dirty work. When riots or protests spiral out of control, Ansar-e Hezbollah usually takes the first crack at quelling the tides of dissent. They played a substantial role in suppressing the student riots in 1999, and as an elite paramilitary group, they continue to intimidate. Dressed all in black, they are seen by the population as the equivalent of a gang of government thugs, traveling from district to district looking for protests and assemblies to crack down on. They are essentially suppression-happy, often seen using primitive weapons like metal bars and chains and speeding around on their motorcycles. As one of the most conservative and fundamentally Islamist groups in the country, most youth fear this gang of thugs.