REMARKABLY, THERE WERE NO ATTEMPTS TO ATTACK THE UNITED States in retaliation for its occupation of Iraq, not by American Muslims or by foreigners. But the jihad in Iraq did lead to a regional blowback, and its neighbor Jordan was the first to suffer.
On February 16, 2006, Mohammad Zaki Amawi, Marwan Othman El-Hindi, and Wassim I. Mazloum were indicted by a U.S. district court in Ohio. The three were accused of conspiring to wage jihad against U.S. forces in Iraq, training in firearms and martial arts, collecting funds to support their mission, studying jihad training manuals on the Internet, meeting to plan how best to assist the Iraqi insurgency, studying how to build IEDs, and threatening the life of President Bush. Amawi flew to Jordan in August 2005 carrying laptops he wanted to donate to the mujahideen in Iraq. The indictment added that Amawi “unsuccessfully attempted to enter Iraq to wage violent Jihad, or ‘holy war,’ against the United States and coalition forces.”
Amawi and El-Hindi were Jordanian-born naturalized citizens of the United States. Mazloum was from Lebanon. It was the first time such charges had been made against U.S. residents, but the charges were very similar to ones in numerous court cases in Jordan since the beginning of the Iraq War. These trials were held in the Marka military court, a squat white building across the road from a military airbase that is planted atop a hill in eastern Amman, the somnolent capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Apart from dealing with wayward soldiers, the court also handles security and terrorism cases. Relatives of prisoners stand on line on the curb outside, most dressed in traditional gowns, deep lines on their unshaven faces, waiting to be searched and allowed in. The winter winds blow hard on Amman’s hilltops and muffle the approaching sirens of a police sedan, which is followed by a dark blue van, windowless except for some bars on the back that show only blackness inside. The van is always followed by a pickup truck, with two masked counterterror agents manning a heavy mounted gun on the bed.
On Wednesday, December 28, 2005, the van entered Marka through the main gate and circled around the back of the courthouse. Ten shackled prisoners were taken out and led into a cage in the courtroom. Their lawyers chatted jovially in a smoke-filled waiting room; then made their way past the numerous police officers, security officers, and soldiers bustling back and forth in search of something to do; and headed into the small courtroom, lit with bright fluorescent lights, lined with old wooden benches, and full of blue uniformed Amn al-Am, or General Security, officers.
Muhamad Ibrahim al-Ghawi, twenty-five years old; Faris Sayid Hassan Shoter, thirty-two; Muhamad Jamil al-Titi, twenty-two; Rauf Aballah Abu Mayha, twenty-two; Muhamad Mahmud al-Sharman, twenty-nine; Basil Muhamad al-Ramah, twenty-nine; Monaem Ibrahim Hasan, thirty-one; Raed Ahmed Kaywan, thirty-three; Muhamad Qasim Sulaiman Ramah, thirty-five; and Majdi Khalid Hassan al-Fawar, twenty-one: all stood in the cage, chatting in good spirits, smiling and waving at the few relatives who sat in the back. The cage had a chain-link fence around it, an innovation imposed after one prisoner called Azmi al-Jayusi, a friend of Jordanian terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, threw his shoe at the judge while on trial for attempting to bomb the Jordanian security headquarters. Other prisoners had been known to sing songs in honor of Zarqawi during trial.
All ten prisoners in the cage wore dark blue denim prison suits, wool caps, and slippers. Their beards were shaggy, as was their hair, which curled out of their caps over their ears and the backs of their necks. They were hard to distinguish from one another. Some had a dark stain sunk in above their brows in the center of the forehead. It was a sima, a sign of intense piety, acquired by kneeling and bowing forward, placing the forehead on the floor in prayer. Their long beards and hair were a sign of their beliefs. These men were Salafis.
Salafi ideologues dominated Jordan’s mosques, and young men filled their ranks. Salafism found a home in Jordan beginning in the 1970s, when a Syrian cleric called Muhamad Nasir al-Din Albani began teaching in Jordan at the invitation of the Muslim Brotherhood. Eventually he settled in the Jordanian city of Zarqa to avoid persecution by the secular Syrian Baathists and began preaching about the need to purify Islam. Hundreds came to hear him speak, and he influenced the ranks and hierarchy of Jordan’s clergy. The regime was threatened by the crowds he drew, and he was prohibited from speaking in public. Unable to operate openly, Salafism became an informal underground movement. The late 1970s were a crucial period, as the leftist, secular, and nationalist projects in the Arab world appeared to be failing. Saudi radicals rose up against their regime, temporarily taking the mosque in Mecca; the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan; and the Iranian Revolution was both a model for political Islamists and a threat to Sunni regimes. By the early 1980s Arab regimes had decided to dispose of their excess radicals by dispatching them to the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.
Jordan was a ripe environment for political Islam. Since the British invented it in 1924, the kingdom had been ruled by the Hashemites, or Albu Hashem, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad who gained their legitimacy by belonging to Ahl al-Beit, the family of the Prophet. In 1970, when King Hussein fought an uprising of nationalist Palestinians—some of whom promulgated the slogan “The liberation of Jerusalem begins in Amman”—the Muslim Brotherhood, previously disenfranchised, supported King Hussein. The King rewarded them by granting them control over the Ministry of Education, allowing them to inculcate generations of Jordanians. Founded by Egyptian Hassan al-Banna in 1928, it sought to establish a Muslim state through nonviolent cultural revolution.
Radical Islam had received a needed fillip from the Afghan jihad, which began in 1979. But it was following the Gulf War of 1991 that jihadism became an international ideology. The Saudi government’s dependence on the American infidels to protect it from Saddam, and the U.S. presence in the holiest Muslim land, coincided with Muslims’ increasing resentment of their own governments. Arabs who had fought in the Afghan jihad began returning home and were disillusioned with what they encountered, so they sought to bring the jihad home too. The Israeli peace process was but one more betrayal for them. Also following the Gulf War, the Kuwaitis expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of whom settled in Jordan. Returning Jordanian jihadis were repelled by the ostentation that accompanied the arrival of wealthy Palestinians to their poor country. One such jihadi was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who would lead the Tawhid and Jihad organization of Iraq, later known as Al Qaeda in Iraq. Other Palestinians brought with them a radical jihadist Salafi ideology. Two of them were Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, the most important ideologue for modern jihad and Zarqawi’s former mentor, and Abu Anas al-Shami, who went on to become Zarqawi’s key cleric and religious adviser in Iraq. Maqdisi’s writings influenced the jihadis who carried out the 1995 bombings in Saudi Arabia that targeted Americans as well as the September 11 attackers. Zarqawi, Maqdisi, and Shami were heroes for young Jordanians such as those on trial in Marka.
Bordered by Palestine and Iraq, Jordan was caught between the two most important struggles in the Muslim world, at once both anticolonial wars and jihads. On November 9, 2005, Zarqawi brought the terror back home to Jordan when he dispatched four Iraqi suicide bombers to Amman, three of whom succeeded in detonating their deadly vests in three different hotels, killing sixty and injuring one hundred. It was Zarqawi’s third successful attack in Jordan. Each time he had used non-Jordanians to avoid infiltration by Jordan’s mukhabarat (intelligence service). In 2005 the mukhabarat had arrested thirteen terrorist cells, and in 2004 it had arrested eleven, one of which was in direct contact with Zarqawi. It was not a good time to go on trial for terrorism if you were a Salafi.
All of the prisoners held in Marka in 2005 were from Irbid, a northern city by the Syrian border. Six of the ten were originally Palestinians, their parents or grandparents having been expelled from their homes west of the border in 1948 or 1967. One of them paced back and forth in the cage, chanting lines from the Koran. Others joked with their relatives. One leaned forward in conversation with his lawyer, complaining that “the verdict was already decided before the trial. This is just a formality.”
The charges against the ten stated that there were five other suspects who had escaped. According to the prosecution, they had met in the Qaqa’a Mosque in the Irbid’s Hnina neighborhood, which they visited frequently. The charges mentioned that the men engaged in theological discussions about calling common people, rulers, and scholars infidels. They had agreed it was necessary to fight the Americans in Iraq and planned how they could recruit others, collect money to go to Iraq via Syria, and attack the Americans and the Iraqi Security Forces. In late July 2005 they pooled money to purchase a Kalashnikov and bullets. At different times they snuck into Syria, some of them ferried by a friend who owned a school bus. In Syria one of them met with a Tunisian who took him to an apartment where a Libyan and Saudi were staying. They discussed what operations he could execute and urged him to drive a car bomb, but the charges stated that he refused to become “suicidal.” He tired of waiting in Syria and returned to Jordan, where his friends gave him a hard time for turning back. (Another one was invited to become a suicide bomber, but he too refused and returned to Jordan, where he was arrested.) Others later snuck into Syria and discussed joining the ranks of the mujahideen fighters in Iraq. Still others snuck into Syria with a Kalashnikov and four magazines full of bullets. In Syria they argued, and two of them decided to return to Jordan, where they too were arrested.
All the officials in the court had mustaches. Three military judges in olive uniforms sat behind a long wooden bench. Behind them were framed pictures of former King Hussein and current King Abdullah. Two young soldiers with red sashes from their waists to their shoulders stood against the wall. The chief judge sat in the center. As he prepared to read the charges, one of the prisoners shouted, “Say God is great!” The prisoners erupted in unison, yelling fiercely, “God is great! The way of God is jihad!” Perhaps they were imitating one of their role models, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, who made a similar show during his trial in Egypt for the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. The judge waited for them to finish shouting as if he was used to it and read the four charges, which were possession of an automatic weapon with intention to use it in illegal activity, initiation of illegal activities that could harm Jordan’s relations with a foreign country, sneaking and helping to sneak from and to Jordan with an automatic weapon, and helping to sneak into Jordan illegally. When the judge got to the part about “a foreign country,” he was interrupted by an angry prisoner, who shouted, “Infidel countries, not foreign countries!” The judge looked bored and tapped his pen on the table for silence, asking the prisoner to stop interrupting.
One by one the judge read the prisoners’ names, asking if they pleaded guilty or not. He was interrupted by the same prisoner once more, who shouted, “This is a play. When is it going to end? We know that the verdicts have been decided and written in the files!” The judge tapped his pencil impatiently. “I am not guilty, you are guilty!” snapped some of the prisoners. “Jihad is not guilt!” shouted one prisoner. “Is jihad in the way of God guilt? Fighting the Americans and Jews and infidels is now guilt? We are protecting the honor of our sisters in Iraq. Is that guilt? God is our master and you have no master. Your regime is rotten and it stinks. You and your regime and your ranks, you are all guilty!” The judge tapped his pen and told the prisoners to answer without comments. “He who opens alcoholic bars is guilty!” said one prisoner.
The judge lost his temper and angrily told the guards to take the loudest prisoner out of the cage and back to the van, and the prisoner quieted down. Then, as punishment for the prisoners’ recalcitrance, the judge ordered their families to leave the court. The military prosecutor, also in uniform and sporting a thick mustache, informed the judge that he had no witnesses, and the trial was postponed for one week. “God is our master and you have no master!” the prisoners shouted in unison. “He is the best master and the best supporter. America is your master and you have the worst master. God is great!”
Following the trial I met with Hussein al-Masri, lawyer for the accused ten. Masri, dressed in an ill-fitting brown jacket with green pants, a red shirt, and a brown tie, told me, “Now the law permits accusing people who only think or talk about terrorism. It is not required to commit the act of terrorism; only thinking or speaking is enough. The prosecution accused the defendants of already going to Syria and meeting and arranging terrorist activities, but they didn’t do it.”
The following Friday I drove up to Irbid’s Hnina neighborhood to the Qaqa’a Mosque, hoping to learn more about what might have motivated the young prisoners in their failed and almost comical attempt to join the jihad in Iraq. As I drove up, my taxi driver recounted how his cousin had suddenly picked up and left for Iraq in March 2003. Many young men from his town, Zarqa, who were not even overtly religious, had poured over the border to fight the Americans. An hour and a half later we drove through Irbid’s rolling hills, the elevation making the air cleaner than in Amman. We were a mere thirty kilometers from the Syrian border. Friday is a slow day in the Muslim world, and Irbid’s streets were nearly empty. In the Hnina neighborhood, two boys sat on a curb sharing a bag of potato chips. A small group of men and women lined up in front of the Jowharat al-Zein bakery to purchase piles of large flat bread for lunch, which was always a more important occasion on Fridays. Children played in the street, and the few women walking by were not conservatively dressed.
I sat on a step in front of a closed store eating a sandwich with my friends and watching the trickle of men making their way to the Qaqa’a Mosque for the Friday noon prayer and the khutba (sermon). Men casually strolled by. “Assalamu aleikum” (Peace be upon you), they said as they noticed us, and we responded, “Wa aleikum salam wa rahmat ullah wa barakat” (And peace upon you and the mercy of God and his blessings).
The mosque was an inconspicuous white three-story building with a small dome and a loudspeaker. Down the hill from its narrow gated entrance, and around the back, was a small tiled bathroom for ablutions, the ritual washing of the legs, arms, and face required before prayer. Inside was a long sink lined with many faucets and short benches. Upstairs the trickle of men had reached about six hundred; it seemed as if more men were present than the neighborhood could have produced on its own. Their shoes lined the entrance or were stuffed into pigeonholes. They kneeled, or bowed, or stood in silent prayer in rows along white lines painted on the green carpet, in a “fortified wall” the way tradition stipulated. Many small children played by the door; others prayed by their fathers or leaned against the columns. The mosque was unfinished, and unpainted cinder blocks and plaster were visible on the walls. The sun came in from a skylight around the dome. Men wore tracksuits, jeans, and dishdashas. I noticed one man wearing a salwar kameez, the traditional long shirt and baggy pants worn in Pakistan and Afghanistan but not in the Arab world. It was a statement of support for jihad.
By chance, the mosque’s imam was called Sheikh Jihad Mahdi, though the name itself was of no significance (even Christian Arabs are known to call their sons Jihad). Sheikh Jihad wore a simple white dishdasha and white cap and sat in the front with a microphone. As he waited for the proper time to begin, he lectured the men in the mosque—and, through the loudspeakers, the entire neighborhood—on how to pray properly, using a strong colloquial accent and slang. As the majority of men completed their prayers in a low murmur, Sheikh Jihad stood up and began with a short prayer, as is the custom. “Thanks be to God, supporter of Islam,” he said, “for his victory and his humiliation of infidelity with his power and managing all the matters with his orders and deceiving the infidels with his cleverness, the one who estimates the days going over and over by his justice. Prayer and peace on the one who raises the flag of Islam with his sword.” This was no ordinary prayer and was not normally used, but it was the same prayer used by Al Qaeda in Iraq, the movement led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in every message they put out. It was a code, and supporters of the jihad and Al Qaeda would recognize it.
It would soon be time for the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, and throughout the world millions were making their way to Saudi Arabia to fulfill this important pillar of Islam. Sheikh Jihad exhorted his flock to go on the hajj, calling it “the most important act of worship.” He warned that if a man did not go on the hajj he was as bad as a Jew. “Remember that we are now building this mosque,” he told his listeners. “It is not finished, so give any amount of money to help build this house of God.”
Like all sermons, Sheikh Jihad’s ended with a prayer. “God support the Muslims and give them victory everywhere,” he said, as the crowd responded with an “Amin.”
“God support the mujahideen and give them victory everywhere, in Iraq in Palestine.”
“Amin.”
“God give us the power to break the thorns of the Jews and the Americans and the Crusaders.”
“Amin.”
“God give us the opportunity to face them.”
“Amin.”
“Bless us and show us the way to jihad in the path of God.”
“Amin.”
Sheikh Jihad repeated this last prayer for jihad three times. Interestingly, he omitted the prayer for the leader of the nation (in this case, King Abdullah) that is traditionally invoked by clerics after their sermons.
The sheikh lived beneath his mosque with his family, and I waited on the steps in front of his door as he kissed and greeted well-wishers following his sermon. He invited me to his guest room, which was lined with books on Islam. Green pillows covered the floor, and we sat down to drink tea that he brought in from the house, which was closed off to me lest I glimpse his wife. I could hear his children watching cartoons on television. Colorful plastic flowers, which seemed to be required in Jordanian homes, decorated the room. On one wall in his guest room Sheikh Jihad had hung an immense sword, right out of Conan the Barbarian, with a wide sharp blade. On its hilt were two skulls and spikes coming out ominously. It was not a Middle Eastern blade, and I had never heard or seen a cleric with such a décor hanging on his walls. The thirty-five-year-old Sheikh Jihad took his name seriously.
Like many in Irbid, Sheikh Jihad was originally Palestinian; his family’s town had been destroyed by the Israelis in 1967. He had been a cleric for ten years, after receiving a degree in Sharia law from a Sudanese correspondence school. “The khutba is a standard that measures the direction of people,” he said, adding that his sermons had once been much more political, especially at the beginning of the Iraq War. But he had been arrested several times by Jordanian authorities as a result, and was forced to moderate his tone, at least a little. He claimed to have been tortured by them as well. I asked him about the ten young men I had seen in court two days before and who were said to have met to discuss their ideas and plans regularly in his mosque, but he claimed never to have heard of them. He no longer explicitly advocated jihad, in public at least, worrying that the November bombings in three Amman hotels had changed things in Jordan. “People were disgusted by it,” he said, explaining that things in Iraq were confusing.
The war in Iraq had changed everything in the Muslim world, creating new confusion and new certainties. In the late 1990s experts on the Muslim world had spoken about the failure of political Islam, even explaining that the September 11 attacks were its last nihilistic act. The planners of the American war in Iraq claimed that the democracy they would install in place of Saddam’s dictatorship would create a domino effect, spreading to other authoritarian states in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Syria. Nearly three years later, with religious parties dominating the Iraqi elections, Hamas winning in the Palestinian elections, the Muslim Brotherhood increasing its power in the Egyptian elections, and authoritarian regimes in the region appearing unthreatened by democracy, it was radical Islam that had spread. In fact, it was experiencing a renaissance.
The father of modern jihad was Abdallah Azzam. Azzam was born in 1941 in Jenin, Palestine. Following the 1967 war and the Israeli occupation, Azzam, then a high school teacher, based himself in Jordan and led religious fighters from different Arab countries in cross-border raids against the Israelis from the “sheikhs’ camps” supported by the Muslim Brotherhood movement. Azzam led the Qutbi wing of the Jordanian Brotherhood, which was named after Egyptian Sayyid Qutb and made up of those closest to Salafis in their way of thinking. Qutb, who led the Muslim Brotherhood after Hassan al-Banna, was executed by the Egyptian regime in 1966. His most important book was Milestones on the Road. The two most important concepts in Qutb’s writings were jahiliya and takfir. Takfir, as mentioned above, means excommunicating, or declaring a Muslim to be a kafir. Jahiliya is the pre-Islamic ignorance that Islamists accuse present Muslim governments of having reverted to. Governments that have reverted to such a state can be declared infidel, and jihad against them is legitimate.
During the 1970 civil war in Jordan, when the regime battled Palestinians in what came to be known as Black September, Azzam ordered his men to leave Jordan to avoid killing other Muslims. Azzam was alienated by the dominance of secular nationalism over the Palestinian liberation movement and hoped to internationalize jihad. He studied in Egypt’s prestigious Al Azhar University, receiving a PhD in Islamic law and graduating with honors. He went on to teach in Saudi Arabia as well as in Jordan. Following the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, Azzam moved to Pakistan, where he founded Maktab al-Khidmat al-Mujahideen (the Office of Mujahideen Services). The office served as the main clearinghouse for Arab fighters seeking to join the jihad in Afghanistan; it housed, trained, and educated them. Although the top Saudi cleric pronounced jihad in Afghanistan a fard ayn (direct obligation), the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood refused to issue a similar fatwa, so Azzam left the movement. Azzam believed that defensive jihad—i.e., defeating infidel invaders in Muslim lands—was a fard ayn. He singled out Afghanistan and Palestine as the most obvious cases. (During the war in Iraq, similar declarations that defensive jihad was a fard ayn were made throughout the Muslim world.) Azzam’s books and sermons formulated his thoughts on jihad, and he mentored Osama bin Laden until 1987, when the Saudi decided to form his own camp for Arabs. Azzam was not radical enough for this new camp; Ayman al-Zawahiri, who would become bin Laden’s key deputy and ideologue, virtually excommunicated him.
In November 1989 a car bomb killed Azzam and two of his sons. In the car that followed Azzam’s doomed vehicle sat his eighteen-year-old son, Hudheifa, who had been fighting since 1985. In December 2005 I met Hudheifa in a cafe in Amman. Dressed in light blue jeans, wearing a leather jacket and red polo shirt, speaking excellent English, still fit and smiling often, he did not look like an expert in international jihad. Hudheifa, who was light-skinned like his father, with a neatly clipped and groomed beard, ordered a hot chocolate and recounted his tale. When Azzam brought his family to Pakistan, he settled them first in Islamabad, where he taught part-time. He set up the Office of Mujahideen Services in Peshawar in 1983, opening guest houses for mujahideen and training camps in 1984. Hudheifa began his training at the age of thirteen in the Sada (echo) Camp in Peshawar, and in 1985 he trained in Afghanistan’s Khaldan and Yaqubi camps. He fought his first battle alongside his father and brothers in Jaji that year. The all-Arab unit included Saudis, Moroccans, and Algerians. When he was not fighting, Hudheifa studied at the Mahad al-Ansar (Supporters’ Institute), a school his father had established for the children of Arab mujahideen. Rivals of Azzam condemned him for his friendship with Afghan jihad leader Ahmad Shah Massoud and for his relative moderation. “Al Qaeda separated from Abdallah Azzam,” said Hudheifa. “They wanted to fight against the whole world. Our school specialized in defensive jihad: Palestine, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Chechnya.”
Hudheifa fought from 1985 until 1992. He befriended Massoud in 1985 and fought alongside the famed hero, taking Kabul with him in 1992. He then went to continue his studies at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, but for the next six years he and some Arab colleagues tried to bring the warring parties in Afghanistan together, shuttling back and forth between Massoud’s Northern Alliance and the Taliban’s Mullah Omar (he blamed the failure to reach peace on the intervention of Pakistani intelligence). “We were the Arab mujahideen respected by everyone,” he told me.
From 1994 to 1995 Hudheifa was in Bosnia, working to funnel money and supplies to the nascent country’s beleaguered Muslims, and fighting on their behalf as well. He tried to enter Chechnya, but the Russians had blocked the road and he was forced to turn back. Hudheifa was arrested in the airport when he returned to Jordan in 1996, and again in 1997. He was also arrested in Pakistan, as governments that had supported the jihad began fearing the blowback. In 2000 the Jordanians returned his passport to him, and he was allowed to live freely, selling cars and nuts, importing and exporting, and receiving a license to work as a mobile phone distributor (on his personal multimedia mobile phone Hudheifa showed me films he had saved of Iraqi resistance attacks against the American military). He completed his master’s degree in Islamic studies and the Arabic language. When I met him he was working on a PhD in Arabic literature from the classical Andalusian period.
Three days after America’s war in Iraq started, Hudheifa and other followers of Azzam crossed into that country, basing themselves in Falluja. “We were trying to convince Muslim scholars to begin the resistance,” he explained. “They had no plan. They were sleeping. For one month they did not agree. They said, ‘Go back to your country.’ We were more than thirty or forty Arabs, without weapons. We went from mosque to mosque, from school to school. People said. ‘The U.S. brought us democracy.’ They believed the lies of Bush, that he will bring democracy and freedom.” Everything changed on April 28, he said, when American soldiers killed seventeen people at a demonstration and twelve more at a subsequent one. Soon after that, rumors spread of four American soldiers raping a seventeen-year-old girl, with pictures distributed on the Internet. “This story was the main cause of starting the resistance in Falluja,” Hudheifa explained. “The rape made them reconsider, but there was still no action. I was watching from far only with a smile. In the beginning they said, ‘Go make jihad in your country.’ After the rape they said, ‘Okay, we want to start now or tomorrow we will find our mothers or daughters or sisters raped.’ This story exploded the resistance in Falluja. Then they called us for a meeting and said, ‘You were right.’ We had told them from the first day the Iraqi army abandoned weapons to take them, but they said, ‘This is stealing, haram [forbidden], looting. You could buy an RPG for three U.S. dollars in those days. The Americans changed the ideology of the people with their oppression. They could have been the best power in the world.”
Hudheifa spent four months in Iraq imparting his knowledge to the indigenous resistance. His background gave him immediate currency. “I am the son of Abdallah Azzam,” he said, “so everybody wanted to listen, and I have experience in three or four jihads in different countries, and a lot of the Iraqi resistance had no plan. We gave them our experience so they could start from where we stopped, so they don’t start from zero. Jihad is an obligation as a Muslim. If you can’t support jihad with fighting, you can support with ideas or teaching. So we tried and we still do. Followers of Abdallah Azzam helped plan the resistance in all of Iraq, and we had hoped for a united resistance with Shiites. We were aiming to bring unity between Sunnis and Shiites with resistance on both sides, but the Shiite leadership was against us and Zarqawi spoiled it, making it fail.” The Iraqi resistance requested his father’s books, he told me, and beginning in June 2003 they became widely available in Falluja and Ramadi.
He explained that his father “talks about the crimes of Saddam and what real jihad is.” His father had also opposed Saddam, he told me, trying to make it clear that Azzam’s followers opposed the Baathists as well and were not fighting in support of the former regime. “My father was kicked out of the University of Jordan for opposing Saddam’s war against Iran, and he was sentenced to death in Iraq for his work against Saddam. We are not with Saddam or the Baathists. We want to support the Muslim population.”
Things were more difficult now, he explained. “After September 11 all money-transfer systems changed, but they can’t stop financial support for the resistance.” Wealthy businessmen from outside Iraq still sent money. “We have Iraqis who were in the Office of Services and are now in Iraq,” he told me. But still, the good old days of jihad were in Afghanistan. Back then, “We used to go safely and securely, get a plane from anywhere to Pakistan and find vehicles from different organizations who sent us to rest houses, who took us to safe training camps and then safely to Afghanistan. Now if you want to go to Iraq, there are thousands of dangers facing you. Going into Iraq is very dangerous.”
Hudheifa was fiercely opposed to terrorists like Zarqawi, who, he said, gave jihad a bad name. “We say to people who give funds, ‘Don’t give to Zarqawi. Give to Iraqis, give to the Association of Muslim Scholars. They are the right way. Our school supports them.’”
Hudheifa viewed his support for the Iraqi resistance as consistent with his support for other indigenous Muslim movements fighting in self-defense. “Iraq is a defensive jihad,” he said. “Troops from abroad came to a Muslim country.” Hudheifa told me he was proud of his work in Iraq. “Praise God, we were successful. Everything is going much better. Much better than we were planning. It won’t take like Afghanistan, nine years, to kick the U.S. out. It will be much faster. If I find a way to go into Iraq, I would go. I told the government. But we must know our aims and goals. Just exploding cars is not enough. We need a plan for the future. When the Americans leave, we will look for the next place.”
Although Azzam had opposed attacking Muslim governments, other veterans of the Afghan jihad took a different view, preferring to target what they called “the close enemy” first rather than “the far enemy,” such as the Americans. Sheikh Jawad al-Faqih was one such veteran who seemed to want to target all enemies. I met him at the home of a Salafi contact called Abu Saad. Sheikh Jawad was a fearsome Brobdingnagian man with a thick beard and a clipped mustache (en vogue for Salafis); a large head; thick, fiery, protruding eyebrows; immense hands; and a raspy voice. He was a Salafi Hagrid. He wore a black salwar kameez and a white ishmag (head scarf) without an eqal (rope), which was the Salafi way. Like a good Salafi, he strictly adhered to the requirement that one’s beard be longer than what a hand’s grip can hold. A Palestinian whose uncles had fought the British occupation of Palestine, he had initially been influenced by secular nationalism. In 1982 he found “the correct way,” and abandoned his nationalist sentiments. “I looked at all Islamic groups, only praying and fasting,” he said. “I didn’t like it. To be a real Muslim you have to fight and make the wrong right and hit powers who work against the right and attack Christians, Jews, and the mukhabarat.”
When he encountered followers of Juheiman al-Utaibi, a Saudi radical who in 1979 had led the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and was later executed by Saudi authorities, Sheikh Jawad explained, “I found their ideas were what I was looking for.” Sheikh Jawad had served in the Jordanian special forces, and he applied the skills he learned when he joined a militant group called Muwahidun, which meant Unitarians, or Monotheists. But in 1985 eight of the members were arrested. Sheikh Jawad was spared arrest because he feigned mental retardation. He was disappointed with his comrades in arms upon their release. “They were afraid,” he said. “Their ideas about jihad changed in jail, so they refused to work with me.” Disgusted with his fellow Jordanians, Sheikh Jawad was determined to leave. In 1989 he went to Yemen with another Jordanian, and together with seventeen Yemenis they made the journey to Pakistan. He had previously tried to go to Afghanistan but failed. In Pakistan he stayed for two nights in Peshawar’s Beit al-Shuhada (home of the martyrs) guest house before entering Afghanistan’s Sada Camp, where he received training in Soviet bloc weapons and was sent to the Jalalabad front. “I refused to be with Afghans,” he explained. “They had beards, but they were communists or used drugs.” He added, “I don’t like Afghans except for the Taliban.” Sheikh Jawad fought in four battles before being injured and transferred to a hospital. Osama bin Laden, known to friends like Sheikh Jawad as Abu Abdallah, spotted him carrying a heavy mortar across a river. “He liked me and said, ‘Sign this guy up,’” said Sheikh Jawad. “He was impressed with my strength. Abu Abdallah was a brother, a jihadi. He was very humble. He helped the jihad with money.”
Sheikh Jawad returned to Jordan, and then “a friend of mine asked me to come back to make operations on the other side of the border,” meaning Israel, so “we smuggled weapons into Palestine.” During the Gulf War he trucked food aid from Jordan into Baghdad. At the time many Afghan veterans gathered in Jordan, preparing to enter Iraq to defend it from American occupation, which would not come for another fourteen years. Instead, together with a doctor called Samih Zeidan, Sheikh Jawad established Jeish Muhammad (Army of Muhammad), and he imposed a strict training regimen on his recruits. Sheikh Jawad admitted to carrying out operations against infidels: attacking a British target, attempting to attack U.S. marines, “killing a priest,” and “exploding a Jew.” He established cells of fighters he called “families,” each of which consisted of five fighters who did not know the identities of any other families. Sheikh Jawad claimed that Jeish Muhammad had cells around the Arab world. Most were veterans of the Afghan jihad. In 1991 a disgruntled member of Jeish Muhammad confessed the names of the organization’s members to the Jordanian intelligence. In 1992 members established a new organization called the Jordanian Afghanis, which bombed a movie theater in the city of Zarqa.
Sheikh Jawad disliked living in Jordan and viewed Jordanians as unreliable. “I was jailed thirteen times,” he said, “nine times because Jordanians named me, even when they gave their word that they wouldn’t.” Likewise, he was suspicious of fellow Palestinians in Jordan. “This generation of Palestinians,” he explained, “their fathers fled Palestine, so they can’t be trusted.” Sheikh Jawad was now a car dealer, but he missed the jihad. “I wish I was in Afghanistan now like I wish I was in paradise,” he told me. Likewise, he hoped to go to Iraq but worried that the Jordanians would turn him in. “If I reach the borders they will tell the Americans or the rafidha, [but] I wish I could go.”
“Iraq has a different taste. The water, the dates, the yogurt. It is the country of the caliphate. I am addicted to Iraq, addicted to jihad.”
Outside, the opulent western Amman homes are unpainted, the cinder blocks still showing, rebar protruding from unfinished rooftops. Hastily constructed square houses are piled one atop the other haphazardly along the hills, an architectural patchwork like in a South American barrio, with narrow alleys covered by laundry hanging between rooftops. Empty lots become trash lots. Thin metal minarets jut up from the cacophony, their mosques mere unadorned squares like all the homes but with a speaker attached to the metal tower. In a maze of narrow treeless streets in Rusaifa, south of Amman, shops cover the heads of female dummies in the windows; on the streets some women wear the burqa. Muddy cars drive through roads built in wadis (dry riverbeds) and trash collects on cliff sides. In the distance the yellow and red hills and dunes of the desert look cold against the gray winter sky. Like a Jewish settler in the West Bank, Muhamad Wasfi built his home on a deserted moonscape. It too appeared unfinished yet old, the yard covered with garbage, shrubs, a tricycle, and a toy gun.
Abu Muntasar, as he is called, wore fake Nike training pants and a matching blue sweatshirt. He had a strong thick body, with a belly that showed he was not as active as he used to be. His thick beard was unkempt, but his mustache was groomed short like a Salafi’s, and his hair was close-cropped. He had a false front tooth. Jordan’s winters are bitter, and we sat close to a gas heater in his guest room. Though Abu Muntasar was born in the West Bank in 1963, his father worked for the Jordanian Army. “I still remember the day I left Palestine,” he said, “with all the pieces of the Palestinian people. The Jews were raping and killing, so people were scared for their honor and left for Jordan.” His family moved first to Amman and then to Zarqa, northwest of the capital, where many military families were based. Abu Muntasar served for two years in the Jordanian military before earning a degree in business management and working as a civil servant. “At that time I generally began learning Islamic thought,” he explained. He admired the radical Islamic Group of Egypt and hoped to establish a similar Jordanian movement. “As Palestinian people we want to find a solution for our question,” he told me. “Although I was young, I saw no other solution for our problems other than Islam, so I wasn’t affected by secular Palestinian movements. I wanted to do something for Islam and Muslims and help establish the Muslim state and make Palestine the capital of our new caliphate.” I asked him if he thought this was possible. “I believe it without any doubt,” he said. “This has been proven by the Prophet Muhammad in his words.”
He viewed Jordan’s Islamic movements as contained or co-opted by the government. Like many Salafis, he was autodidactic, reading the works of Abdallah Azzam and the radical Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel Rahman currently imprisoned in America for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He read their books and listened to tapes of their sermons, admiring them for going to Afghanistan. In 1989 he went to Pakistan and then Afghanistan “to see the reality of Muslims and their movements, of the Islamic nation and jihad.” He dreamed of starting a jihad in Sham (the lands of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine) and liberating his homeland. “I was lucky,” he said, because he got to meet his hero Rahman in the Saudi-run Ansur guest house. The sheikh lectured Abu Muntasar and others about jihad: its justification, its history, and its future. “It was the first and last time that I saw the sheikh, but for me it is a rich history,” he recalled with nostalgia. Before going to the Jalalabad front, he was trained in the Sada and Salahedin camps, and fought under the leadership of an Egyptian called Abu Uthman. He also fought with Afghan leader Abdul Rasul Sayyaf but complained that “Sayyaf disappointed many people in the final years of the jihad by taking the side of the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. He should have taken the other side.”
In 1990 Abu Muntasar reached an agreement with jihad officials in Afghanistan that would allow him to bring his wife and children and work as a teacher with the sons of mujahideen, while continuing to fight during his vacations. Iraq invaded Kuwait upon his return to Jordan, “and my ideas changed,” he said. “The war was here.” Although a huge international coalition punished Saddam for violating international law, Israel’s defiance of United Nations rulings were ignored, he said. “It was a critical point for any Muslim who loves his religion and nation,” he said. Together with a Jordanian doctor called Muhammad al-Rifai, who was a leader of Jordan’s Afghan Arabs, he “established a jihad fighting movement based on spreading tawhid and jihad, and we directed our energies against Israel.” Led by Rifai, his movement was called the Organized Movement of Islamic Call and Jihad. The main goal of the organization, which he claimed had thousands of members and supporters, was to establish a caliphate and then to destroy Israel. Abu Muntasar, the organization’s speaker, spread its ideas in mosques and schools, although he had no formal religious education. “Islamic thought is something personal,” he said. “I taught myself. I was a leader and had to learn more and teach in people’s homes and mosques, even funeral houses.” Following the Gulf War, the Jordanian government cracked down on Islamic movements, and Abu Muntasar was jailed with many of his associates, since their group was affiliated with the Jeish Muhammad. Abu Muntasar had opposed operations in Jordan. “We knew it would be useless, and we had a much more important goal,” he said. In prison he was beaten and tortured. “Torture is how they got information,” he said. “Torture is the best way to get information.” (I joked that perhaps I should torture him, then, to get more answers.) Following their release from prison, Rifai returned to Afghanistan and then sought asylum in England, while Abu Muntasar worked as a part-time imam in mosques and roved the country to teach and lecture.
Abu Muntasar described the 1990s as his trial-and-error period. He opposed attacking the Jordanian government, explaining that “the near enemy exists to protect the far enemy, but if you attack the near enemy, then you alienate the population. They will say the dead man is a member of this or that tribe, he prays with you, it will get people to hate you. But if you attack the far enemy, you are also attacking the near enemy, but the regime cannot say anything to you because people will hate them. If you kill a Jew or Americans, people will like you.” Abu Muntasar was arrested once more for his speeches, and later for his activities with Zarqawi. “What I am concerned with now is continuing the Islamic call and establishing an Islamic way of life and waiting for the correct jihad. The next battlefield is Sham, and we must prepare the people of Sham for this. What happened in Iraq and before in Afghanistan has extension. The U.S. wants to get inside the capital of Islam, which is Sham. This entrance will be through Syria. Syria will be the slaughterhouse of Americans and their supporters, so they are welcome to get inside Syria and be butchered.”
Abu Saad called me one night and picked me up from my hotel in Amman. In the front passenger seat sat thirty-seven-year-old Abu Muhamad. Though he was seated in the front and I in the back, lighting my notebook with my mobile phone in order to take notes, I could see from how his head touched the car’s roof and his long legs pressed against the dashboard that Abu Muhamad was a giant man. He had a dark sima above his prominent brow, and though I could see his thick lips, his face was shrouded by a dark ishmag with an eqal. He refused to tell me whether he was originally Palestinian, explaining that nationalism was against Islam.
Soon after the fall of Baghdad, Abu Muhamad had made his way to Baquba, a town east of Baghdad near the Iranian border. “I was thirsty for jihad,” he explained. “I felt I had a duty to go to Iraq. It’s a duty of any Muslim if he can.” He had previously lived in Iraq for five years before, and so had established relationships with “good people on the right side,” and he knew the country’s geography and dialect, so he passed for a local. Abu Muhamad had been married in Iraq in 1989, but when he returned to fight the Americans he had not expected to see his family again. Though at first he and his friends were unorganized, they soon met fighters from western Iraq and became more involved in the jihad. Abu Muhamad had been a sniper during his Jordanian military service. The Iraqis had not needed much training. “Do you know an Iraqi who doesn’t know how to fight?” he asked me. Abu Muhamad, who had known Zarqawi before the war, ended up in a group of five or six fighters belonging to Zarqawi’s movement but composed mainly of Iraqis. The group was commanded by a former Iraqi pilot. “God’s support came and sent us brothers from Ansar al-Sunna who trained us in street fighting,” he explained. “Jihad will spread around the world. The Americans are trying to attack Syria, and we are expecting them to attack.”
He refused to discuss most of the operations he had taken part in but admitted they had involved shootings and bombs and explained that most suicide bombers were not Iraqi. Jihad was an obligation for Muslims, he told me. “It is not about Iraq. The higher goal is to establish an Islamic state.” Referring to Osama bin Laden, he told me, “Sheikh Abu Abdallah said, ‘The foreigners and infidels and their interests are everywhere, so anywhere you can hit them you will hurt them.’”
He complained that Jordan was protecting Israel. “If this regime gave the youth freedom they would eat Israel,” he said. “They wouldn’t even leave their bones. But regimes are trying to protect Israel.” Abu Muhamad supported attacks against Iraq’s Shiite civilians because he considered them rafidha. “The infidel sects are one, if they are Jews or Shiites.” He explained that Ibn Taimiya, the thirteenth-century scholar loved by Salafis, had said that Shiites “were worse than Jews or Christians. Shiites hate Islam and hate Sunnis.”
Abu Muhamad’s days began early, although he and his fellow fighters rarely left the house during daylight, executing most operations at night. During the day, “one of the brothers would lecture, or we prepared for operations.” Before his departure for Iraq he had been arrested, accused of being a mujahid. “They called us takfiris,” he complained. “The man who says, ‘Don’t drink alcohol, don’t dance, but pray instead’—they call him a terrorist.” Although Sheikh Jawad had spoken a rich Arabic, referring to the Koran, Abu Muhamad’s speech was heavily colloquial. He called Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak a “pimp” for going to pay condolences to Tony Blair following the July 7 London bombings.
Abu Muhamad had not been in Iraq for a year, but he longed to return. “Iraq has a different taste,” he said. “The water, the dates, the yogurt. It is the country of the caliphate. I am addicted to Iraq, addicted to jihad.”
Yet no one was more addicted to jihad than the “Sheikh of the Slaughterers,” Ahmad Fadhil Nazal al-Khalaylah, more commonly known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He hailed from Zarqa, which had been the capital of radical Islam in Jordan since the 1960s and had also produced most of the Jordanian jihadis fighting in Iraq. Zarqa’s population of nearly one million is made up mostly of Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 and a second wave of refugees who came in 1967. Abdallah Azzam had also settled there.
Zarqawi, who took his city as his namesake, had been a wild young man, with no interest in religion. A high school dropout, he had a reputation for getting tattoos, drinking alcohol, getting into fights, and ending up in jail. Like many disaffected Muslim youth, he was moved to fight in Afghanistan by stories of mujahideen heroism there. But by the time he arrived as a twenty-three-year-old, the Russians had withdrawn, so he took part in the civil war. His journey to Afghanistan was arranged by Azzam’s Office of Mujahideen Services, then run by Azzam’s follower Sheikh Abdel Majid al-Majali, or Abu Qutaiba. Azzam’s son Hudheifa told me that in 1989 he picked up Zarqawi from the airport in Peshawar and took him to the Beit al-Shuhada guest house. “Zarqawi was a very simple person, silent, he didn’t talk. As a witness I can say that he was very well trained in military skills, especially in making bombs. In English you say ‘braveheart,’ but he had a dead heart—he was never scared. Bin Laden wanted Zarqawi to join Al Qaeda, but he didn’t like Al Qaeda’s ideology, so he left for Khost. I saw him in Gardez and Khost; if he was alone against a thousand soldiers he would not retreat. He was not a leader at the time, just an ordinary person and a good fighter.”
Sheikh Jawad, the imposing former jihadi, had a similar view of his friend Zarqawi, whom he called Abu Musab. “He used to come to my house,” he said. “We went to Afghanistan together. Abu Musab was a normal man, afraid of God, a very natural man, didn’t have a lot of knowledge.” Sheikh Jawad told me that Zarqawi gave two of his sisters as wives to Afghans in order to strengthen his relationship with his hosts. “Afghans took care of him, and he gained experience,” he said. Zarqawi was placed in charge of Jordanians arriving in Afghanistan and later led a group called Jund al-Sham (Soldiers of Sham).
In Pakistan Zarqawi met Isam Taher al-Oteibi al-Burqawi, known as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. Maqdisi was a self-taught Palestinian cleric living in Kuwait. Like many Palestinians who relocated to Jordan from Kuwait, he had belonged to an important Kuwaiti Salafi organization called Jamiyat al-Turath al-Islami (The Society of Islamic Heritage), led by the Egyptian cleric Sheikh Abdel Rahman al-Khaleq. Khaleq had come to Kuwait from Egypt in the 1960s, a period when many Egyptian Islamists moved to the Gulf to teach in order to escape government persecution. This persecution persisted until Egyptian clerics like Omar Abdel Rahman, who led the Islamic Group, declared the state itself to be the enemy. This sort of radical Islam was a product of Egyptian prisons, and when these Egyptians were encouraged to take their struggle to Afghanistan they clashed with Abdallah Azzam, who emphasized the importance of fighting defensive jihads. Egyptians such as Abdel Rahman and his followers sought to fight Arab regimes first. Their followers were the takfiri par excellence, sometimes viewing all of society as the enemy and demonstrating a willingness to ruthlessly kill civilians. Maqdisi was influenced by this school of thought and brought it back home with him.
Hudheifa Azzam met Maqdisi in Pakistan and was similarly unimpressed. Like Zarqawi, he said, “Maqdisi is also an ordinary person,” adding that at first Maqdisi had condemned his father as an infidel, but after Azzam was assassinated he apologized and said he had been mistaken. Upon arriving in Jordan in 1991, Maqdisi led Jordan’s Salafi movement, composed of Jordanian and Palestinian Salafis who had fought or trained in Afghanistan. Maqdisi called his organization Tawhid (Monotheism), but he later changed the name to Bayat al-Imam (Oath of Loyalty to the Leader). He traveled around Jordan with his book Milat Ibrahim (The Creed of Abraham), which was the most important source for Jordanian Jihadis. The book, also available on Maqdisi’s website, discusses some of the main duties the followers of Ibrahim have, such as demonstrating that they are innocent of any infidelity and improper worship of God and declaring infidels to be infidels. Just as infidels are infidels with God, the followers of Ibrahim have to be infidels with the gods and laws of the infidels. Likewise, they have to demonstrate hatred and enmity for the infidels until they return to Allah and renounce their previous infidelity. The followers of Ibrahim also have to renounce tyrants and impious or un-Islamic governments, call them infidels, and call all the people who “worship” them infidels as well. These tyrants include stone idols, the sun, the moon, trees, graves (a reference to the Sufi and Shiite practice of visiting the graves of saints and imams), and laws made by men. It is the duty of the sect of Ibrahim to expose the infidelity of all these forms of worship and idolatry and manifest their hatred and enmity to them as well as showing how silly these things were. Infidels, tyrants, and oppressors all deserve hate and public condemnation.
According to Maqdisi, democracy was a heretical religion constituting the rejection of Allah, monotheism, and Islam. It was a bida (innovation), placing something above the word of God and ignoring the laws of Islam. Only God could legislate laws, and God’s laws had to be applied to the apostates, the fornicators, thieves, alcohol consumers, unveiled women, and the obscene. Maqdisi held that the regimes that ruled Muslims were un-Islamic and illegitimate. Therefore, Muslims did not owe them obedience and should fight them to establish a true Islamic state.
When Zarqawi returned to Jordan, he sought out former mujahideen he had met in Afghanistan, including Maqdisi. In the summer of 1993 Zarqawi visited Muhamad Abu Muntasar Wasfi. “He sat there, where you are,” Wasfi said, pointing to the pillow I was resting on. We sat in his cold guest room as his sons brought in sweet tea and came in to replenish our glasses. Wasfi stroked a cat that wandered in. His children screamed and fought in the next room. His youngest boy, Mudhafer, came in to ask him for some money. “I like to call him Abu Musab al-Khalaylah,” Wasfi told me about Zarqawi. “Abu Musab had heard of me. He was a simple Muslim who wanted to serve Islam. He didn’t stay long here, and the next day he came with another guy. We sat and we spoke about our hopes and dreams and ambitions to establish the caliphate and raise the flag of jihad against the enemies of Islam everywhere. I disagreed with him on some strategic issues, like his view of Israel and Palestine. He didn’t have an idea of making jihad against Jews and Israel. Abu Musab wanted to change Arab regimes.”
Zarqawi invited Wasfi to join Bayat al-Imam and offered him the position of emir, or commander, from the Arabic word amr, meaning “to order.” Wasfi joined but refused the position, claiming that because he was Palestinian he would be subjected to greater retribution by the Jordanian authorities, who were more lenient on Jordanians. Maqdisi, Zarqawi, and Wasfi led the group, limiting their initial activities to proselytizing. “We had no ability to make jihad,” Wasfi admitted, “but despite the lack of ability it didn’t mean we should stop.” Maqdisi had seven grenades from Kuwait, which he gave “to some brothers to make operations in Palestine to kill Israelis,” Wasfi said. “The brothers were arrested, and the government uncovered the organization and arrested the leaders, but before that we were fugitives for four months. We were arrested and tortured.” Wasfi claims to have suffered “sleep deprivation, beatings, tearing off beards.” As a result he has rheumatism and his knees often hurt; he couldn’t kneel properly when he prayed for the first year after his release. “When we were put in group prison, we worked on expanding the organization inside and outside the jail. It was my job to organize prisoners. Jail was very good for the movement. Jail enhanced the personalities of prisoners and let them know how large was the cause they believed in. Inside jail is a good environment to get supporters and proselytize. Inside jail is oppression.” Wasfi admitted they recruited from criminal ranks. “Even the worst criminal is still repressed because they did not impose Islamic law on him, and when you talk to them with Islam they see the difference between a system of punishment made by humans and a system made by God. This made them supporters of the Islamic call and enemies of oppression.”
The Jordanian authorities placed all the Islamist prisoners together and in isolation from other prisoners. They formed relationships, exchanged ideas and knowledge, and established trust in one another. They continued organizing jihadists, especially former criminals like Zarqawi, until their release from the Sawaqa prison in a 1999 amnesty. Wasfi was the movement’s spokesman. He explained that even while in prison Zarqawi and Maqdisi reached an outside audience, influencing people in the various cities where they were imprisoned. By then, the awkward and solemn Zarqawi had begun to bloom in his own jihadi way, while Maqdisi, despite the anger and violence of his ideas, avoided conflict. “Zarqawi was very charismatic,” said Wasfi. “Maqdisi was calm and passive. We were dealing with prison authorities in a very aggressive way, and Zarqawi was tribal, so his tribal position gave him more power than a Palestinian. If your root is pure Jordanian and you have a big tribe, then you have more power. Prisoners liked a strong representative like Zarqawi, and he fought with the guards. He was very harsh and strong when dealing with members of the organization. He prevented them from mixing with other organizations so they would not be influenced by other ideas, and he prevented them from moving around freely in the prison, even me, but I rebelled against him.” Few other jihadis dared to defy Zarqawi save Abdallah Hashaika, who was the emir of the Jordanian Afghans. Zarqawi organized a coup, forcing Maqdisi to hand over control of the movement. When Wasfi told me this, Abu Saad, who was present for the meeting, grew anxious—he didn’t want me to learn of tensions within the movement.
Zarqawi’s aggressive personality attracted the tough young men imprisoned with him, and Maqdisi was relegated to a theological position, issuing fatwas. Like jihadi Salafis outside prison, the jihadis in Sawaqa were embroiled in internal conflicts, declaring one another infidels. “In prison a disagreement of ideas led to problems,” said Wasfi. He refused to get into the details but added that “Abu Musab had many wrong decisions that I did not accept, like enmity with other groups.” Five months before his release, Wasfi abandoned the movement. After his release he focused on “personal dawa,” or working to spread Salafism on his own. Though officially forbidden to teach, he still does in secret. “After Zarqawi was released, he asked me to work together, but I refused,” Wasfi said.
The men’s time in prison was as important for the movement as their experiences in Afghanistan were, bonding together those who suffered and giving them time to formulate their ideas. For some it was educational as well. Hudheifa Azzam was impressed with the changes prison wrought in the men. “Maqdisi returned to Jordan from Afghanistan and educated himself,” he told me. “He had a lot of time to read in jail. When I heard Zarqawi speak, I didn’t believe this is the same Zarqawi. Six years in jail gave him a good chance to educate himself.”
Shortly after his release in 1999, Zarqawi left for Pakistan, where he was temporarily arrested before making it to Afghanistan along with his key followers. Zarqawi was influenced by Egyptian jihadist groups such as Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Group, which held that the leader should be based outside the country in order to avoid harassment by the mukhabarat. Maqdisi opposed conducting operations within Jordan.
In Afghanistan Zarqawi found both Al Qaeda and the Taliban insufficiently extreme for him. Zarqawi also criticized Osama bin Laden for not calling Arab governments infidels and attacking them. For Zarqawi, the near enemy was the priority, while for bin Laden it was the far enemy. Hudheifa Azzam explained that bin Laden’s Front for Fighting the Jews and Crusaders, established in 1998, required its members to take an oath of allegiance and to fight rival movements, both of which Zarqawi refused to do. Al Qaeda was far more pragmatic; its members negotiated with Pakistan and Iran. Zarqawi was such a strict Salafi that he condemned the Taliban for lack of piety. He criticized them for not being Salafis, insufficiently imposing Sharia, and recognizing the United Nations, an infidel organization. And he condemned Al Qaeda for associating with the Taliban. Zarqawi established his own camp in the western Afghan city of Herat, near the border with Iran. Following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Zarqawi made his way through Iran to autonomous Kurdistan in northern Iraq—a point worth noting, since the Bush administration claimed Zarqawi’s presence in Iraq was proof of an Al Qaeda connection. But Zarqawi linked up with the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam in a region outside Saddam’s reach. With Saddam removed from power on April 9, 2003, Zarqawi had a new failed state to operate in. By the summer of 2003 he had claimed responsibility for the devastating attack against the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad’s Canal Hotel. Zarqawi allied himself with Ansar al-Sunna, the reconstituted Ansar al-Islam, which was composed mostly of Iraqis, whereas the members of Zarqawi’s Tawhid and Jihad group were mostly foreign Arabs.
In October 2004, Iraqi intelligence claimed that Zarqawi’s group consisted of 1,000 to 1,500 fighters, foreign and Iraqi. Zarqawi’s inner circle was made up of nine emirs, all of whom were non-Iraqi and close friends. The movement had stored weapons in secret depots in Iraq.
Their plan was to turn Iraq into hell for all its residents, to prevent an elected government from taking power, and to create a civil war between Sunnis and the hated Shiites. Zarqawi’s group was responsible for the gruesome videotaped beheadings of foreigners and Iraqis accused of collaborating with the occupation. Their bombs slaughtered masses of Shiites as well.
Though Zarqawi had run his own camp independently of bin Laden in Afghanistan, in October 2004 he swore an oath of allegiance to Al Qaeda, renaming his organization Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers and also joining the Salafiya al-Mujahedia, or Salafi Mujahideen, movement in Iraq. Bin Laden soon announced that Zarqawi was the head of Al Qaeda’s operations in Iraq. Either Bin Laden wanted to co-opt a rival jihadi group that was getting most of the attention and actually confronting the Americans, or Zarqawi needed the Saudi financier’s help, or at least the connection with the hero of international jihad, in order to attract more foreign fighters and support. On December 9, 2004, Zarqawi’s military committee issued a statement about the upcoming January elections. It addressed “all the parties participating in the elections.” It threatened Shiites around the world for supporting the crusader occupation of Iraq. It called Ayatollah Ali Sistani the greatest collaborator with the crusaders. It condemned the apostate police, national guardsmen, and army for attacking Falluja. It warned the rejectionist Shiites and their political parties, the Kurdish pesh merga, the Christians, and the hypocrites such as the Islamic Party that the Tawhid movement would increase attacks on them.
Though Al Qaeda under bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri had not made Shiites their targets and did not publicly condemn them, Zarqawi held that Shiites were the most evil of mankind. He compared them to a snake, a scorpion, and an enemy spy, like the thirteenth-century cleric Ibn Taimiya, the father of Wahhabism and Salafism. Shiites were polytheists who worshiped at graves and shrines, he argued. They were to be avoided at all costs. They could not be married, they could not bear witness, and animals they slaughtered could not be eaten. Zarqawi defended operations that caused Muslims to die. Martyrdom operations, as he called suicide bombings, were sanctified by Muslim scholars, and defending Islam was even more important than defending the lives of Muslims.
Zarqawi reserved special hatred for the Jordanian monarchy and security forces. He sought to delegitimize the Hashemite kingdom and its claim to power based on its descent from the Prophet Muhammad. It was true that King Abdullah was a descendant of Muhammad, but through Abu Lahab, the Prophet’s uncle, who had fought against him. This claim was first made in 1995 by two Jordanian brothers from the al-Awamli family, who sent out a mass fax condemning the regime. They were shot in their homes following a confrontation with Jordanian police. Zarqawi’s confrontation with Jordan culminated in the November 9, 2005, attacks, dubbed by Jordanians “our 9/11,” in which almost all the victims were Jordanians or Palestinians. By this point his actions were proving too much even for the most radical to stomach.
Hudheifa Azzam viewed Zarqawi and his followers as “against everybody, even themselves. The followers of Abdallah Azzam opposed killing civilians and conducting operations in Muslim countries, he told me. “Our militant activities are only against the military,” he said. “No one can give the green light to kill an innocent human being. In 9/11 and 7/7, innocent people were killed.” Hudheifa also opposed targeting Shiites. “Abdallah Azzam said Shiites are Muslims,” he told me, “and even if they are not Muslims, their blood is still protected.”
The war in Iraq galvanized young admirers of Zarqawi and other mujahideen, who frequented jihadi websites and Internet chat rooms, where they could watch filmed encomiums to their heroes and violent depictions of their latest exploits. There were several groups of young men on trial in Jordan when I visited, all failed jihadis, but perhaps more important than succeeding in their quixotic and ill-planned schemes was the time spent in Jordanian prisons, where they could meet their heroes. Like inner-city fans of hip-hop in the United States, where time in jail could be a rite of passage that established street credibility, for these young men in Jordan, jail time proved they were tough enough and dedicated to the cause.
On January 10 I attended another hearing for the ten young men from Irbid. The only two witnesses for the prosecution were set to testify. The courtroom was heavy with blue uniformed security officers. As the judge spoke, the prisoners swaggered and laughed. The first witness was Lieutenant Saud, clad in a motorcycle jacket. He put his hand above a Koran and swore to tell the truth, then stated that he had received information about a group of dangerous terrorists near the Syrian border and was ordered to arrest them. Upon questioning by the defense he admitted that he had found no weapons in their possession. The second witness, with long hair and a long beard, was accused of selling the defendants a Kalashnikov. The prosecutor read the witness’s confession, but the witness renounced it, claiming he had never sold any weapons and explaining that the mukhabarat had threatened him and ordered him to lie. The judge ordered him rearrested for perjury. Ashen-faced, he was led away as the prisoners in the cage shouted “Allahu Akbar! The way of God is jihad! God is your master and America is their master! Bush is your master! You have the worst master!” All the accused claimed to have been tortured, and all renounced their confessions. As the session ended the prisoners shouted, “This session we just wanted to hear the testimony, but in the next session we will teach them!”
“Most people here hate and hate and hate the U.S. administration,” attorney Samih Khreis told me. “And most people, if anybody has the opportunity to explode the White House, they would.” Khreis often represented Jordanians accused of terrorism; his clients had included Azmi al-Jayusi, a close Zarqawi associate, as well as members of Bayat al-Imam and Jeish Muhammad. A high-ranking member of the Jordanian bar association, Khreis remembered seeing mujahideen recruiters on the streets of Amman in the 1980s, working with the support of the Jordanian government and inviting young Jordanians to join the jihad in Afghanistan. “Governments taught them these ideas, Salafi, takfiri, to push them to Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, and after the jihad they returned and they compared the government’s conduct with what they had taught them, so according to this thinking the governments were infidels. What happens daily motivates anybody to go to jihad. The magic turned against the magician. When they were against Soviets they were good, but against USA they are terrorists?”
Although in the past most recruits to the jihad were uneducated and poor, he said, “after the war in Iraq there was a large increase, and many educated men joined, like engineers. This was new. Most men going to Iraq now are educated and from Irbid, and most are Jordanians, they come from good families.” He added that most families of accused terrorists were proud of their sons. Most of them were beaten and tortured during their interrogations, he told me. “Electric torture, sleep deprivation, being tied by hands so you are on your toes. They do it to get confessions.” Khreis’s youngest client was an eighteen-year-old jihad hopeful. “I take these cases because the American government is against them, and I am not with the USA, and the Jordanian government wants to satisfy USA.” Like many Jordanians, Khreis believed Zarqawi was not responsible for the November 9, 2005, hotel bombings in Amman. “The hotel bombings were done by the Mossad, maybe the CIA is involved. There is a secret agreement between the Jordanian government and the USA to bring American forces here to attack Syria, so they want to prepare people for the attack on Syria.”
An insider in the Royal Court who studied Jordanian attitudes explained such beliefs as shanateh, or schadenfreude. “Whatever is shanateh to America, we like it.” A June 2005 Pew poll found that 60 percent of Jordanians trusted bin Laden and 50 percent supported violence to get rid of non-Muslim influence. The report stunned the Jordanian government. “We said, No way, our people are not like that,” the insider said. But when the Jordanian government conducted its own research it found similar responses. “Even if we assume the Pew poll is exaggerated, maybe 25 percent trust him very much and 35 percent trust him somewhat. The Pew poll is exaggerated, but if Zarqawi wants to recruit here, how many does he need? Even if one-half of 1 percent join, he’s okay.” Despite the support Zarqawi and bin Laden received in the polls, the insider believed it did not reflect a true radicalization; it was merely shanateh. “When it comes to Israel, we are helpless,” he said. “Hundreds of millions of Arabs, and we can’t hurt Israel or America. So we can be happy with what is happening to America in Iraq.”
This inside source also blamed the Jordanian government’s tolerance of Salafism. “This is an appeasement from the security services. The church got them to ban The Da Vinci Code, but in Abdali you can buy Salafi books. Since the ’70s they are turning a blind eye.” He added that the requirements for studying Islamic law at the University of Jordan were lower than for any other subject. “Sharia students are the ones who get the worst scores and can’t get into other schools, the ones with no critical thinking skills. The Sharia school in the university accepts the dumbest students. They tell them, ‘All other majors are closed to you. Become a preacher.’” There are more than three thousand mosques in Jordan, he told me, but one-tenth of them lack a regular imam, which means that “anyone can stand up and do the Friday sermon.” In addition, he said, “1,450 imams earn less than one hundred dinars a month, so you can buy them easily. So the quality of the preachers is low.”
A Jordanian woman who ran youth empower ment and education programs throughout the Middle East worried that recruits were drawn to Salafism because “they are discouraged and depressed. Across the whole region youth lack dreams because they have been repressed by the system. It’s not just poverty. Wealthy individuals are joining the jihad. There is a lack of hope and dreams. The youth feel they are of no value to society and become a burden, so of course they are attracted to these extreme ideologies.”
Muhammad Abu Rumman, a Jordanian journalist specializing in Islamic movements and a former Muslim Brother himself, attributed the attraction of Salafism to hopelessness. “The political environment and conditions make them feel bad,” he told me. “They have no hope for the future with the political system here, so they try by themselves to do what the government cannot do. They are victims of conditions in Jordan and the Arab world. Political consciousness is born in bad political, economic, social conditions. There is no religious reform. Religious understanding is not supporting democracy and human rights. It always says all the bad things are because we are far from Islam and we don’t obey Allah so the U.S. invaded Iraq.” He explained that the Muslim Brotherhood, which was Jordan’s only opposition movement but refrained from questioning the government’s legitimacy, “represents the middle class and shares in the system and government, but in their religious speech they use the same language as Salafis. These youth do what people say and don’t do. We all speak of Iraq. The preachers speak of Iraq, and of jihad in Iraq and Palestine. The king would be in danger if he tried to stop this. All of the society speaks the same language.”
Hassan Abu Haniyeh, a Jordanian researcher specializing in Salafism and a former reformist Salafi, agreed: “The main motivation for terrorists is unemployment and poverty. The people are between the hammer of the Americans and the anvil of exclusion from participating. If you open an office for volunteers for the jihad in Iraq here you would take a million, and from the rest of the Arab world you would take millions.” Abu Haniyeh complained that the American project of reform in the Arab world had given democracy a bad name. “The U.S. terminated us, the reformers,” he said, “because now the word ‘reform’ is a bad word, an American word. If people hear the word ‘reform, ’ they think of Iraq, which became a model of violence. And now the reform and the reformers are isolated from people, people don’t like them. Now the reform project became empty from the inside because the replacement of our regimes is very terrifying, so there is nothing left, only extremist talk.”
Yasar Qartarneh was a sharp, raucous, slightly overweight man who jokingly called himself an Islamist and liked to provoke. Qatarneh worked for Jordan’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, a think tank within the Jordanian government funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “Terrorism is linked to events on both sides of the border,” he said. “For fifty years Islamist activists and politicians were the regime’s main source of legitimacy.” Now the chickens had come home to roost. He was concerned that just as America had given reform a bad name, so had Zarqawi tarnished resistance. “We have to draw a line which Zarqawi, Goddamn him, blurred. It was very legitimate to fight occupation. Zarqawi blurred the line, and now you can’t distinguish if what he does is terrorism or freedom fighting.”
The solution, according to Abu Rumman, was in Iraq. “If Sunnis played a political role in Iraq, Zarqawi would disappear, because who will support him?” Jordan was in a difficult position, watching its neighbor to the east nervously. In December 2004, King Abdullah warned of a “Shiite crescent” from Lebanon to Iraq to Iran that would destabilize the entire region. Iraq’s Shiites had demonstrated against Jordan in the past, condemning the country for its steady trickle of suicide bombers who crossed into Iraq and committed atrocities against Shiite civilians. In September 2005 Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal warned that a civil war in Iraq would destabilize the entire region and complained that the Americans had handed Iraq over to Iran for no reason. From the Jordanian and Saudi perspective, indirectly supporting Sunni violence in Iraq was advantageous, because it would give Iraq’s Sunnis greater political leverage. Jordan was dependent on the Saudis. In 2007, when the Jordanian state was bankrupt, the Saudis paid Jordanian civil servants’ salaries. Compounding these difficulties, Jordan’s fragile authoritarian regime and precarious balance of Jordanian and Palestinian was being tested by the massive influx of refugees from Iraq.
“YOU HAVE NOW ENTERED IRAQ,” MY TAXI DRIVER JOKED. WE HAD, in fact, just entered Seyida Zeinab, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus built around the eponymous shrine to Zeinab, granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad. This shrine city, long a destination for Shiite pilgrims, had become home to many Shiites among the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who had sought refuge in Syria from the hell their home had become in Iraq. “Everybody is Iraqi,” one taxi driver joked after he stopped to ask several people on the street for directions to a mosque and they replied in Iraqi Arabic that they did not know. “There are more Iraqis than Syrians.” Another, after complaining that the Iraqi refugees had driven up prices and insisting that there were four million of them in his city, explained, “Anybody who has a war comes to us: Sudan, Somalia.”
It was early 2006, the seventh day of the Muslim month of Muharram, and Shiites around the world were preparing for its tenth day, known as Ashura, in which they commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein, brother of Zeinab, slain in 680 in a battle that crystallized the division between Sunni and Shiite Islam. A vast commercial district had grown around the shrine. Built at first to house and care for the pilgrims and seminary students, the district had become home to so many Iraqis that walking through its streets I was transported back to Baghdad—to Kadhimiya, the Shiite commercial district built around the shrine to Imam Kadhim. “It’s like they froze Iraq in 2003 and put it in a museum,” exclaimed photojournalist Ghaith Abdul Ahad, who accompanied me. And indeed, we were both struck by the feeling of being in a safe Baghdad. After nearly three years in the war-torn country, I had started to fear Iraqi men; all strangers were potential kidnappers.
All around us the streets bustled with men speaking Arabic in the Iraqi dialect, overflowing indifferently onto the road nicknamed “Iraqi Street.” The walls were festooned with posters from Iraqi elections past. Inside a bakery I saw a poster of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, father of populist cleric Muqtada. There was a mobile phone shop named after the Euphrates River and barbershops called Karbala and Son of Iraq. Ali Hamid, a Sunni barber from Baghdad’s Shiite district of Shaab, had been working in the same shop since 2003; he explained to me that many barbers had fled Iraq to Syria because Islamic radicals had forced them to close their shops. “In Iraq there is a sectarian war,” he told me. “Here we all get along.” He attributed this to the vigilant Syrian authorities. “Praise God, thanks to the Syrian government we have no problems. If anything happens, they deal with it. As shop owners we are not allowed to talk about sectarianism. Word spread to all business owners. You live in a different country, not your country, you have to respect their rules.” He added that Iraqi refugees feared the Syrian regime anyway. They had fled to Syria looking for a place to live and were tired of problems. In 2006 Ali began seeing large numbers of Iraqis coming. He noticed many more tea stands springing up and more pedestrians crowding the district.
In one alley, not far away, I found the famous Baghdad restaurant Patchi al-Hati. Patchi is sheep’s head, the meal I have dreaded most in my years in Iraq. The restaurant’s owner had left Iraq four months earlier, “because of the terrorism and looting,” the chef explained over an immense steaming pot boiling with the pungent smell. Anybody with money in Iraq was a target for kidnappers and extortionists. “They heard we were a famous restaurant and thought we were millionaires,” he told me.
In another alley I walked past the field office for Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri, guarded by plainclothes Syrian security officials. Haeri had been a student of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr during his exile in Iran. Following the overthrow of Saddam’s regime, Haeri had urged his followers to kill Baathists. He had once been close to Muqtada, but the two had fallen out. Further down the street I found the office of Muqtada’s representative, also guarded by Syrian security officials, who were friendly with the Sadr officials and zealous in demanding I provide official permission before entering. That evening I attended the recitation of Hussein’s story. Dozens of shoes were piled on the stairway and in a wooden shelf outside a room where men clad in customary Mahdi Army garb—black shirts with black head scarves or headbands—sat listening to Sheikh Ali wail the story of Hussein’s bravery and betrayal, ending with the slaughter of his family and finally his martyrdom. The men began to sob, burying their heads in their hands or between their knees. For Sheikh Ali, the story of perfidy and resistance to tyranny was a parable for his community’s current oppression, as he saw it at the hands of Americans and Sunnis. “They are doing the same thing with the poor children and people on the streets,” he cried out. He concluded by asking God to end the Americans’ occupation, free their hostages in Baghdad, and bless the Mahdi Army.
Sheikh Raed al-Kadhimi was Muqtada’s representative in Syria. He blamed the American occupiers, along with “people who operate in Iraq under the umbrella of the Americans and former Baathists who aim to destabilize Iraq” and takfiris, for the refugee flow into Syria. “They do killings and kidnappings,” he said, “and now attacks happen with mortar shells from both sides, so people resort to a safe place and they come to Syria.” Sheikh Raed was proud of his leader Muqtada, who he claimed “began the revolt against the Americans and fought them. He made it difficult for the American army.” On the eve of the tenth of Muharram a procession organized by Sheikh Raed’s office gathered. Dressed in black, they were led by youths wielding immense wooden flagpoles with different colored flags that they struggled to wave from side to side. Others carried framed pictures of Muqtada and his father. It was a latmiya procession, in which the men chanted songs lamenting Hussein’s martyrdom and vowing fealty to him. “We have chosen our destiny,” they sang, “we are the sons of Sadr, soldiers for the Mahdi.” The thousands of onlookers waited until dawn for the culmination of the events. By four in the morning hundreds of men dressed in white robes had assembled in tents. They carried short swords, which they cleaned in buckets of soap. They patted their heads for several minutes, perhaps to numb the surface or steel their nerves. After performing the dawn prayer, they lined up and, led by trumpeters and drummers, began a march through alleys lined with shrouded women looking on. The drums and trumpets rang out a martial beat and were followed by chants of “Haidar!” another name for Ali, father of Hussein and Zeinab. The men, and many boys, swung their swords rhythmically, hitting their foreheads and drawing blood, which soon drenched their faces and robes. As onlookers filmed the scene on their phones and the sun rose above them, the men danced in bloody ecstasy. When they reached the shrine the event ended suddenly, and people returned to their homes or hotel rooms. In the Iraqi shrine city of Karbala and Baghdad’s Kadhimiya district, I had seen these events end in explosions and terror attacks. In Damascus it felt almost anticlimactic.
As the violence in Iraq caused its population to hemorrhage, Iraqis fled to wherever they could. Millions were displaced, some seeking shelter in Kurdistan, others in safer neighborhoods, cleansed of minorities, or safer provinces. Others fled to Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Denmark, and anywhere else they could. During the civil war between one thousand and three thousand Iraqis entered Syria through the border at Al Tanf, passing through the volatile Anbar province, risking death at the hands of militias and the American military.
“It’s the largest refugee crisis in the Middle East since 1948,” said Kristele Younes of the Washington-based Refugees International. “Not only is it a regional crisis but it can become international, since Iraqis want to be resettled,” she said. “What’s especially shocking to me is the level of extreme and indiscriminate violence. Every civilian is at risk. This crisis is growing at almost unprecedented numbers. Fifty thousand are displaced a month, and tens of thousands are leaving. The international response to the refugee crisis was extremely weak until recently. They had not acknowledged the crisis. The only agency that had responded was [the United Nations High Commission for Refugees], and they were doing so with extremely meager resources. One reason why the response has been so weak is because the international community was waiting for U.S. leadership. The U.S. sparked the conflict and should be answering for the humanitarian consequences of the war as well as the political ones.”
Those who survived the perilous journey were met by surprisingly friendly Syrian officials led by a captain overwhelmed by the desperate refugees. A thin, energetic man with an air of desperation, the captain politely listened to the stories of hundreds of Iraqis every day, asking for exceptions to be made, for their expired or potentially forged passports to be accepted, and protested. “Wallahi ma fini,” he would say, “By God, I can’t.” “Ma fini, ma fini, ma fini,” until finally he would break and let in the despairing Iraqis. He explained that often his border post was overwhelmed because American convoys or military operations would close down the road in the Anbar province, and when it was reopened huge numbers of Iraqis would descend upon them at once. Dusty and dazed Iraqi families gathered inside and outside his small, drab concrete building, filling out the applications, waiting for their names to be called.
One man waiting for his name to be called, Abu Ibrahim, told me he had left because of the violence. “There isn’t an Iraqi here who wants to enter and hasn’t lost a brother or father or received a threat,” he told me. A Sunni from Seidiya, he complained that the Americans did nothing. “In my neighborhood, the head of the city council was killed just three meters away from one of their checkpoints. His family went to the checkpoint and said, ‘How come he was killed just three meters from you?’ And they said, ‘It is not our duty to go and check why he was killed.’ We don’t want Iraq anymore—neither itself, not its oil or gas. Let the whole world know that we Iraqis want nothing from Iraq. All we want is to be left alone. The Iraqi leaders go to neighboring countries and ask them to repatriate us to Iraq. Why? So that they will rule and slaughter us.” He was called Omar, a common Sunni name that was dangerous to possess. “Omar is not allowed to enter Baghdad,” he said. “There is no government in Iraq,” just “theft and killing.”
Sitting in a column of minivans and trucks piled with suitcases, I found one old woman waiting for her family to return with their passports. She was from Ghazaliya, in western Baghdad. She did not require much prompting to vent her fury. “Is this democracy, to tell people kill and displace people? Walking in the street with fear? Our situation in Iraq is miserable, worse than miserable. Why is the world silent about Iraq? I don’t know. What have we gained from the oil? Nothing. Even in winter we have no kerosene to put in the stove. There is no gas, no security. There is only killing and explosions. We ran from explosions in the streets. The children do not go to school. Even the university students don’t go to school. All stay at home.” It was her second trip to Syria. She had returned to Baghdad to bring more of her family, which would now reach around thirty people. She began to cry as I parted with her. “Please get our voices to the world,” she begged as her voice broke. “What did the United Nations do for us? What did America do for us? Why all of this?”
Past the fortunate Iraqis who had made it out was the no man’s land between the Iraqi and Syrian borders, a desolate moonscape stretching several kilometers. Off an escarpment the cold wind battered a collection of neatly ordered tents. Three hundred and fifty Palestinian refugees were marooned here, facing extermination in Iraq but unable to enter Syria. They were refugees for the second time. Most of Iraq’s Palestinians had come from three villages—Ijzim, Jaba, and Ein Ghazal, together known as the Little Triangle—which were near Haifa in northern Palestine. As part of the plan to cleanse Israel of its Palestinians, Israeli soldiers bombarded the villages from the air, killing hundreds of civilians. Ground forces then attacked the villages and killed hundreds more civilians. The Little Triangle was defended by a motley group of farmers armed with Ottoman rifles. In July 1948 they were defeated. Many men were summarily executed, while the other inhabitants were expelled to Jenin after the Israeli soldiers relieved them of their money and jewelry and looted their villages. Other Iraqi Palestinians had come from the nearby village of Tira. In one incident, twenty-eight of Tira’s civilians were burned alive when they asked their captors for water and were doused in gasoline instead. Others had come from Ayn Hawd, which was also attacked and cleansed under orders of the Israeli leadership in 1948. Iraqi troops fighting as part of a small contingent of Arab volunteers who had come to defend the Palestinians bused them from Jenin to Iraq. By 1949 up to five thousand Palestinian refugees had been granted asylum in Iraq. A minority of Iraq’s Palestinians had lived in Kuwait from the time of their expulsion and moved to Iraq following the Gulf War, when Kuwait evicted them. By 2003 the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that there were up to thirty-four thousand Palestinians in Iraq. Today there are only an estimated twelve thousand left. Thousands fled using forged Iraqi passports. In at least one case, a Palestinian from Iraq landed in Cairo’s airport using an Iraqi passport. Because his body bore the scars of his torture at the hands of Iraqi militias, he was resettled with the help of UN officials in a third country.
Under Saddam the Palestinians had received subsidized housing and, in the eyes of Shiites, preferential treatment. Many of these homes were owned by Shiites. Immediately following the American invasion the Palestinians were among the first victims of reprisals by the inchoate Shiite militias. They were expelled from their homes and often ended up in tent communities or in the Baladiyat apartment complexes. The new Interior Ministry revoked the Palestinians’ identity papers. They were now obliged to register in Baghdad once a month. But to approach the Interior Ministry was to risk kidnapping, torture, and murder. The Palestinians became illegal, but they could not leave. Their neighborhoods were shelled by Shiite militias, and their men were kidnapped by Shiite death squads. They were being systematically attacked, and they were warned by Shiite leaders that they faced death in Iraq. An Iraqi diplomat in Cairo gave me the typical prejudiced view. He denied that Palestinians were being targeted, insisting that they lived better than most Iraqis. He accused them of supporting Al Qaeda and building car bombs in their neighborhoods. The U.S. State Department was pushing the Iraqi Kurds to accept the Palestinians, but Kurdish officials steadfastly refused, as did the Syrians and Jordanians. “They want to make a point that the solution for Palestinians is not settlement in the region,” a United Nations official explained to me.
In May 2006 the Palestinians began arriving at Al Tanf, on the Syrian border. Most came as families. When I visited in February 2007 there were 93 women and 135 children. In the back of the camp there was an area for single men. One tent said “Al Tanf Mosque.” That month eight Palestinians with university degrees were taken to Damascus, where they received ten days of training by the UN before returning to open a school for seventy-five children. This was controversial among some of the camp residents, who feared it would make the camp look more permanent. One tent functioned as a bakery, another as a grocery store. The residents were helped by UNHCR and Palestinian organizations in Syria. The Syrian government, already burdened with four hundred thousand Palestinian refugees and a similar number of Iraqis, was hesitant to open the door to thousands more Palestinians. Syrian officials believed that they should not be the only ones sharing the responsibility, but UN officials believed the Palestinians could be absorbed without great difficulty and that the Syrians were also making a political statement about the need to solve the Palestinian refugee crisis. But this debate came at the immediate expense of the desperate refugees, and there were five hundred more stranded on the Iraqi side of the border (known as Al Walid), protected by a local tribal sheikh but still vulnerable to the depredations of the Iraqi Security Forces, who had attacked them in the past. Iraqi Security Forces even entered Al Tanf twice attempting to kidnap people, but they failed. The camp was freezing in the winter, and rains flooded the tents and washed them away, leaving the refugees without shelter for days at a time. During the summer temperatures exceeded fifty degrees Celsius. Children suffered from diarrhea and other diseases from the dirty water. “Al Tanf is a refugee camp on a highway in between borders,” said Younes of Refugees International. “There is a lack of funds and very little assistance. People are trading their personal items with trucks for food.”
Night fell quickly on the frigid camp. In one dark tent, lit only by a small lantern, I met several men who told me their stories, their voices barely audible over the wind. Hussein, a round young man with a melancholy baby face who wore a tan Adidas tracksuit, was originally from Ein Hawd in Palestine. He had lived with his Iraqi wife and daughter in Baghdad’s Hurriya district, a Shiite militia stronghold, where he worked as a taxi driver. “In Iraq before the war we lived without problems,” he told me. “The problems started in Iraq as the American occupation began.” Hussein was first threatened in 2005, when a letter was sent to his house containing a bullet and two drops of blood. “If you do not leave Iraq, this will be your fate,” the letter said. A second death threat was signed by the Badr Brigade, the Iranian-sponsored Shiite militia. “They threatened me to leave because I am a Palestinian,” he said. “They think that because we are Palestinians the whole world helps us. But that’s not true. If we had an easy life, I wouldn’t be working as taxi driver and working in restaurants sometimes. They blew up my car. Then they blew up my house.”
Two of Hussein’s uncles had been kidnapped and tortured to death with power drills, a specialty of Iraq’s Shiite militias. The kidnappers had demanded one hundred thousand dollars in ransom, but Hussein’s family did not have the money, and the next day they received a phone call informing them that his uncles’ bodies were in the morgue. Their bodies had been mutilated: drills had been driven through their bodies from the neck to the belly, and their genitals had been cut off. Hussein’s family was given a CD with a film of the gruesome murders. “We couldn’t even have a funeral because they said, ‘If you do it we will blow you up.’ We had to bury them at night.” Hussein was also attacked in his car by a Shiite militia he believed to be the Badr Brigade; he still bore the scars. In March 2006 he heard the sounds of attackers in his house. With his wife and daughter he escaped by way of their roof to a neighbor’s roof. The attackers then blew up his house. Two months later, Hussein and his family attempted to flee to Syria after hearing rumors that it was accepting Palestinians. Stranded between the two borders, his wife’s family got her to divorce him and she returned to Baghdad.
Ayman was a vegetable seller from Baladiyat. He still spoke in the Palestinian dialect he had inherited from his family, which had been expelled from Palestine when his father was five years old. “My grandfather was my age when he was expelled,” Ayman said. “Now it wasn’t Jews who expelled us, it was Arabs.” Shiite militiamen had attacked his house and killed his mother and brother. Ayman had fled with his wife and two children and hoped to live anywhere as long as it was safe.
Yasser and his father had been arrested by the Iraqi National Guard. “They accused me of being Palestinian,” he said. “They said, ‘You are a Palestinian terrorist’ and ‘You Arabs, you destroyed us.’” The two were imprisoned for sixteen days and tortured with electricity. Yasser’s nails were torn out. Then his seventy-three-year-old father was electrocuted to death in front of him. The National Guardsmen then gave him twenty-four hours to leave Iraq, and in June 2006 he and his family arrived in Al Tanf. “We paid to get my father’s body,” he cried, “but they gave me the wrong body.” The other men stared down silently as he sobbed. “All I want to know is where my father’s body is.”
Another man was taken out of his car along with six other Palestinians. All were shot and killed, but he survived. He was denied treatment in the first hospital because he was Palestinian. After he was released from the second hospital, he fled to the border. “Even in another camp right on the border, the Iraqi army came to the camp and arrested five of us for eight days,” he said. “They tortured us during that time and robbed us of everything we had. They even took my wedding ring. In Baghdad also they took our houses and cars. Here we have a tragic life, we have gone through cold, heat, dust, and this wind. It is a very bad life. But what is the reason? It is only because we are Palestinians and carry with us Palestinian travel documents. Now we want to live anywhere that is safe and secure. Anywhere. In Iraq they kill us because of our identity.”
One family in Al Tanf received a CD with a film of their daughter’s gang rape and murder by Shiite militiamen as their final warning to leave Iraq. Three men in the camp with the Sunni name Omar had been followed merely for being called Omar and had survived assassination attempts. The camp provided scant protection, and some men who went close to the Iraqi border to purchase vegetables from locals were captured by the Iraqi National Guard. “They think we are Saddamists,” one man told me. “The American occupation didn’t protect us.” Palestinians who went to get relatives from the morgue were also kidnapped. One baby was born in Al Tanf, and she was named Khiyam, meaning “tent” in Arabic. “We went backward sixty years,” one man lamented. “We were born in tents, and our children will be the same. Is this our legacy?”
According to a UN official, Arab governments were reluctant to call the Iraqis refugees because the term is associated with the Palestinians. “The Palestinians are a people without a land,” he said. “Iraqis still have a country, although I think it will break up like the former Yugoslavia. It is not positive to be associated with the Palestinians.” Jordan, with half its population made up of Palestinian refugees, was afraid of a second refugee wave.
No discussion of refugees in the Middle East can begin without addressing the Palestinian experience. Between 1947 and 1949 up to 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from Palestine by Jewish militias; hundreds of Palestinian villages were wiped off the map. They were dispersed throughout the region, unable to return home and unable to assimilate fully into the countries to which they fled. They soon organized, forming armed groups and trying to return home. These groups were often manipulated by various governments in the region for their own ends, and some even fought one another. Their presence contributed to the destabilization of several countries, while in places like Lebanon, they were preyed upon by more powerful militias, as we shall see in the next chapter. Their cause became a rallying cry. After 2003, radical groups based in the camps exported fighters to Iraq.
The flow of fighters into Iraq, of millions of refugees out of Iraq, the smuggling of weapons and even sheep, and the export of dangerous ideas such as sectarianism and jihadism demonstrated that the Iraqi civil war was close to becoming a regional conflict. One factor militating against such a development was the fact that the Iraqi refugees had not settled in camps but instead had been absorbed into cities like Beirut, Damascus, Amman, and Cairo, which made it more difficult to organize or mobilize them, though also more difficult to help or monitor them. Like the Palestinians, most Iraqi refugees may never return home. The decimated Christian and Sabean minorities had left for good. Sunnis from Baghdad and the south, now cleansed and controlled by Shiites, were also likely never to return. Although the Palestinian cause and its initial popularity in the Arab world eased their integration into Syria and elsewhere, and they were tolerated and even welcomed with generosity by the local population in some instances, this goodwill did not last forever. In Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, and elsewhere, it ran out. Jordan and particularly Syria have shown extreme generosity, but they are both straining under the burden.
Damascus became so full of Iraqis that rent prices soared, driving many refugees as far as Aleppo. One hour away from Damascus, in Qudsiya, I found an Iraqi neighborhood with a “Baghdad Barbershop” and “Iraq Travel Agency.” Off an alley I entered a hastily constructed apartment building, rough and unfinished, cement and cinder blocks thrown together without paint. The carved wooden doors to each apartment were a stark contrast to the grim hallways. Inside I found Dr. Lujai and her five children. At fifteen, Omar was the oldest; the youngest was two years old. Dr. Lujai, a family medicine specialist with her own clinic, had lived in Baghdad with her husband, Dr. Adil, a thoracic surgeon and professor at the medical college. Both were forty-three-year-old Sunnis who originally came from Ana, a town in the Anbar province. They had been married for fifteen years.
Right after the war Dr. Lujai began to notice changes. Shiite clerics took over many of Baghdad’s hospitals following the postwar looting, and they did not know how to manage a hospital. “They were sectarian from the beginning,” she said, “firing Sunnis, saying they were Baathists. In 2004 the Ministry of Health was given to the Sadr movement, and the minister was only a general practitioner.” Following the 2005 elections the Sadrist ministers initiated what they called a “campaign to remove the Saddamists.” The advisers to the minister of health wore the turbans of clerics and mismanaged the ministry. In hospitals and health centers, walls were covered with posters of Shiite clerics. Traditional Shiite music could often be heard in the halls.
Sunni doctors began disappearing. Ali al-Mahdawi, who managed the Diyala province’s health department, was said to have gone into the ministry for a meeting and never came out. Several months later, American military raids uncovered secret prisons run by Ministry officials with hundreds of prisoners. Several days after Mahdawi was released, he was murdered on the street. A pharmacist they knew called Ahmed al-Azzawi went in for a meeting with the minister and was killed by his militia.
Dr. Lujai reported that Sunni patients were accused by Sadrist officials of being terrorists. After the doctors completed their operations, she said, the Interior Ministry’s special police would arrest the patients. Their corpses would then be found in the Baghdad morgue. “This happened tens of times,” she said, to “anybody who came with bullet wounds and wasn’t Shiite.” Dr. Lujai knew of five Sunni doctors and two Christians who were threatened to leave or fired.
On September 2, 2006, Abu Omar, as Dr. Adil was known, went to work as he usually did in the morning. He had three patients to operate on that day. A fourth came in unexpectedly after he was done, and since no other doctor was available to treat him, Dr. Adil stayed later than usual. He finished work that day at around two in the afternoon. Their home was about fifteen minutes away, on days when the road was open. At 2:15 Abu Omar was driving home when his way was blocked by four cars. Armed men surrounded him and dragged him from his car, taking him to Sadr City. Five hours later his dead body was found on the street, and the next day his body was found in the morgue. I tried to find out the way he was killed, but Dr. Lujai was overcome, crying, and her confused young children looked at her silently. She had asked the Iraqi police to investigate her husband’s murder, but an officer told her, “He is a doctor, he has a degree, and he is a Sunni, so he couldn’t stay in Iraq. That’s why he was killed.” Two weeks later she received a letter printed from a computer ordering her to leave the area.
On September 24, Dr. Lujai fled with her brother Abu Shama, his wife, and his four children. Her sister had already been threatened, and had fled to Qudsiya. They gave away or sold all their belongings and paid six hundred dollars for the GMCs that carried them to Syria. Because of what happened to her husband, she said, up to twenty other doctors fled. Abu Shama was an engineer and professor at the College of Technology. He had lived in Baghdad’s Khadhra district. In June 2006 a letter was placed under the door in his office ordering him to leave Iraq or be killed. He stopped going to work after that. One of his best friends, a Sunni married to a Shiite, had been killed in front of the college.
In Qudsiya they paid five hundred dollars a month in rent for the three-bedroom apartment both families shared. Their children were able to attend local schools for free, but Iraqis were not able to work in Syria, so they depended on relatives and savings for their survival. Twenty-five members of their family fled to Syria. Four days before I visited them they heard that a Sunni doctor they knew had been killed in Baghdad’s Kadhimiya district, where he worked. He had been married to a Shiite woman. “He was a pediatric specialist,” she told me. “We needed him.” The people and government of Syria had been good to them, they agreed, and they did not expect to go back to Iraq. Dr. Lujai did not think Iraq could go back to the way it had been. “It’s a dream to return to our country,” she said.
Jordan had already closed its borders to Iraqis, and Iran required a sponsor for Iraqi refugees, though for obvious reasons most would never think of going to Iran. “Syria is the only open gate for refugees,” said Lorens Jolles of the UNHCR in Damascus. “At one point Syrian society won’t be able to accommodate them,” worried a worker from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Syria, with a population of only nineteen million, has a record of extreme generosity to refugees. It houses four hundred thousand Palestinians expelled from their homeland. During Israel’s July 2006 war against Lebanon, Syria took in up to half a million Lebanese refugees.
“For us every Iraqi who is here is a refugee,” said Jolles. “This takes into account the generalized violence and targeting of most groups in Iraq. And everybody is in need of protection.” Because Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan are not signatories to the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees, the Iraqis did not have the right to work—although those with sufficient money could open businesses, and others worked illegally. UNHCR had signed memorandums of understanding with those countries requiring refugees to be resettled in a third country within a year after UNHCR had declared them refugees. UNHCR had to establish a category of “persons of concern” without calling them refugees in order to avoid getting dragged into battle with the national authorities. It therefore gave the Iraqis the opportunity to register for temporary protection, a legal trick to recognize them as having fled a situation of generalized violence for a temporary period of time. In theory this protected them without presenting the host countries with any formal obligations (though Syria had not deported Iraqis, Jordan and Lebanon had). Most Iraqis had not yet registered with the UN for temporary protection, but hundreds could be found lining up in front of the UNHCR office in Damascus in the early hours of the morning. Between February and April 2007 ten thousand Iraqi families, or at least fifty thousand individuals, had made appointments with the UNHCR.
“First the minorities left Iraq,” a UNHCR official told me, “now we get Sunnis targeted by Shiite militias.” Until February 2006 the majority had been Christians, although Muslims were represented as well, with Sunnis and Shiites equally represented. Starting in March 2006, though, the number of Sunni refugees shot up, far exceeding all other groups; July through September 2006 saw a sharp rise in Sunnis registering. Between January 2005 and the end of February 2007, 58,924 Iraqis registered with UNHCR in Damascus. Forty-two percent of those registered since December 2003 were Sunni, 21 percent were Shiite, and 29 percent were Christian. In January 2007, 3,144 Sunnis and 901 Shiites were registered. In February it was 5,988 Sunnis to 1,570 Shiites. Only the most desperate refugees bothered to register, so the true figures were unknown. Ninety-five percent of those registered with UNHCR were from Baghdad.
The Shiites were generally single young men, while the rest came as families. For the first two years the Syrians provided free medical care to Iraqis, but they were overwhelmed; in 2005 they ended the practice except for emergencies. Iraqis could attend Syrian public schools provided they were not too crowded, which they often were. Child labor became a problem, since parents were unable to work and children were easier to hide. Children dropped out of school as a result, and Iraqi prostitutes became extremely common. UN screeners reported seeing numerous victims of torture, detention, rape, and kidnapping among newly arrived Iraqis. Most had family members who had been killed, and many were intellectuals.
“The problems of Iraqis have not come to Syria,” said Jolles, referring to sectarianism. “The [Iraqi] refugee communities don’t integrate, and the government has good control.” But he still had his worries. “They are less manageable and understandable because they are not in camps. One million people are uprooted, and they don’t know what the future has in store for them. It’s normal to have some degree of criminality, violence, and disruption.”
According to a Western diplomat, the presence of so many Iraqis gave the Syrian government political leverage in Iraq. Nearly every Iraqi political movement was represented in Syria. Historically Syria had accepted Iraqi dissidents such as those from the left wing of the Baath Party, Dawa leaders like Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, and even Kurdish independence parties. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan was established in a Damascus restaurant. The Syrians were still playing a complex game. They diplomatically recognized the Iraqi government but also housed members of the former regime, security forces, and Baath Party. They invited Shiite leaders such as Muqtada al-Sadr and radical Sunnis close to the resistance, such as Harith al-Dhari of the Association of Muslim Scholars. Syria saw the Iraqi civil war through the prism of Lebanon, thinking it could manage the conflict through its contacts; thus the Syrians were monitoring and cultivating everybody. But there were also dangerous contradictions in Syrian policy. Syria is a majority-Sunni country, but its close ally is Shiite Iran—which, in the eyes of Sunnis in Iraq and the region, sponsored the very militias that were persecuting Iraq’s Sunnis, who were often related to Syria’s Sunnis, especially in the border region. “The Syrian government is very capable of managing those issues,” the Western diplomat assured me, but sectarianism was at its peak in the region, and Syria, which was once a major exporter of fighters to Iraq, may face its own blowback.
“Their need is enormous,” a top official at UNHCR told me. “The temptation is there. The money from bin Laden is there. If the international community doesn’t help, then the other groups will, and all hell will break loose. Iraqis are sitting in Syria or Jordan, where the Baathists and Wahhabis are strongest. If 1 percent of the two million can be bought, then that is very dangerous. If they stay on the street you will have youth violence or terrorism. If people are in need they turn to crime or terrorism.” He mentioned the North African community of France as a model, some of whom were drawn to Islamic radicalism or terrorism out of frustration and neglect. “They come to the UN and queue at our door for five hours to get a registration card, or they can turn to radical groups for funding,” he said, explaining that the money came from Saudi Arabia to Jordan and was disbursed there. “This problem will be with us for a long time,” he added, shaking his head in frustration.
Many poor Iraqi refugees settled in the Jaramana district of Damascus. They came to the Ibrahim al-Khalil convent for assistance. The convent was the only white structure amid the graying and incomplete buildings surrounding it, many of which were so hastily thrown together that they were unpainted and lacked glass in the windows. In front of the convent I found a small bakery preparing the typical Iraqi bread known as samun, a thick pita with two pointy ends. The owner, Haidar, had left Iraq three months earlier “because of the occupation,” he told me. In Baquba he had been a sports teacher.
Sister Malaki, an elderly nun who ran the convent, expressed wonder at how quickly the neighborhood had been built since the Iraqis began showing up. Until 2006 there were no buildings around the convent, she said. It used to take her thirty minutes just to see a taxi on the street, and now she had to wait an hour to find an empty taxi. The first wave arrived in the spring of 2006, she said, but the biggest wave began in the fall of 2006. At first she saw many cases of rape, including boys and girls only ten or twelve years old. “Now it’s mostly cases of extreme poverty and people who will never go back to Iraq,” she said. “They fully reject returning to Iraq. They will die.”
She had worked in a hospital in Beirut throughout the Lebanese civil war and was seeing similar traumas. “The children have a strong fear,” she said. When asking her for something many children would threaten her, she said. “If you don’t give it to us we will tell the Americans,” she repeated with laughter. “Any nation that goes into a civil war,” she said, “the pressure makes them bitter. They ask, ‘Why us and not you?’ Today I was insulted by three different Iraqis. They feel entitled: ‘We suffered, you didn’t.’ The people who really suffer are those who had a lot—educated, university people. Now they are begging. They show me pictures of what they had.”
Um Iman worked as a cleaner in the convent. She had come with her husband and three daughters two months earlier. They were Christians and had lived in Baghdad’s Dora neighborhood. They had received four letters threatening them with death if they did not leave. One night they took a taxi to a relative’s house in Baghdad, and the next morning they joined a convoy of buses heading to the Syrian border. “There were explosions behind us and in front of us,” she said. Her husband looked for work every day but could find none. She looked defeated to me. “What can we do?” she asked with resignation. “Even if I die of hunger here I don’t want to go back to Iraq. Now there are no Christians in Baghdad.”
As Iraq fell apart its human detritus was scattered throughout the region. Lost amid the millions of Cairo, Iraqis could be found struggling with the bureaucracy in the Mugamaa, the massive labyrinthine edifice where all people’s interactions with the Egyptian state began and ended. On the first floor, in the Arab Nations section of the Visa Renewal section, past Somalis and Sudanese sitting and awaiting their turn, was a sign that said, “Booth 23 for Iraqis only.” When I visited in late February 2006 the crowds of Iraqis there exceeded the numbers at the nearby section for Palestinian refugees. Iraqis continued to enter Egypt by the planeload. They came on tourist visas at first, but extended them indefinitely or applied for temporary protection at the UNHCR, and settled into the urban sprawl of Cairo.
In the Medinat Nasr district, past the Layali Baghdad (Baghdad Nights) restaurant, I found a small Internet cafe owned by Muhamad Abu Rawan, a twenty-seven-year-old Sunni man who fled Iraq on May 15, 2006, with his wife, Lubna, also twenty-seven. Muhamad walked me to their nearby apartment, where we found Lubna watching a soap opera and holding their three-month-old daughter, Rawa. Their home was sparsely decorated: flower patterns on the sofas and carpets, pictures of a forest, a beach and a lake on the walls. Both Muhamad and Lubna were from Basra. Back in Baghdad Muhamad had worked repairing air conditioners for the same electronic appliance company where Lubna, a civil engineer, worked.
At first they both spoke Egyptian Arabic with me, because, like most Iraqis, they had quickly assimilated into Egyptian culture and had learned the dialect from the country’s famous soap operas and films. At the beginning of the American occupation, Lubna told me, “Our lives were normal, like all Iraqis. Every once in a while the Americans would besiege the area, but my father was never politically active, so the Americans never bothered us.” One morning in December 2004, Lubna’s father, also a civil engineer and structural designer, drove toward the Mansour district to pay his contractors. He took the airport road and got off at the exit that would take him to Mansour, but the roads had been blocked by American soldiers, who were conducting an operation in the area.
In Yarmuk’s Qahtan Square American soldiers fired into the air as Lubna’s father drove. He sped away to avoid the shots. Perhaps thinking he was attacking them, one American soldier fired at him, and then several others opened fire as well. “He did not have time to close his eyes before he died,” Lubna told me, because there were so many shots in his body. She showed me pictures of his bullet-riddled car, with holes in every side. “That year the Americans were killing many Iraqis on the street,” Muhamad explained. Lubna, her mother, and her two sisters did not learn about his death until later that afternoon, when Iraqi police contacted them. Their neighbors persuaded them to demand compensation, and they approached one of the lawyers the Americans had authorized to deal with such cases. “After one year the lawyer said the Americans had rejected it twice,” Lubna told me as she rocked Rawa steadily and patted her back. The Americans did offer her family seven hundred dollars, but they rejected it as a paltry sum. “My mother had to go back to work as a teacher because my father was the only provider,” Lubna told me.
At the time, Muhamad still lived in Baghdad’s volatile Dora district, where Shiites and Christians were targeted by Sunni militias. When he picked up a wounded Shiite from the street and took him to the hospital, he found himself targeted by the Sunni militia that had shot the man. They told him they would have killed him were he not a Sunni and forced him to move out of Dora. One year after her father was killed, Lubna and Muhamad got married. They lived with her mother in Hai Jihad, a majority-Sunni district Muhamad described as “very hot.” Two days after they were married, there was a joint American and Iraqi operation in their neighborhood. One hundred and fifty Sunnis were arrested, he told me. “The Americans would surround the neighborhood, and the Iraqi police commandos raided the houses. It was our neighbors and friends. They still haven’t been released.”
“We were afraid to admit we were Sunnis,” Lubna told me. “All men stopped going to the mosque to pray because they would have been harassed or killed.” Muhamad’s sister was married to a Shiite man, he told me, and they had many friends and relatives who were Shiites. “It’s the militias of Badr and Sadr,” Lubna told me, “they are ruthless.” The company they worked for was owned by a Sunni man, and it had branches in Baghdad and Basra. In Basra twenty members of the company were kidnapped. The Shiites were released, and thirteen Sunni employees were murdered. In Baghdad the company’s Shiite lawyer was killed by Sunni militiamen, a security guard was kidnapped, and the manager was threatened. The owner belonged to the Omar family, a name that gave them away as Sunni, and his company was known as a “Sunni company.” He fled Basra to Baghdad because of threats, and after more threats he fled to the United Arab Emirates. Muhamad was beaten, and his car was stolen. “Every day we heard of people we knew getting killed,” he told me.
Lubna and Muhamad chose Egypt because the cost of living was cheap and Syria was threatened by the Americans. They came on a three-month tourist visa and rented their apartment, for which they paid three hundred dollars a month. Lubna felt welcomed by the Egyptians, she said, and Muhamad felt at home because the social environment reminded him of Iraq. After they arrived they were joined by Lubna’s mother and her seventeen-year-old sister, Najwa, who attended a private high school. Lubna’s grandfather was dying, so her mother returned to Baghdad to see him, but then she could no longer get permission to return to Cairo. Muhamad heard rumors that Iraqis who had tried to renew their visas at the Mugamaa were deported by Egyptian authorities, so he obtained an asylum-seeker registration card from the UNHCR.
The couple ran out of their savings, and in December 2006 Muhamad opened his Internet cafe. Lubna hoped to work when Rawa was older. “Our standard of living in Iraq was much better,” she told me. In Medinat Nasr they had Shiite neighbors who had been expelled from a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad. I asked if the sectarian problems had followed them here. “On the contrary,” Muhamad said, “we are happy to see any Iraqi so we can speak our dialect.” Lubna added that “the Iraqis who come here are all tired and don’t want to organize or attract attention.”
Muhamad had to get an Egyptian partner just to open a business. The Egyptian owned 51 percent of the cafe, even though he had not invested anything in it. Muhamad’s friend Haidar helped him out at the cafe. A twenty-three-year-old Shiite pharmacist from Baghdad’s Khadhra district, where Shiites were under attack, Haidar was married to a Sunni woman. After a local supermarket owner and his two brothers were murdered for being Shiite, Haidar began to receive threatening calls. His uncle’s car was stolen and his house burned down, and the walls of the neighborhood were scrawled with notices saying that Shiites’ property was forfeit and could be taken by any Sunni. Haidar’s family sold their house, and the new owner was killed. “All the Shiites in the neighborhood fled,” he told me. Haidar moved to Cairo in September 2006 to arrange a place to live before his wife arrived. But when she applied for the Egyptian visa it was denied, leaving her stranded in Baghdad. Haidar met Muhamad in Cairo. “We get along better here than in Iraq,” he told me. “We feel closer.” Hatred of Shiites was increasing throughout the region, and even in Cairo Haidar did not feel fully comfortable. “On the street and in cabs people ask if I am Sunni or Shiite,” he told me. “They say we are infidels.” One day at the supermarket the grocer heard Haidar’s Iraqi dialect and told him, “Your Shiites are infidels.”
Egypt had stopped issuing visas to Iraqis, although it was widely rumored that Iraqis who paid bribes at the Egyptian embassies in Syria and Jordan could obtain them. Iraqis in Egypt told me that they had paid hundreds of dollars to visa agencies that managed to obtain visas for their relatives. Egypt had absorbed between two and four million Sudanese, and had refugees from thirty other nationalities. It also had a high rate of unemployment. Egyptians and Sudanese could not find work, so additional Iraqis would further burden the state’s weak social services. Between 100,000 and 140,000 Iraqis lived in Egypt before the influx of refugees, but by March 2007 only 5,500 had registered with UNHCR for an asylum seeker’s card because, in the eyes of a UN official, “not every Iraqi in Egypt is a refugee.” Many of the middle-class Iraqis in Egypt were beginning to run out of resources, and it was only then that they turned to the UN.
Egypt’s reasons for no longer letting Iraqis in were twofold. In the post-9 /11 world, concern over terrorism justified almost anything. “Tourism is a major industry, so one incident would cost millions in lost revenue,” said the UN official. In addition, Egyptians were afraid of Shiites, an Iraqi diplomat told me, “because they think they have links to Iran.” Many Egyptians had raised fears of a Shiite wave and of Sunnis converting to Shiism. They also feared making permanent demographic changes to Iraq. “You are taking them from Iraq and implanting them somewhere else, and most of them are Sunnis,” a high-ranking Egyptian diplomat told me. “It disturbs me. It means the whole area will be Shiite.”
Many Iraqi refugees have carried the sectarian bitterness with them. In an apartment complex that resembled American housing projects, only partially occupied and complete, I found a collection of Sunni Iraqis in a courtyard inside, where a few had opened shops. Ghaith, an eighteen-year-old from Amriya, long since cleansed of its Shiites, had owned a supermarket back home and had opened up a small grocery store on the ground floor of the complex in Egypt. He pointed to his twelve-year-old brother playing soccer with other boys and told me that he had been kidnapped in Baghdad and held for one week. Sitting in the grocery store was Dhafer, a round thirty-five-year-old man with a sharp nose and stubble from a few days of neglect. He had the tired look of a defeated man. Originally from Baghdad’s Ghazaliya district, he had been threatened by Shiite neighbors whose sons worked with the Iraqi National Guard and Interior Ministry, he said, and given forty-eight hours to leave. “I brought my relatives for protection and weapons and they escorted us out,” he told me. I asked him why he had then left Amriya. “Civil war,” he said. “All of Baghdad, all of Iraq, is a civil war. The guy who goes on television and says it’s not a civil war is mocking the people.” On August 16, 2005, Dhafer came to Cairo with his wife and son. Since then another son had been born. Dhafer and his family regularly watched Al Zawra TV, the Iraqi satellite channel that broadcast resistance operations and was openly pro-Sunni and anti-Shiite. They had recently seen a video of a Sadrist cleric calling on Shiites to kill Sunnis. “I was not surprised,” he told me. “I know the Shiite sect. But my wife was crying.” Dhafer told me that up to twenty of his friends had already been killed in Baghdad. He had not renewed his residency and instead had applied for refugee status at the UNHCR. Although he missed his family, he never wanted to return to Baghdad. His relatives had also warned him not to return, telling him that it was better to starve outside.
Next door was a hair salon owned by a Sunni couple from Baghdad’s Ghazaliya district. It was decorated in pink and red in honor of Valentine’s Day, and there was only a chair for one customer at a time. Its owner, Ghada, had taught herself hairdressing after she arrived in Cairo with her husband, Abu Omar, and their three children. Abu Omar, a former colonel in the Iraqi Army, had retired in 1999. After retiring he had opened a stationery shop in the Nafaq al-Shurta district with a friend. The American military raided their home twice. “They said to me, ‘You look like an American woman,’” Ghada said, laughing with pride. The military asked permission to use their roof for surveillance, and Abu Omar agreed. “Could we have said no?” Ghada asked.
“After the war I started to feel the Iranian influence,” Abu Omar told me. “Before there were no problems between Sunnis and Shiites, but then on television we started hearing people talking about Sunnis or Shiites.” Like many former military officers, Abu Omar was actively involved in the Iraqi resistance. “As long as they are attacking the occupiers or those cooperating with the occupiers,” he said, the Iraqi resistance was honorable. When talking of the resistance, he slipped and said, “we” instead of “they.”
Shiite militias associated with the Iraqi government obtained lists of former military officers and their personal information, he told me. “Every day we heard names of officers killed,” he said, estimating that he knew at least one hundred people who had been killed since the Americans overthrew Saddam. He was threatened twice in front of his house, and then his partner was assassinated. “After they killed his partner he told me that we must leave in five days,” Ghada told me. She started crying. “They have stolen my house, my furniture. I left everything. Even now I hope to go back. Here we have many troubles. We have no money. It’s very difficult. There you feel that you can die every day. Here I am dying every day. Every day you hear bad news. There is no hope. I lost everything. I was a queen in my house before. I had a home, furniture, a BMW. Now I live in a dirty area. What did I do? What did my children do?” Ghada sold most of her jewelry to help support the family. They had been in Cairo since 2005 and had managed to pay for their children’s school the first year but could no longer afford to.
Ghada told me that Iraq’s sectarianism had followed them to Cairo, causing problems in their children’s school. Iraqi Shiite boys beat their son Omar, she said. “He hates Shiites so much,” she said, adding that many fights had occurred between Sunni and Shiite Iraqi children. Her son’s fight had been provoked by Saddam Hussein’s execution, which they watched on television. “We had hoped that Saddam would return to lead Iraq. It was like they ripped my heart out,” he told me. “After I saw the images I stayed up all night.” Ghada told me that Egyptian customers had cried with her and consoled her after Saddam’s execution, and they had recited a prayer together. “The ones that Saddam killed,” she said, meaning Shiites, “I would go back and kill more of them. I hate Shiites.”
Abu Omar still held out some hope that peace could be restored. “If America comes down from her pride and negotiates with resistance, then maybe there can be a solution. The resistance is very strong and has the best officers.” He was not as sectarian as his wife, explaining to me that “there are real Iraqi Shiites, and they have the same feelings we have. It is the Shiites of Iran who are the cause of the problems.” Abu Omar often referred to the resistance as “the patriots,” explaining that “there are Sunni and Shiite patriots. The patriots can defeat the Iranian Shiites.”
Many former Baathists and Iraqi Army officers had settled in Egypt following the war. Harith al-Dhari, leader of the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, frequently visited Cairo, where he met with Egyptian leaders, including his friend Mahdi Akef, leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The Association of Muslim Scholars controlled some militias that fought in the resistance. More resistance leaders based themselves across the border from Iraq’s Anbar province, in Amman and Damascus, however. Nearly three years into their war against the occupation, many were growing introspective—much like the tribal leader Sheikh Saad, whom I met in Amman in late 2006.
In Damascus in February 2007 I met one of the leaders of the Anbar resistance that Sheikh Saad referred to when he told me they had all fled. Sheikh Yassin was a weathered and frail man with a thick white scarf over his head. He fingered black beads as we spoke. He led a mosque in Hit but had fled a month before we met and left it with his sons. Hit had become deserted, he told me. “The situation there has become disastrous,” he said. “They hit my son’s house in an airstrike and destroyed his house and killed my grandson. The people of Hit are caught between Americans on one side and Al Qaeda on the other side. And the police and army do not treat people properly.”
He too recognized the strategic Sunni error made at the beginning of the American occupation. “That is the origin of the problem: they boycotted. If they had participated with all their weight, they would not have let the Shiite militias take over the government of Iraq.” He blamed the Iraqi Sunni leadership for denouncing elections and threatening those who participated. “They made the wrong interpretation,” he said. “Shiites wanted to prevent Sunnis from voting, and jihadists did as well. The jihadists fight the Americans on one side and on the other side they destroy the community.” Sheikh Yassin had not fled Shiite militias, but rather Al Qaeda. “Sunnis must choose between death or seeking refuge in the Anbar, Syria, or Jordan,” he said.
Another opponent of Al Qaeda was Sheikh Mudhir al-Khirbit of Ramadi, a former leader of the Confederation of Iraqi Tribes. The Khirbits had been favored by the former regime, and in March 2003 an American airstrike on their home had killed eighteen family members, reason enough for them to seek vengeance. Sheikh Mudhir had sought shelter in Damascus but made frequent trips to Lebanon for medical treatment. The Iraqi government placed him on its new list of forty-one most wanted, and in January 2007, on a medical trip to Lebanon, he was arrested by that country’s Internal Security Forces. His affairs were now being handled by his oldest son, Sattam, who was only eighteen years old but who, according to one Western diplomat, had his father’s trust and went on missions for him. I found Sattam in an apartment in Damascus, dressed in a gray suit, wearing pointy leather shoes, and taking business calls from sheikhs well into the night.
In 2004, when he was only fifteen, Sattam and an uncle were arrested in an American military raid on their home. “Every tribal sheikh has weapons, machine guns, missiles, Kalashnikovs,” he told me. Sattam was jailed for one month and interrogated about his father’s activities. “They treated me badly,” he said. “We were tied up for two days, and it was really cold.” His uncle was held for three months and was later imprisoned again for one year. Iraq had grown too dangerous for the family’s leadership. “In Ramadi you can’t drive in a car,” he told me. “You don’t know if the Americans or Al Qaeda will kill you. Not only Shiites are slaughtering Sunnis; Sunnis are slaughtering Sunnis.”
Iraq’s Sunnis were beleaguered, he said. He called the initial Sunni boycott of Iraqi politics “a big mistake,” one that opened the door to Shiite domination. “Now it’s too late,” he said. “People here and in Amman feel like they lost.” The only way to protect Sunnis, in his view, was to establish a Sunni state that would include the Anbar province, Mosul, and Tikrit. Radical Sunnis in groups like Al Qaeda were now in control of Anbar, and the resistance was taking on Al Qaeda as well as the Americans. “Al Qaeda kills Sunnis the most, and you don’t know what they want,” he said. His priority was to deal with Al Qaeda in Anbar first, then reconcile with the Shiites, and then work to end the occupation. “When Sunnis in Baghdad get arrested by the Americans, they feel good because it’s better than being arrested by Shiite militias.” Despite this, he did not bear hostility toward the Shiites. “My father doesn’t differentiate between Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians,” he said. “We don’t have anything against Shiites. Shiites didn’t kill eighteen people from our family—the Americans did.”
Another longtime resistance fighter was Abu Ali, commander of Jeish Nasr Salahedin (The Army of Salahedin’s Victory) in the Tikrit area. A short, stern man wearing a brown jacket, a sweater showing his shirt collar, and green pants, he had a small mustache atop his tight lips and spoke without expression in a low voice. He had arrived in Damascus with two comrades who were wounded and could not get treatment in Iraq. “Our people here said they could help them,” he told me. The Americans had raided his home, and he had not slept there for two years, stealing only occasional visits to see his family. I was told that Abu Ali had led a much-publicized attack on the American base in Tikrit on the day American ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad attended a ceremony handing it over to the Iraqi army, and he confirmed this.
“They expressed democracy with bullets against demonstrators,” he said of the Americans. “I will keep fighting until the last American and Iranian leaves.” Abu Ali added that he anticipated a clash with Al Qaeda as well. Although there was no political leadership in the resistance, he said, “there are politicians, and we express our ideas to them.” He worried that the resistance was becoming too public, with many people appearing on television and claiming they led it. “The secret of the success of the resistance is that nobody knows who we are,” he said. “If we make it public, then we will be like Palestine, sixty years and no state.”
The prospect of the Palestinian refugee crisis happening all over again is especially worrisome for Jordan. At least half its population of nearly six million people are Palestinians who were expelled from their homes in 1948 or 1967. Following the Gulf War in 1991, Kuwait expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of whom ended up in Jordan. Jordan has close and longstanding ties to Iraq, dating back to that country’s monarchy.
In a fast food restaurant in Amman I sat with a major from Jordan’s powerful General Intelligence Directorate. He insisted that there were more than one million Iraqis in Jordan, though in truth the number never exceeded more than a few hundred thousand. He denied that they were refugees because they had not been forced out of Iraq. When I asked him what he expected a Sunni living in Shiite militia-dominated Basra to do, he told me that the Sunni should merely move to a Sunni area of Iraq. “Nothing positive has come from the Iraqis,” he said. “You can’t trust an Iraqi.” Like most Jordanians he complained that the influx of Iraqis had tripled housing prices.
After Iraqis associated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda movement struck two Jordanian hotels in November 2005, detonating suicide bombs in a wedding, Iraqis began facing interrogations at the border. Beginning in 2006 Jordan imposed strict restrictions on the entry of Iraqis. By the end of that year a sign on the Jordanian border proclaimed that men between eighteen and thirty-five years of age could not enter. Families entering with many suitcases or belongings were turned away as well. Many Iraqis entering Jordan at the border and airport reported being questioned about whether they were Sunni or Shiite. Shiites were more likely to be turned away. Once in Jordan, Iraqis could register with UNHCR for their temporary protection cards.
At first, Iraqis were given three-month tourist visas; but when they left Jordan to renew the visas, they could not return. As a result, many Iraqis chose not to leave and fell into illegal status. Underground, they were unable to work formally and often didn’t get paid for the work they did illegally. Many young Iraqi men left their families behind and came to Jordan seeking work. They lived in virtually empty apartments, the only furniture being mattresses on the floor. Their children did not have access to schools or medical care. In February 2006, there were officially fourteen thousand Iraqi children in Jordanian private schools.
Jordanian society was very sympathetic with the plight of Iraq’s Sunnis, but Shiites had a hard time there. A young Iraqi Shiite man working with an NGO in Jordan reported being regularly questioned about his identity. Major Jordanian newspapers like Al Rai often published anti-Shiite articles, he said. “In Jordan, if you want to work they might ask you if you are Shiite or Sunni, and if you are Shiite you can’t work,” he told me. “Taxi drivers ask me, ‘Are you Iraqi? Are you Sunni or Shiite?’” If he answered truthfully, they would ask him why he was helping the Americans. “After Saddam was executed, they asked me, ‘Why didn’t Iraqis make a revolution after his execution?’ They don’t believe Saddam committed crimes. I told one I am Iraqi and Shiite. He asked, ‘Are you supporting those Iranians killing Iraqis?’ I don’t argue, I don’t want trouble or to be taken to police station. I bought a bicycle to avoid the taxi drivers.”
Dr. Mouayad al-Windawi was a Shiite professor of political science who left the University of Baghdad in May 2005. “In my first lesson after the war, I said this will be a disaster and bring us nothing. We will live in chaos for a long time.” A member of the Baath Party until 2001, he explained to me that under Saddam there was some sectarianism, but it was not overt. A glass ceiling kept many Shiites from advancing too high. “I worked with the Iraqi government for the last forty years,” he said. “Not much attention was paid to who you are.” I asked him how sectarianism had increased after the war. “Ask Mr. Bremer,” he told me, referring to Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. “Bremer’s system for political parties was good for blocs, not parties. It was good for Kurds and [Supreme Council leader] Hakim. Nationalists boycotted the political process after 2003, but the hawza and Sistani told Shiites to wait and see, and Sunnis had no such guy to issue a fatwa. The Jaafari government forced Sunnis to see themselves as defending themselves and not the nation. Former Baathists and nationalists like me have no place. I realized there is no future. I told my family we have to stay ten years away from the country.”
Mouayad lived in Adhamiya, a Sunni stronghold in Baghdad. Members of Zarqawi’s Tawhid and Jihad militia attacked his house. His brother, married to a Sunni woman, was kidnapped and released after a ransom of twenty-five thousand dollars was paid. He then fled to Damascus. “I realized that the country would have a civil war one way or another,” he told me. “I still believe the worst is coming, not only to Iraq but in the region. It’s the first stage of a conflict that might lead to a Sunni bloc against Shiites. There is no hope for the future.” A month before I met Mouayad, his house was occupied by a Sunni militia. Two days before we met, a relative of his was killed when mortars landed on his home.
In Jordan Mouayad was working as a consultant for the political advisory group to the United Nations ambassador to Iraq. “Jordanians were very cooperative until last summer,” he said, “but they realized the civil war might lead to new wave. Sixty-five percent of Iraqis in Jordan are Sunnis because Sunni areas in Iraq are under attack.” He did not expect the sectarianism to spread to Jordan. “In Jordan security is too strong, and Iraqis here don’t want to engage in sectarianism. But over time things might change.”
Many officers from the former regime in Iraq had chosen to settle in Jordan. I met two one rainy evening at the home of Maj. Gen. Walid Abdel Maliki, a former assistant to the minister of defense before the war. With him was Gen. Raed al-Hamdani, a former commander in the Republican Guard Corps. Both men, I was told, “had contacts” with the Iraqi resistance. As we sat down, Abdel Maliki’s young son burst into the living room. “This is the Mahdi Army,” Abdel Maliki told me as he kissed his son, “his behavior in the house.” The two former generals were nostalgic for the time before Iraq was overrun with sectarianism. “We never had this sort of fighting before between Sunnis and Shiites,” said Abdel Maliki. “Saddam didn’t believe in Sunnis or Shiites; he was tribal. Saddam didn’t put down the Shiite rebellion because they were Shiite but because it was an uprising. The soldiers who put down the Shiite uprising were Shiites. We never heard from our fathers and grandfathers such a thing as is happening now. The problem now is from Sunni and Shiite political leaders: Hakim, Dhari, and Adnan Dulaimi are playing the same game.” Abdel Maliki blamed Iran for the problems in Iraq. “It’s a military idea, to move the battle from your land to the enemy’s land,” he said, and Iran sought to confront the U.S. in Iraq. “Iranian occupation is worse than American occupation. The only way is a military solution. Al Qaeda, the Shiite militias, the Iranian groups—they have their own agendas but don’t want to solve their problems. We have to attack Al Qaeda and the militias. Thousands of Iraqi officers can help Americans.”
General Hamdani, Abdel Maliki’s former superior officer, had fought and lost in six wars against Americans, Iranians, Kurds, and Israelis. He had been severely wounded in 1991. “The hardest loss was this last one. We were given the responsibility to defend our country. We lost the war and we lost our country.” Hamdani also resisted a sectarian approach to Iraq. “It is a mistake to think Sunnis ruled Shiites,” he said. “Most of the coup attempts against Saddam were Sunni. If we have a point of view on Iraq, it is as Iraqis, not as Sunnis. There are nationalists and those who are not nationalists.”
He did not think the Sunni boycott of the Iraqi government had been problematic. “Many Iraqi Sunnis participated in the government. What was the result? Nothing.” Although Hamdani thought the Iraqi resistance should continue its struggle, he too saw a larger threat. “These groups were established to fight the occupation, but now I think the danger from Iran is greater than from America. American national interests and the resistance’s interests are the same. The U.S. did itself harm by demonizing the Iraqi resistance and anyone who deals with it. They have prevented the emergence of moderates who can sit and negotiate, and you see now, four years after the invasion, the strongest factions are Al Qaeda and not the nationalists.”
Hamdani was involved in a new political party called Huquq, which was formed by Dr. Hassan Bazzaz in August 2006. Bazzaz was a professor of international relations who taught at the University of Baghdad. He left Iraq two months before I met him in February 2007. “I just ran away. I was afraid they will kill me,” he said, referring to the Shiite militias. Being a well-known professor was a sufficient reason to be targeted, he explained. When I entered his office he was on the phone with someone in Iraq. “Where did they find him?” he asked. “Who shot him? The Americans?”
Bazzaz was also from Adhamiya. “Good fighters, good people,” he said of his former neighborhood. “It never fell.”
The Americans had just initiated their new security plan for Iraq, and Bazzaz was trying to be optimistic. “Everything must come to an end, and I don’t think this will go on forever,” he said. “We are not the first nation to get occupied by a foreign power or the first nation to fight among itself. The Americans are doing it for their own benefit, and we, the Sunni people, can benefit from that.” Although he struggled to be optimistic, he still placed hopes in the resistance. “If things get worse, then we, the people who are talking politically, will take the military option,” he said. “The Sunni Arab neighbors will have to support us. The worst is coming.”
In February 2007 I met Mishan al-Juburi of Al Zawra TV in the offices of a charter airline company in downtown Damascus he claimed belonged to his wife. Two heavy-set thuggish young men stood guard. As I sat down, he began complaining about a recent New York Times story about him. “It’s completely from a dream,” he said angrily. “All the story except my name is not correct.”
Juburi told me his version of his life’s story. He claimed to have been a businessman in Baghdad’s Shorja market. “I knew Saddam personally,” he said, “and gave him my full support. Saddam tried to show he was a winner and he didn’t care about those who supported him. I lost my son in a car accident and criticized the health minister.” Juburi claims that this criticism provoked the ire of the regime. He told me his father had led the Juburi tribe but that since Mishan had an older brother, he was never expected to lead the tribe. “I like city,” he said. “I don’t want to be tribal.” He also claimed to have been involved in a coup attempt by the Juburi tribe. “I tried to kill Saddam, and he killed thirty-five people from my family: my brother, my cousins. I lost ninety-five people from my family to Saddam, but it’s indisputable that Saddam was better. I’m sorry I opposed him.”
He had lived in Jordan, Turkey, Britain, and Syria, he told me, and had founded the Iraqi Homeland Party. Before the war he had taken part in an opposition conference in Salahaddin, in Kurdistan. Now he regretted his participation in this conference: “I trusted the American lie of building democracy in Iraq, and I found myself a part of the American destruction of Iraq.” He claimed he had come to this realization one month after the war ended, when Bremer declared the American presence in Iraq to be an occupation.
Immediately following the war, Juburi and his militia went down to Mosul from Erbil, where he had been staying as a guest of Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani. “Barzani is my friend. I fully support an independent Kurdistan.” He claimed Barzani’s militia had helped him take Mosul. I asked him what had become of his militia, and Juburi told me, “I think they are resisting.”
I expressed surprise at his support for an independent Kurdistan. “I believe it’s good for the Iraqi future,” he said, though he admitted that the Kurds were planning on cleansing the Arabs of Kirkuk. He told me he had remained in Mosul for one month and then arranged for an election. “I didn’t put my name or any name of my family” on the list of candidates, he said, somewhat implausibly. After the elections in Mosul, he left for Baghdad and eventually joined the Iraqi government and Parliament. His small party, he said, received 142,000 votes in the first Iraqi elections.
Juburi was known for his sectarian attacks on Iraq’s Shiite leaders and militias, whom he called “Safawis,” the Arabic way of saying “Safavid,” the name of a Persian dynasty that ruled from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. It is a common epithet used to imply that Iraq’s Shiites are not Arabs but are part of an Iranian or Persian conspiracy to gain hegemony over them. “On April 18, 2005, I said the government is Safawi,” he said proudly. “I’m the first man to use the word ‘Safawi.’ Since then I haven’t gone to Parliament. The first Jaafari government was Safawi-Persian. We are not against Shiites; we are against Safawis. We fear Iran. The Americans will leave; first we are afraid of Iran.”
In November 2005 he established Al Zawra TV. “From the first day we said we are going to say what no one else dares to say,” he told me. At first Al Zawra was known for its entertainment programs, but after Juburi’s immunity as a Parliament member was lifted following charges of corruption and aiding the resistance, the channel began broadcasting proresistance propaganda. Since most of Al Zawra’s target audience in the Middle East did not have access to the Internet, Juburi rebroadcast the propaganda videos that many had seen worldwide online. The videos consisted of members of the resistance preparing for or conducting operations against the Americans. Two commentators, a man in military attire and a veiled woman, occasionally provided news bulletins. Although his channel was praised by the resistance, many also expressed their skepticism about Juburi for being “opportunistic.”
Al Zawra received widespread attention throughout the Arab world, and many Iraqi Sunnis in exile watched it as well. One newspaper in Jordan, Al Arab al-Yawm, wrote that only Al Zawra transmitted the reports of the resistance without focusing on suicide attacks that promoted sectarianism. The newspaper praised Al Zawra’s stance against the occupation and its call for the overthrow of the “puppet sectarian regime.” The channel was unique and important, the paper said, because there was otherwise a media blackout imposed on the resistance. The channel showed Arab children the real picture of Iraq, praising the “martyr leader Saddam Husayn.”
In April 2006 Juburi absconded to northern Iraq and Erbil, where his friend Barzani provided him with safe haven. “If I stayed in Baghdad the government militias would kill me,” he said. “Maliki told me he would execute me if I opposed the government. I am against the Iranians in Iraq, so the authorities accuse me of certain things. Now the office in Baghdad is destroyed.” The Americans eventually closed down his station in Erbil too. He explained that he broadcasted from Anbar using mobile transmitters on taxis and other vehicles.
When we met he was running his station from Damascus with the help of his son and publishing a pro-Sunni newspaper. He claimed that he alone funded the station. “I was one of the top-ten richest men in Iraq,” he said. Al Zawra was broadcast by the Egyptian satellite network Nilesat. Juburi expressed glee in the distress he was causing as a gadfly. “The Americans pushed me to be against them,” he said. “I know how much I give them a headache.” He would soon also be broadcast by Arabsat and Hot Bird, a European company.
Juburi maintained that Zarqawi and other Salafis had hurt the Sunni cause. They had sought to provoke a civil war, he said, and they had succeeded. “That’s why Sunni society doesn’t support them,” he said. “There are clashes between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi resistance, which we consider ourselves to be a part of.” Al Zawra had become a symbol of the resistance everywhere, he told me. “The resistance are serving us; we have relations with all the resistance in Iraq except Al Qaeda,” he said. “We never show anything from them. Al Qaeda is a danger like America in the Middle East. We don’t want to make the mistake they made in Afghanistan.”
Like many Sunnis, Juburi feared a potential genocide of the Sunnis of Iraq. He believed that Sunni children and women would leave the country. He did not think the Shiites had won yet. “If we are outside the city but Shiites cannot leave their homes, then you cannot say that there is a winner to the civil war,” he said. Unlike some Sunni leaders, he did not think the Sunni boycott of the Iraqi government had been a strategic error. “If you push people to join the Iraqi police and army, it means you accept the American occupation.”
Although Juburi was ready to criticize Iraq’s Shiites and what he saw as their Iranian sponsors, he refrained from criticizing Lebanese Hizballah, a successful Shiite resistance movement. Many Sunni Iraqis saw Hizballah as an Iranian proxy and were thus hostile to the movement. Juburi told me he did not want to talk about Hizballah, possibly because he was a guest of the Syrians, themselves supporters of the movement. He conceded that Hizballah’s general secretary was very charismatic and expressed his admiration for Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, a Lebanese cleric formerly associated with Hizballah. “I love Fadlallah especially,” Juburi told me. He agreed with me that it was ironic that in Lebanon the Sunnis supported American policy while the Shiites were opposed to the Americans.
He predicted that Al Zawra would soon go live on the Internet. “We use the Internet the way photography was used in Vietnam,” he said. “We will cause Bush a real headache. We will show the reality of American soldiers. America must apologize for what it did to Iraq.”
In January 2007 Juburi famously debated Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shiite Iraqi journalist, on Al Jazeera. Juburi came out swinging, asking Musawi to recite a prayer for the soul of “the martyred president Saddam Hussein.” Musawi refused, condemning Saddam instead. Juburi called Musawi a Persian, and Musawi responded that Juburi was a thief. Juburi claimed to have evidence that Musawi was an Iranian, and Musawi claimed that Juburi’s father had killed Kurds. Juburi called Musawi a “Persian shoe.” Musawi stormed off the set, and Juburi continued alone, praising the executed Saddam. Invoking sectarianism and the ancient split between Sunnis and Shiites, Juburi said that the people who killed Saddam were the same people who had killed the caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab and who hated the caliph Abu Bakr and the other companions of the Prophet Muhammad. Although Musawi eventually returned to the set, his exchange with Juburi was no less acrimonious.
In February 2007 Juburi made a speech condemning Al Qaeda for provoking Iraq’s Shiites while failing to protect Sunnis from Shiite retaliation, for imposing itself on other resistance groups, for killing Iraq’s Sunni leaders, for seeking to create a Taliban state in Iraq, and for killing a messenger sent by Juburi to negotiate with them. Juburi warned that Iraq’s Sunnis would fight Al Qaeda. Following his speech, many jihadist websites and forums condemned Juburi. Although the Egyptians had ignored threats from the ruling Shiites in Iraq, in February Nilesat finally pulled the plug on Juburi’s channel (other satellite networks continued to broadcast it). The Americans, who had long been pressuring the Egyptians to shut Al Zawra down, finally succeeded.
Others I spoke to disputed Juburi’s account of himself. Amatzia Baram of the University of Haifa, an expert on Iraq’s tribes and its former regime, was one of them. According to Baram, who also advised the American government: “He is a middle-level sheikh of the Jubbur [tribe], originating from the vicinity of Tikrit. In the mid-1980s he was approached by Saddam to recruit young and uncouth Juburis that would go through a crash (and often crush) course of army officers and then sent to the front with Iran to lead troops in battle. Saddam believed that country tribal boys were tough, very Arab (no mix with Turkish or Persian genes or culture), and imbued with traditional tribal ideals—murua (manliness or nobleness), sharraf (honor)—and so they will fight the Iranians tooth and nail. Actually, they did prove themselves. Saddam promoted them at a neck-breaking speed in the war. Your man claims that he recruited fifty thousand such, but he is exaggerating. Still, he did a good job. Now, many Juburis were angry at Saddam for other reasons and planned a coup d’état in January 1990. Saddam exposed it and executed many Juburi army officers, imprisoned or just sacked others. It became dangerous to be a senior Juburi for a while. I don’t know whether your guy was or wasn’t part of the plot, but he felt that the soil was burning under his feet, and fled. He always tried to present himself as far more important than he really was. He returned to Baghdad in 2003 but was not successful in attracting meaningful Juburi support. He always had money, who knows where from. Assad? CIA? Saudis and Gulfies?”
An Iraqi politician close to many Sunni leaders and the resistance who also lived in Syria provided me with another account. My source, who preferred anonymity, explained, “The resistance has doubts about him. They are using him, but they won’t give him their trust to speak in their name. When the occupation ends they will judge him for all that he did.” He was referring to charges the Iraqi government had made that Juburi had run off with millions of dollars he had been paid for contracts he never completed. He had allegedly used that money to launch his television station.
My source explained that under Saddam’s regime Juburi had worked for the Jumhuriya newspaper. Juburi then met Saddam’s son Uday and fell into his good graces. Juburi came from a poor family, my source told me, but he had made deals with Uday during the sanctions era and had stolen money from Uday before fleeing to Jordan and Syria, taking advantage of the fact that Syria would not hand him over to Saddam. Juburi then pretended he was using money to overthrow the government. My source mocked Juburi for attending the Iraqi opposition conferences in London and Salahaddin before the war, legitimizing the American occupation. When the former regime learned of a coup being plotted by members of the Jubbur tribe, many members were executed, including Juburi’s brother, his wife’s brother, and many military officers from the tribe.
“When the Americans invaded,” my source explained, “he came down with the Kurds to Mosul, and he participated in robbing banks and burning them. He tried to lead Mosul and gave a speech, and people threw shoes and vegetables at him. He bought a lot of votes and got three seats in Parliament. His tribe has rejected him because he came on the back of American tanks.” My source explained that Juburi received various building contracts but never built anything. He also received a contract to provide security for oil pipelines. “When he started clashing with the government, they opened his file, and the first file they opened was the pipelines,” my source said, adding that some Sunni Iraqi politicians had appealed to Juburi to stop promoting sectarianism. “We told him he serves the American agenda of dividing Iraqis,” he said.
IT WASN’T ONLY IRAQI REFUGEES WHO WERE LEAVING THE COUNTRY. Al Qaeda in Iraq was searching for new sanctuaries as well. Most countries in the region were harsh dictatorships with strong security services that would never countenance an influx of the new “Arab Afghans,” veterans of the jihad in Iraq, the way they had after the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s. But with its weak state, sectarian structure and divisions, foreign interventions, and extreme social inequalities, Lebanon was especially vulnerable to the destabilizing influences of the civil war in Iraq. Best of all, large swaths of it were ungoverned, and there was a Sunni community that felt increasingly insecure. Though there were many differences between the two countries, Lebanon showed a possible glimpse of what parts of Iraq might look like—especially if, as in Lebanon, there was never any process of justice, truth, or accountability to grapple with the civil war and the massacres.
The wave of Sunni extremism and the regional rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia were especially felt in Lebanon. Fighting in the northern Nahr al-Barid refugee camp near Tripoli and street clashes in January and May 2008 were a sign that the war in Iraq was spilling over into neighboring countries, with fighters, weapons, tactics, and sectarian tensions all making their way to Lebanon and elsewhere. The clashes were also a sign that America’s “New Middle East,” based on supporting U.S. client states at the expense of rival movements that had more popularity or legitimacy, was failing. America’s support for Sunni regimes that manipulated sectarianism was increasing radicalism in the region and threatening to provoke a larger regional conflict.
While many analysts were promoting a theory of “Shiite revival” in the Middle East, recent events in Lebanon and the region pointed to a Sunni revival. According to a Lebanese political scientist I spoke to, Amer Mohsen, the Shiite revival, spoken of with fear by Sunni dictators in the Middle East and with pride by supporters, was passé. It had happened in 1979, when the Shah of Iran was overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini. “If by revival we designate a movement revolutionizing Shiite thought or the way Shiites think of themselves, this already happened in 1979 in much of the Middle East, and that movement reached its apex and is no longer in fashion,” he said. “Hizballah in Lebanon is gaining popularity not based on the notions of the Iranian Revolution but as a communitarian movement working in the context of identity politics, much like the other movements in Lebanon. And it is the same thing in Iraq, where Shiite movements have no clear ideological commitment. If by revival we mean increased power for Shiite groups within their countries, that would apply solely to Iraq, where the fall of Saddam supposedly catapulted Shiites to a position of power they had not had since the creation of the country. But this is also a local phenomenon, whose conclusion is still undecided. There is clearly (in the case of Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Lebanon) a phenomenon of Shiites identifying more openly with their sectarian affiliation and building political projects on that basis. But that is a case of the resurgence of identity politics throughout the Middle East in the last years, in which sense, there is a Shiite revival, a Sunni revival, a Druze revival, an Alawite revival, and a Kurdish revival all happening simultaneously.”
Amal Saad Ghorayeb, an expert on Shiite movements I spoke to during my time in Lebanon, saw a Sunni revival in the region running on two parallel tracks: “one being the Al Qaeda paradigm, whose sectarianism is religiously, doctrinally, and ideologically based, and which aspires to represent a new resistance, a revolutionary and populist model for the region’s Sunnis. While it is not necessarily a reaction to the Shiite Hizballah-Iranian model, it does seek to compete with it. It is insurgent (on a national level) and a resistance or jihadi trend (on the global level). It is a transnational antisystem phenomenon or antiestablishment, anti-world order movement.
“In parallel with this trend is the narrower state-sponsored Sunni sectarian model, which is social and political in nature, is closely interwoven with ruling establishments and personalities, may or may not overlap with the Salafi trend in some cases, but is ultimately a reaction to what is perceived as a growing Shiite threat, as distilled from Arab rulers’ discourse and the media. Unlike the Al Qaeda paradigm, though, it cannot compete ideologically with Shiite resistance, nor does it seek to. The Sunni revival is a product of insurgent/ jihadist/antiestablishment forces as well as proestablishment forces. In both cases, a revival is taking place insofar as Sunni Islam is seen as being the most effective tool for mobilizing support and achieving objectives.”
Mohsen believed that what mainstream Sunni leaders were doing was taking the racist discourse of anti-Shiite extremists (like Zarqawi) and inflating it into a mainstream discourse among Sunni masses. Saad Ghorayeb, on the other hand, insisted that Sunni Arab regimes had appropriated this discourse not so much from Salafis but from the United States, whose leaders and pundits spoke of those who are loyal to Iran and of a Shiite crescent.
Lebanon, in particular, had seen a spectacular revival of Sunni identity and a reshaping of traditional Sunni attitudes since 2005. Order in Lebanon had been maintained by Syrian political and military domination, now referred to as an occupation by opponents of Syria. The Syrians had first intervened in Lebanon in 1976 at the request of the Lebanese president to support right-wing militias against a coalition of leftists and Palestinians who threatened to overturn the Maronite Christian-dominated order. In 1987 they returned, this time in support of Sunnis who had grown tired of the militia wars being fought between the Shiite and the Druze minorities. Both times the Syrian intervention met with American, Israeli, and Saudi approval: first the Syrians marketed themselves as opponents of the coalition between the Palestinian resistance groups and leftists, and the second time they took advantage of American fear of Hizballah, going so far as to attack the Shiite militia.
The Syrian era ended in February 2005, when Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri was assassinated, and since then a major divide has emerged between Sunnis and Shiites in Lebanon, with the Christians who had once dominated the country increasingly losing their political significance and becoming marginalized. Lebanon gained independence from France in 1943. Christians and Muslims divided powers and apportioned positions based on sectarian identity, with Maronite Christians benefiting from a six-to-five ratio and Sunni Muslims dominating their Shiite coreligionists. In a sense Lebanon has never had a government but rather a power-sharing arrangement. At first the system of distributing political posts according to sect was merely based on custom. The 1991 Taif Accords, which ended the civil war, enshrined this system while granting a larger proportion to Muslims, allocating seats in Parliament on a one-to-one ratio. The president remained a Maronite Christian, with powers reduced in relation to the Sunni prime minister and the Shiite speaker of the Parliament. The Taif Accords were meant to establish a transitional period that would end with the abolition of political sectarianism, but this never happened. Instead the system became more entrenched, and the Lebanese became more connected to their sectarian institutions. Saudi money and the Syrian military presence in Lebanon helped guarantee that the accords held. While other militias were disbanded, Hizballah was allowed to maintain its armed struggle against the Israeli occupation.
Taif also helped bring to premiership Hariri, a Lebanese Sunni who made his billions working with the Saudi royal family and who used force and bribery to bring the rival factions together in the Saudi resort city after which the accords were named. He had a history of spreading his wealth, granting scholarships to thousands of students, and corrupting the Syrian overlords in Lebanon, who often seemed like they worked for him. Before the rise of Hariri many of Lebanon’s Sunni political and religious leaders had been murdered. Hariri was an ally of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon, and was installed as prime minister in 1992 by Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad.
Though he is widely credited with reconstructing much of Lebanon, it was the Lebanese who shouldered much of the burden, and under his reign the national debt increased from one and a half billion dollars to eighteen billion dollars. Beginning in 2000, Hariri also contributed to the increase in sectarianism, campaigning more openly on a platform of Sunni power.
Hariri was killed by a massive car bomb. His supporters as well as opponents of Syria established a loose coalition in the wake of his assassination that blamed the Syrians for the murder, demanded the formation of an international tribunal to investigate it, and called for the withdrawal of Syrian forces and influence in Lebanon. The coalition was named for the March 14 demonstration in which Hariri’s supporters called for the Syrian withdrawal. The March 14 coalition also became the main vehicle for the Bush administration’s agenda in Lebanon and was closely associated with Saudi Arabia through the Future Movement, led by Hariri’s son and heir, Saad, who even has a Saudi passport. Most of the March 14 coalition was composed of politicians who had been former supporters and allies of the Syrian regime. One of the most famous chants of March 14 demonstrators was “We want revenge!” That revenge was often taken on poor Syrians who worked as laborers or sold bread on the street. Many of them were beaten or stabbed, and the tents they lived in were burned down in the name of March 14.
Saad al-Hariri was not prepared and had not wanted to inherit his father’s mantle. Without his father’s achievements to build a popular base he relied on Sunni communal solidarity. Lebanon’s Sunnis allied with their historic enemies, the Christians, against the country they had historically identified with more than their own, Syria.
FADIL SHALLAQ was a close associate of Rafiq al-Hariri from 1978 until 2002, heading construction and charitable projects for him, advising him, and finally serving as editor in chief of Hariri’s Future newspaper. Following the 2006 war with Israel, Shallaq, a Sunni, publicly broke with his former allies, objecting to the sectarian and pro-American turn the movement was taking. He did not view the former Syrian presence in Lebanon as an occupation. “When the Syrians were here, I don’t know who controlled who, the Lebanese or the Syrians,” he said. “Hariri thought the Syrian presence helped Lebanon,” he told me. “I worked with him for twenty-five years.” Shallaq rejected the Future Movement’s claims that Hariri had been anti-Syrian and argued that the Israelis were more likely to have killed Hariri than the Syrians. Shallaq also rejected the reincarnation of Hariri as a Sunni symbol. “Hariri was a Sunni believer,” he admits. “He hated my atheism, but he was originally an Arab nationalist, he believed in building the state. He was a Lebanese nationalist, but he was never sectarian. Sunni sectarianism started after Hariri’s death. Sectarianism is not given, it’s manufactured. Sunnis were reshaped, reconstituted, reprogrammed after 2005, and became a despicable entity. You needed a corpse. Without the corpse you could not have reprogrammed their identity. Then you had a campaign of propaganda. It was well financed.” Shallaq blamed a coalition of neocons and Lebanese allies such as Walid Fares, a former Lebanese Christian militiaman associated with the American right. He says they funded the creation of the Future Movement and the sectarian and anti-Syrian direction it took.
“How could a whole community change like this?” he asked. “Before the Sunni community was traditional, Islamic, Arab nationalist, a little bit to the left, with very definite anti-Israeli attitudes about the Palestinian cause. They had strong feelings about the Syrians, but this wave of hate of Hizballah was created. It’s new.”
Shallaq was worried about new Sunni militias being created by the Future Movement. “There is a not-so-secret militia and security organization. People are being trained in Jordan; others are trained here by former military men.” Still others were trained by Christian militiamen belonging to the Lebanese forces, he said. “They are being prepared for civil war. We are in the middle of a civil war now, or civil conflict. You have to distinguish what happened in 1975 and what is happening now. We won’t have the paradigm of 1975 repeated. We have a civil war without generalized violence. Sectarian feelings are at a maximum point. Militias, arms, preparations, violence—all the elements of civil war. But will it erupt? And have a green line? I think we will have fighting house to house, building to building.”
One of the people Shallaq blamed for the sectarian tension was his former colleague Ridwan al-Sayyid, a professor of Islamic Studies at the Lebanese University and speechwriter and adviser to Hariri and his successor for prime minister, Fouad Siniora. On May 3 I visited Sayyid in his apartment. Interestingly, he agreed with Shallaq on the basic narrative. “There was a repositioning in the Sunni community since 2005,” he said. “They were shocked by the killing of Hariri.” The Syrians had persecuted Sunnis because Sunnis were traditionally pro-Palestinian, pro-Egyptian, and anti-Baathist. “Hariri helped Sunnis come out of their material, educational, and political crisis, and he made peace with the Syrians so they would not persecute us. He was a symbol of flourishing Sunnism.” After Hariri’s killing, the new Sunni feelings were at first only anti-Syrian, but after the July 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon it became anti-Shiite as well. He blamed Hizballah and specifically Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah for calling Siniora an agent of the Americans and the Zionists. “Because of Hizballah, Sunnis feel in danger,” he said. Sunni tension increased after the mostly Shiite demonstrators descended upon the government and tried to force Siniora to step down. “Sunnis felt it was against Sunnis and not a political act that Shiites are trying to take the position of Sunnis, the position of the prime minister, which belongs to the Sunni confession, and that Hizballah was trying to destroy the Lebanese state and the Sunni role in the state,” Sayyid told me. “Sunnis felt they need to protect the state because the Christians vanished. There is no Christian entity anymore that can mediate between both or make a third party.”
Sayyid believed that Hizballah did not act independently but as a tool for Iran to pressure the West. He blamed the July 2006 war on Syria and Iran. “They want to defeat America in Lebanon,” he said. “It is a struggle with the U.S., and they waged war against Israel and found that the Lebanese state and Sunnis were on the other side. Sunnis felt that on their side there is Egypt and Saudi [Arabia], and on the other side the Shiites, Syria and Iran.” Unlike other Sunni partisans in his alliance, Sayyid did not believe that Hizballah actually wanted a civil war or even that its leaders wanted to impose a Shiite religious state on Lebanon. “But they want to continue the confrontation with Israel without considering the views of the other three million Lebanese,” he said. “Hizballah is here with weapons, and accumulating weapons, and they made war with Israel. The country feels threatened, and they don’t recognize state institutions—they have their own telephone lines, their own army, their own social networks.” Sayyid said he would support Hizballah in the event of another war with Israel. “If Israel wins a war with Hizballah, then Lebanon is destroyed and the Arabs are weakened. How can I, as an Arab, Lebanese, and Muslim, be against Hizballah? I can only say that your program is not good for the country and cannot bring success.” Sayyid was not optimistic for the immediate future. “From both sides, Israel and Iran, Hizballah, there is a situation where one will decide to attack. Israel can’t wait until Hizballah gets stronger. We cannot win a war against Israel. The Arab countries won’t make war with us, so Hizballah will make war alone, and the country will be destroyed.”
There were two groups of Salafis in Lebanon, he told me: peaceful ones and jihadists. But he feared that after the appearance of extreme Salafi jihadists the peaceful ones might side with the jihadists. Seyid admitted to me that Sunnis were being trained in Jordan but explained that it was only to work as security guards. Because of Sunni solidarity and the fear that all Shiites have weapons, there were new armed Sunni groups, he said. “Sunnis feel insecure, but it’s not a good idea,” he told me. “It’s not a good situation, but what can you do? The security forces can’t protect all those institutions, as the bombings show, so they have to have their own guards.”
Facing the Sunni-dominated March 14 coalition was the March 8 coalition, led by Hizballah and aligned with Syria and Iran. Named for the date of the demonstration at which Hizballah thanked the Syrians for supporting the resistance to Israel, the coalition grew to include Michel Aoun, the Christian former Lebanese army general who had spearheaded the fight against Syrian domination. Though Aoun’s anti-Syrian credentials were clear, even calling Hizballah pro-Syrian was misleading. The Syrians had fought Hizballah in the past and supported its rivals. It was only in the mid-1990s that they began to support Hizballah, while not allowing it to participate in Lebanese politics, and it was only after the Syrians left that Hizballah entered Lebanese electoral politics. Privately, Hizballah officials disparaged the Syrian system and expressed resentment of the Syrian presence in Lebanon. But their priority was the resistance, and they were grateful to the Syrians for supporting it. Other members of March 8 included lesser Sunni figures such as the late former Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood leader Fathi Yakan, who was sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
In July 2006 Hizballah soldiers captured two Israeli soldiers in a daring raid typical of the tit-for-tat exchanges that were limited to the border region. Hizballah was surprised when the Israelis responded with a massive onslaught, pounding Lebanon and destroying much of its infrastructure, killing about one thousand civilians while laying waste to southern Lebanon and the Shiite suburbs of Beirut. Standing up to the Israeli military might, less than 1,500 Hizballah soldiers lost about 150 of their men. It was the first time an Arab army had achieved a kill ratio on par with the Israelis. The war ended with the Israelis failing to achieve their stated goal of destroying Hizballah or pushing it north of the Litani River. For Hizballah and its supporters, thwarting Israeli goals was a victory—a divine victory, they said. Hizballah shot to popularity with the people, if not the regimes, around the Arab world.
Although Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described the war and its devastation as the “birth pangs of the new Middle East,” it deepened the chasm between the March 14 and March 8 camps, as well as that between Sunnis and Shiites. Hizballah and its allies accused their opponents of collaborating with the Israelis and Americans. March 14 politicians blamed Hizballah for the destruction that had not only ruined the summer tourist season but the economy and infrastructure. If Hizballah accused them of serving Israel and America, they accused Hizballah of serving an Iranian agenda.
Concerned that the Lebanese government, dominated by the March 14 coalition, was attempting to achieve diplomatically and politically what Israel had failed to do militarily (emasculate Hizballah and remove its weapons), the Shiite members of the government resigned. In November the March 8 coalition asserted that the government was no longer legitimate, since without the Shiites it was in violation of the sectarian division of power. Hizballah sought a national unity government in which it would have a greater share of power. But it was not asking for a larger share of the political pie for the Shiite community beyond the 21 percent of parliamentary and cabinet seats the Shiites were allocated by the Constitution. Instead it wanted a greater share for its non-Shiite allies in the opposition, which collectively represented at least half the Lebanese population. Hizballah wanted a veto-wielding one-third of the cabinet seats so that it and its allies could maintain their influence over “strategic” issues, protecting the resistance, maintaining Lebanon’s “Arabism” and centrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and preventing Lebanon from falling under American and Israeli hegemony.
In December 2006 Hizballah and its allies in the March 8 coalition initiated demonstrations, and a “sit-in” turned into a tent city in downtown Beirut, an area that symbolized Hariri’s costly reconstruction of Beirut and also the seat of the Lebanese government. For Sunnis, this infringement on their territory was perceived as a Shiite “occupation” that had broken the Sunni sense of ownership over this Sunni oasis. In January the opposition called for strikes and civil disobedience. In clashes between Sunnis and Shiites in Beirut, seven were killed and at least 150 were injured. All sides were surprised by the explosion of violent hatred and pulled their forces back. Saudi Arabia and Iran quickly came to the negotiating table. Neither side wanted things to get out of control. Their power was based on the potential for war, not war itself, on playing brinksmanship without being drawn in. During the clashes the army refused to interfere and attack civilians. At the time the army was condemned by March 14 politicians for being insufficiently repressive.
All this was taking place in a region anxious over the civil war in Iraq, in which Sunnis felt threatened by Shiite militias that had profited from the American occupation. King Abdullah of Jordan had warned of a “Shiite crescent” stretching from Lebanon to the Gulf. President Mubarak of Egypt had accused Shiite Arabs of being fifth columnists for Iran. In an unprecedented move, America’s Sunni Arab clients in the region, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, had gone so far as to issue formal statements condemning Hizballah, which suggested they were siding with Israel. While the Sunni regimes used the Shiite threat to galvanize their population, nobody wanted an actual conflict between Arab states and Iran. The tense quiet in Lebanon over the next few months was punctuated by bombs and assassinations. But everybody was waiting for what was to come. Saudi Arabia decided that Lebanon was its project, the place in the region where it would confront Iran. But Lebanon was also an Iranian project, and both countries invested large amounts of money and political capital in support of their allies. Unlike Iraq, where their proxies also competed for power, Lebanon was less costly and the consequences less severe. Much as it had in Iraq, Gaza, and Somalia, the United States appeared determined to provoke a civil war in Lebanon. In the conflict over the cabinet seats and over selecting a new president, the Americans were pressuring their proxies not to compromise with Hizballah and its allies, increasing the tension and seemingly denying Shiites the right to participate in the government.
Lebanon’s twelve Palestinian camps form an archipelago that exists inside and outside the state. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees live suffocated and marginalized in them. Inside the camps the Palestinian identity is maintained, and the main employers are the Palestinian resistance factions. When the Syrian military was in Lebanon it backed former Lebanese President Emile Lahoud—a Maronite Christian, as was custom, who served from 1998 to 2007. Throughout his presidency Lahoud invoked the threat of tawtin, warning that Muslims would grant citizenship to the Palestinians, in order to frighten Christians into backing him and the Syrian presence. Most Palestinians are Sunni Muslims. The Christian minority among them had been granted citizenship long before, since their numbers would bolster the ranks of Lebanon’s Christian minority. Tawtin was an existential threat, Lahoud warned. It would boost the number of Muslims, and only the Syrians could prevent it.
With massacres of Palestinians committed by Lebanese Christians and Shiites in the past, and most recently with Lebanon’s Sunnis having turned against them, sometimes it seems that the one thing that united Lebanese had been their hostility to Palestinians. But in truth the one thing that united them was furthering their sectarian interests. The Palestinians have always been instrumentalized by Lebanese factions. They were used by Sunnis as their militia during the civil war. Shiites in the south joined Palestinian groups in the 1960s to force out their feudal landlords.
Syria sought to maintain the refugee camps as a political card, so Lahoud impeded any way of alleviating Palestinian suffering. In a very cynical policy, Lahoud continued to deny all social rights and representation were denied to them. In the camps, Palestinian clerics deduced that Christians hated Palestinians because they were Sunnis. In 2005, when Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora spoke of improving the conditions for the Palestinians, he was condemned for invoking tawtin. Had they been Christian, no such opposition would have occurred. As a result they had to react as Sunnis and defend themselves as Sunnis. For the clerics it was not the Syrians who were behind the move; it was the Christians. Some Palestinian clerics took advantage of this to mobilize support. If they were rejected in Lebanon as Sunnis, then they would fight as Sunnis.
Radical Sunni groups benefited from this weakened Palestinian identity. Chief among them were Salafis. Salafism is a muscular discourse, and in its most extreme form it sounds like racism when applied to Shiite Muslims. Most Salafis engaged in theology and preaching, and refrained from political or military action. A small minority believed that violence was necessary to achieve an Islamic state. In Lebanon, there were two kinds of Salafis: the traditionalists, who were fully integrated into the political system, and the jihadists, who relied on networks that were not nation-based but had become deterritorialized.
Ayn al-Hilweh, situated in the town of Sidon, a forty-five-minute drive south of Beirut, is the largest of the camps in Lebanon; it houses up to seventy-five thousand people in one square kilometer of squalor. A balance of power in the camp between the two main factions—the broadly secular Fatah, founded by the late Yasser Arafat and the historic core of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and Usbat al-Ansar (The League of Supporters), a jihadist group particular to the Palestinian refugee camps that was formed in the mid-1980s—prevents fighting from breaking out. Jund al-Sham (Soldiers of the Levant) is another jihadist organization that split off from Usbat al-Ansar. It was named after a group established by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Afghanistan in 1999 for militants hailing from the Levant.
In July 2006 Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s second-ranking leader, warned that Al Qaeda would not stand by while Israel shelled Lebanon. Unlike Al Qaeda in Iraq and its founder, Zarqawi, who had declared war against Shiites, Zawahiri sought to establish a common front with the Shiites of Hizballah, who were successfully standing up to the Israelis, but the Shiite resistance organization wanted nothing to do with the Sunni terrorist organization. He linked the struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan with those in Lebanon and Palestine, and blamed “the crusader alliance.” Al Qaeda was concerned that the battle against Israel, and the glory, was being monopolized by Hizballah, and it hoped to establish itself in this crucial front. Zawahiri’s words were taken seriously by some. Islamist websites and Internet forums carried demands to establish a Sunni jihadist front in Lebanon. Other jihadists fled Iraq, disgusted with the sectarian fighting or pressure from the growing power of the American-backed Sunni militias in the Anbar province. Hunted in Jordan and Syria, they found Lebanon—with its failed state, lawless refugee camps, and sectarian strife—was their only safe haven. Zawahiri’s statement in July 2007 praised an attack against United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon.
ONE DAY THAT MONTH, I visited Ayn al-Hilweh for a funeral in the late afternoon. Soon after I arrived calls to prayer echoed from all the mosques in the camp. First built in 1949 to house Palestinians expelled from northern Palestine, the camp had grown into a ramshackle ghetto made of concrete and cinder blocks. Low-hanging electric cables were strung from one building to another, crisscrossing like old cobwebs. Faded political posters were plastered over with newer ones, some for Hamas, others for its rival Fatah, and still others for Saddam, declaring him a martyr for the Islamic nation and a warrior leader. The camp had two main streets and a labyrinth of tight alleys connecting to smaller streets, one of them named after Falluja. At the Shuhada Mosque stood a dozen men in paramilitary uniforms, with walkie-talkies, M4 carbines, AK-47s, scopes, pistols, combat boots, tennis shoes, long beards, and sunglasses. The men had a professional and serious air to them, and they differed from the hundreds of other armed militiamen in the camp who lazily slung their older weapons and were unkempt.
The mosque’s second floor connected to the building across the street, forming a bridge. The armed men standing under the mosque were members of Usbat al-Ansar—the leading jihadist group in the camp—and they joined about two hundred other men on the second floor for a special prayer. They were burying one of their comrades, Daghagh Rifai, who had been shot at 9:30 that morning by men belonging to the rival faction Fatah. The armed men lined up with the others in orderly rows, placing their weapons on the floor between their legs. Some of them wore the salwar kameez typical in Pakistan and Afghanistan, a jihadist fashion.
Following the prayer, men gathered to gaze briefly at Daghagh’s corpse, which was wrapped in the green flag of Islam. A thick man with a large dark beard, he bore fresh wounds on his face. His former comrades carried him down the stairs on an olive-colored military gurney. A procession of hundreds followed them silently around the corner, off the main street, and up an incline. Residents of the camp watched from their doors or from windows and balconies above. As the silent marchers approached the camp’s gate, the armed men stayed behind and let relatives take Daghagh’s body past the Lebanese soldiers guarding the entrance and on to the cemetery.
One of those paying their respects that afternoon was a cheerful man called Abu Anas, who led me through a maze of dark alleys up to his unlit apartment. We were joined by his friends Abu Salih and Abu Ghassan, wiry, fit men with taut faces and long beards. The power came back on and with it the television, tuned to Al Manar, Hizballah’s television station. Abu Anas’s wife and children had left the camp to go to the nearby beach, and he was enjoying the quiet, he said, as he served us melons.
Daghagh had been shot outside his home in what they described as an “old story, a chain.” A few months earlier Fatah men had attacked members of Jund al-Sham, a rival jihadist group to Usbat al-Ansar. Daghagh was part of a group of Jund al-Sham men who retaliated, killing two Fatah men. “Friends of Daghagh will take revenge on Fatah,” they assured me. Two months earlier Fatah had also tried to kill the local Hamas leader but had only succeeded in wounding his youngest son. “Fatah has a bad reputation here,” one of the men said. “Fatah was good in the 1970s. They had principles. Now they are dealing drugs, they are opening Internet places with pornography, they just want money and power.” The men told me that Fatah men had recently stabbed a member of Usbat al-Ansar as he guarded a school, but he had fought back and they fled. Fatah had also thrown grenades at a mosque, they told me. Fatah and Usbat al-Ansar were the two dominant factions in the camp, they said, but Usbat was stronger. Like many Palestinians, they worried that Fatah intended to abandon the Palestinian refugees who lived outside Israel and the occupied territories, and they insisted that Fatah supported tawtin in Lebanon, which they feared would abnegate their right to return to their homes.
Abu Anas and his comrades did not belong to any of the factions. “We have some differences with Jund al-Sham,” one told me. “They are a little ignorant. They think with their hearts and not their minds. You need principles, not emotion. Usbat al-Ansar is more open, more educated. They have military expertise.”
Abu Salih had tattoos, meaning he had not always been devout. He said he had fought in Falluja in the fall of 2004, staying for about fifty days and taking part in four successful operations against the Americans. “The Americans were cowards,” he told me. There had been between 250 and 300 men in his group, he said. I asked why he had chosen Iraq and not tried to liberate Palestine. “It’s impossible to go fight in Palestine,” said Abu Anas. “The Arabs closed the borders—Jordan, Syria. Here if they open the way to fight Israel, many people would go fight.” Hizballah, he said, prevented them from fighting Israel.
I asked the men what they thought of Hizballah, since they supported groups in Iraq that targeted Shiites. “We differ in our beliefs, but we agree on fighting Israel,” one said. “Israel is the enemy. We can settle our differences later.” Many Lebanese Sunnis resented Hizballah for provoking the last war. “Sunnis who disapprove of Hizballah’s war do so because they are allied with America,” one of the men told me. They reminded me that a group of Palestinians from the camp who had fought with Zarqawi in Iraq had launched missiles at Israel and that in his final statement, Zarqawi had declared that “we fight in Iraq, but our eyes are on our home in Jerusalem.”
Abu Salih met Zarqawi once. I asked him what he was like. “He was a lion,” Abu Ghassan interjected. Zarqawi had been very nice to “the brothers” and had cooked for them, Abu Salih explained. It was night when they met in Falluja’s Askari neighborhood, and it was very dark. “The earth was burned,” he said. “Planes were bombing, but we had cold water, appetizers, grilled chicken.” Up to fifty men from the camp had gone to fight in Iraq.
“Usbat al-Ansar is a travel agency and YMCA for jihad,” explained Bernard Rougier, an expert on Lebanon’s Salafis and author of the book Everyday Jihad, “but they are a jihadi group, they must act, so the way of solving the contradiction of being in Lebanon but not fighting Israel or anybody else is by sending jihadists to Iraq and secretly helping other jihadist groups.”
I returned a few times to visit Abu Ghassan. Foreigners entering the camp must get permission from Sidon’s local military intelligence commander. As I sat in his office I overheard his phone calls. One sheikh called him about releasing a Jund al-Sham suspect from prison. The commander opened the man’s file and read the accusations. The man was an extremist: he had helped dispatch fighters to Iraq, was suspected of involvement in explosions, and was inciting against Shiites. With the commander’s permission slip I was able to get past the soldiers guarding the gate and drive past the Fatah checkpoint to meet Abu Ghassan. He wore camouflage pants and a knit cap. He led me through more alleys, down rough-hewn stairs, and past a metal door into his apartment. His infant daughter was sleeping in a baby seat.
Abu Ghassan was thirty-one years old and quick to smile, but, like Abu Salih, he always reverted to a hard suspicious gaze when I wasn’t looking him in the eye. He had six children, the oldest of which was thirteen. He had a nine-millimeter Glock pistol on his belt. Its price in the camp was two thousand dollars, and it had made its way to Lebanon when some “brothers” returned from Iraq with large quantities of weapons. It was the same pistol the Americans had given to the Iraqi police; I had seen it used by Shiite militias and sold on the black market in Baghdad. An August 2007 report from the American Government Accountability Office stated that 190,000 weapons the Americans had given to Iraqis were unaccounted for. Here was one of them. On a desk was a new Toshiba laptop connected to the Internet. Abu Ghassan told me he worked in a cafe in the camp. “You must have sold a lot of coffee to pay for a two-thousand-dollar pistol and the laptop,” I said. He grinned and agreed with me.
He was first trained as a teenager outside the camp by Fatah, before the civil war ended in 1991. In 1995 he came under the sway of Islamic movements, influenced by religious leaders and the recently formed Usbat al-Ansar, listening to mosque sermons and attending lessons held after prayer. Some of the mosques, such as the Shuhada Mosque, also had their own clubs for physical training. The Oslo accords had been signed, and Palestinian refugees felt abandoned—they worried that the PLO was surrendering. Wars were being fought in Bosnia and Chechnya. The first generation of mujahideen—those who had fought in Afghanistan—sought new battlegrounds, and a new generation was galvanized. “I saw Muslims around the world oppressed by secularists,” he told me. Now the Lebanese army wanted him on charges of terrorism, “in broad terms for killing and explosions,” he said, claiming the charges were false.
He had attempted to sneak into Iraq through Syria to fight six times, but each time the Syrians were patrolling the border. In May the Syrians had killed several jihadists attempting to cross. Crossing the border from Syria had become much more difficult since the second battle of Falluja, he said. “I wanted to go to Iraq to liberate Muslim lands, to fight with the Sunnis. The road was open to Iraq. Palestine was closed.” He resented Hizballah for controlling the border with Israel and preventing other groups from conducting attacks. “After Hizballah liberated the south, they became a buffer,” he said. “They say they want to liberate Palestine, but on the ground they do nothing, they just wait for orders from Syria or Iran.” Unlike many Lebanese Sunnis, he did not feel threatened by Hizballah. “As Palestinians we feel threatened by America and Israel,” he said.
“Brothers” in the camp had established a network leading to Iraq. “Young Muslims, enthusiastic, with their own organization, they communicated through the Internet. One guy went and opened the way for others.” A guide would lead the volunteers across the border. Some guides did it for money and others because they believed in the cause.
Abu Ghassan first decided to go to Iraq when Zarqawi renamed his organization Al Qaeda, in December 2004. “Before Abu Musab [Zarqawi] appeared, nobody knew how to get people to Iraq,” he said. “I want to go fight with Al Qaeda, with the Islamic State of Iraq. The priority for me is to fight America and its allies, and if the Iraqi government opposes me I will fight them too. The Iraqi government is an apostate government.” Abu Ghassan had requested to go as a suicide bomber. “Practically speaking,” he said, “suicide operations are the best method to kill the enemy. In principle you try as hard as you can to avoid civilians, but sometimes you cannot.” He did not believe that Sunnis were targeting civilians, and instead blamed Iran, the Mahdi Army, and Israel. “Zarqawi asked Muqtada to fight the occupier, and Muqtada refused,” he said. “We target the Shiites in the government and the militias. The Mahdi Army kills mujahideen and lets the Americans arrest them. Christians have been neutral, not with the occupier, so they have been spared. Shiites are not apostates; their leaders are. Clerics have agreed that the Shiite clerics are infidels, the people are deviants. Hizballah is a Shiite apostate party. The Shiites hate Sunnis.”
Another time when I visited Abu Ghassan in his home, Abu Anas was there. They were looking at Google Earth on the laptop while listening to a CD of Salafi chanting called Commanders of the Jihad. They showed me another CD, a tribute to Salih Ablawi, known as Abu Jaafar, who had died with Zarqawi in Iraq. He was from Ayn al-Hilweh too, and Abu Ghassan had a collection of his speeches and pictures from Iraq on his laptop. A large picture of Abu Jaafar was on a banner above one of the main streets in the camp.
Abu Anas was originally from the Bedawi camp in northern Lebanon and had grown up in a conservative family. He had fled from the north to Ayn al-Hilweh in 2000 because of his involvement in clashes with the Lebanese army. On December 31, 1999, Islamist radicals battled the Lebanese army in northeastern Lebanon’s Sir al-Dinniyeh, led by a Lebanese veteran of the Afghan and Bosnian wars called Basim al-Kanj. Kanj had returned to Lebanon and established his own network, recruiting in the slums of Tripoli and Ayn al-Hilweh and establishing ties with Usbat al-Ansar. With Usbat’s help he established training camps in Dinniyeh. Kanj ordered his men to take over a radio station near the camps that had belonged to Lebanon’s leading Salafi cleric, Sheikh Dai al-Islam al-Shahal. (His father had first brought Salafism to Lebanon in 1940, but it was Dai al-Islam and his brother who really brought Salafism to northern Lebanon.)
Only months before, churches in Tripoli had been attacked, and some of the suspects had fled to Dinniyeh. Shahal and other Sunni clerics as well as local officials tried to mediate between the army and the militants. When an army patrol passed by, negotiations were suspended. Fighting broke out, and fifteen of the Islamists died along with eleven soldiers and five civilians, although Kanj had not sought such a confrontation. The Dinniyeh group was small, but dozens of Salafis were arrested in Tripoli and radicalized in prison.
The Dinniyeh incident, along with an attack on the Russian embassy and similar incidents, were the first signs that Salafi jihadism was establishing a presence in Lebanon. One lesson of the incident was that the poverty and neglect in northern Lebanon could affect the rest of the country, but this was forgotten until February 5, 2006, when rioters came down from the north in buses provided by the Sunni Endowment and rampaged through Christian neighborhoods in Beirut, seeking vengeance for the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Christians were shocked, as security forces were nowhere to be found despite having advance notice of the demonstration. Those rioters who were arrested were quickly released. Ahmad Fatfat, who was interior minister in 2005, had struggled to release the Dinniyeh prisoners in order to gain the support of northern Sunnis and Salafis. As a concession to Christians the government then released Samir Geagea, the notorious war criminal who had killed Palestinians as well as Christian rivals during the 1980s. Much fanfare met the release of the Dinniyeh prisoners; the episode was televised and used to demonstrate that the government was pro-Sunni. Some of them had belonged to Harakat al-Tawhid al-Islami (The Islamic Unity Movement), the main Islamist militia that fought the Syrian presence in northern Lebanon in the 1980s. In the shifting alliances of Lebanese militias, Tawhid is now considered pro-Syrian.
Abu Anas blamed the Lebanese army for the clashes. “They wanted Hizballah to control the conflict with Israel,” he said. “The Lebanese army ambushed them, and during the negotiations they surrounded them and attacked them.” Abu Anas had previously belonged to Tawhid. More than fifty Palestinians had belonged to Tawhid, he told me. Many had gone on to other Islamist movements.
In May 2007 members of a new and somewhat mysterious jihadist group, Fatah al-Islam, robbed a bank in Tripoli, provoking clashes with the army. Salafi militants also robbed banks in Sidon and other parts of the country. “Al Qaeda uses credit cards to fund themselves, and they rob banks and companies that are infidel to fund themselves,” Abu Ghassan explained. “They don’t rob in a criminal way. They don’t want to hurt anybody. There is a difference between killing people and taking money that belongs to Muslim people.” Although most of the soldiers battling Fatah al-Islam in the north were Sunnis, Abu Ghassan did not blame Sunnis. “The Lebanese army answers to the government, and even though the head of government is a Sunni, the orders come from America. They are not fighting as Sunnis but as soldiers, getting orders, and they think Fatah al-Islam are terrorists.” I asked him what he thought. “I think Fatah al-Islam are good people,” he said.
The origins of Fatah al-Islam are nebulous, but based on meetings with Palestinian faction leaders and security officials, as well as documents obtained from their interrogation of the group’s members, I pieced together its history. In the summer of 2006 new faces appeared in Shatila and Burj al-Barajneh, the Palestinian camps of Beirut, and in Bedawi and Nahr al-Barid, the camps near the northern city of Tripoli. The men were clearly religious, and they were assumed to be Salafis. They had long beards, and some even wore the Afghan salwar kameez. Some were clearly foreign. When camp security inquired about the newcomers, they were told, curiously, that the men belonged to Fatah al-Intifada’s “Western Section,” a traditionally leftist, broadly secular Syrian-allied Palestinian group that split from the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1983, which was preparing fighters to go to Palestine. Others claimed they were “from the inside,” meaning from Palestine itself. During Israel’s July 2006 war on Lebanon, more Salafi fighters arrived in these camps, in part because a Fatah al-Intifada camp near the Syrian border in eastern Lebanon was evacuated during the war. Suspicions were aroused because the left-leaning Fatah al-Intifada was known to pay low salaries but some of the newcomers had laptops and went around on motorcycles. The newcomers were led by Shaker al-Absi, a veteran Fatah al-Intifada officer who had been trained as a pilot in Libya and served as one in North Yemen, in addition to fighting in Nicaragua. Absi was in his fifties. A Palestinian born in Jordan, he had spent most of his life in Syrian and Lebanese camps. He was likely disillusioned with the aging and moribund Arab left—which groups like Fatah al-Intifada epitomized—and he was said to have been very religious. In 2002 he was arrested with fifteen others for trying to infiltrate the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. He spent two and a half years in jail, and was said to have gone to Iraq after his release, eventually making his way to the Helweh camp in the Beqaa Valley, by the Syrian border. There he and his followers trained volunteers, including young men from the slums of Tripoli, to fight in Iraq. Gulf Arabs who flew to Beirut to go to Iraq also gathered there. They were segregated from the rest of the camp and better financed, eating better food like lamb.
When Zarqawi died, some of his men came to Lebanon. Some Salafis were diverted to the Burj al-Barajneh camp to serve as a bulwark against the Shiite suburbs of Beirut, known as Dahiyeh. Many Syrians and Palestinian Syrians who had fought in Iraq and become radicalized there made their way to Lebanon. More than two hundred such men had left Damascus’s Yarmuk refugee camp to fight in Iraq with Zarqawi, even though that camp was dominated by the far more moderate Hamas movement. Abu Midyan was one of the foreign fighters who left Iraq because of concerns about the state of the jihad there. He led other comrades in arms from Iraq to Yarmuk, but the Syrians pressured them to leave, so they moved to Lebanon’s camps, where they began to recruit from the poor.
Abu Yasser, the Fatah al-Intifada leader for northern Lebanon, was surprised because the newcomers were bearded, prayed five times a day, and abstained from smoking. He asked his superior, the Syrian-based Abu Khalid al-Amli, deputy commander of Fatah al-Intifada, who the newcomers were. “We have new fighters,” he said. “We must learn from Hizballah’s military and discipline. They are destined for Gaza.” Abu Khalid was also sending jihadists to Ayn al-Hilweh. Abu Yasser was surprised and unsettled by the presence of foreigners among them. “Their commanders were Palestinians, and they were independent of us,” he said. When other factions asked Fatah al-Intifada who the new men were, they were told cryptically that it was an “internal matter.” Shaker al-Absi was the third-ranking official in Fatah al-Intifada, and his authority exceeded that of Abu Yasser’s. “I accepted Shaker but didn’t control him,” said Abu Yasser. Abu Musa, the commander of Fatah al-Intifada in Syria, began to complain that he did not know what was happening in his own organization.
The popular committee for security in Bedawi was tasked with investigating all outsiders who rented apartments in that camp, especially single men. Committee members monitored how much food was being brought into the apartments daily to estimate how many people might be inside. In November a new group of outsiders came to Bedawi and Nahr al-Barid, whom camp residents felt were not part of any Palestinian faction. The committee grew suspicious of newcomers who brought in many bags but had no families. Residents spoke of strange men carrying bags who entered twelve apartments in the camp. One night five strangers came into the camp, and armed members of the resistance asked them what was in their bags, which caused the men to run away. Some of the men were foreigners, including Saudis, Yemenis, Algerians, Iraqis, Lebanese, and an Omani. Fourteen of them lived together in one apartment. When the security committee members first tried to gain access, the Omani, named Ahmad, shut the door in their faces and refused to open it.
On November 23, 2006, an armed patrol of different faction members from the camp security committee was sent to the apartment. They found two Kalashnikovs along with ammunition and grenades and asked the fourteen men to come with them. When the men walked by a Fatah al-Intifada office where Salafi comrades were staying, they erupted in shouts of “God is great! Come to jihad!” and ran inside, throwing a grenade at the security men. An exchange of fire followed, and one of the security men was killed. The security committee raided the other apartments, but the suspects were communicating by radio and some escaped. One Saudi was shot in the leg while trying to escape. When an armed Syrian comrade on a motorcycle attempted to rescue him, he too was shot, and both were taken to a camp hospital. The Syrian had documents signed by Shaker al-Absi. During his interrogation by the Palestinian security officials, the two admitted that they were members of Al Qaeda in Iraq and had come to Lebanon during the July war for training, recruitment, and jihad. Up to eighty men like them entered Lebanon via Fatah al-Intifada, using the organization as a conduit. They claimed to have come to assassinate seventeen Lebanese officials, including members of Parliament, sheikhs, and members of the security forces.
The two men were handed to the Lebanese army. Camp officials found cameras, four computers, and scanners used to make fake identification documents. They also found CDs with footage of training and members swearing oaths of loyalty to Osama bin Laden. “Wherever Muslims are oppressed, we will help them,” said one of the men in a film. Other material included maps of the region. Books with instructions on bomb-making were covered by copies of the Koran. They also found a collection of Al Qaeda statements. Abu Yasser told me that he had received a call warning him to leave the computers alone because they were very important.
One young Syrian had left behind a final statement, handwritten with messages to his family; another young jihadist stressed that “this time, I will not go back. I repeat, I will not go back.” The young man, who had previously engaged in armed struggle, said, “With all that I have seen the last time, I’m in a serious danger of apostasy—God forbid—if I don’t go back there. If the scents of musk and the light in the martyrs’ faces and all the other graces we saw and were told of mean anything, they must mean only one thing, that this route is the path of heaven. Moreover, there is no heaven except by this path.”
Some of the apartments had been rented by Kanan Naji, a former member of Tawhid who was a liaison between the Future Movement and Fatah al-Islam. Naji was also part of the Independent Islamic Gathering, a group that included prominent clerics in Tripoli such as Dai al-Islam al-Shahal and Bilal Barudi. The Gathering tried to influence Fatah al-Islam, and several of its members were in touch with the group.
In the 1980s Naji’s Jund Allah militia of about one hundred had been based in Tripoli’s Abu Samra neighborhood. They were known for wearing all-black military fatigues and received some of their arms from Fatah. Once the Syrians took over Tripoli in 1986, Naji fled to areas controlled by a Christian militia. He was underground in the 1990s, but following the Syrian withdrawal in 2005 he became very active, establishing a close relationship with Hariri’s Future Movement and the Lebanese Internal Security Forces, and providing arms to Fatah al-Islam. Four Palestinians affiliated with Naji’s militia rented some of the apartments in Tripoli. They brought in sniper rifles, M-16s, and other weapons more advanced than what was usually found in the camp. Naji was one of the officials who hoped to use jihadist Salafis to serve the purposes of the anti-Shiite Future Movement.
The camp’s leading factions prepared to rid themselves of the Salafis, but the Salafis—who until then were identified as the Salafist wing of Fatah al-Intifada—absconded to the nearby Nahr al-Barid camp. On November 26, 2006, they declared themselves under the new moniker Fatah al-Islam, calling for their supporters from other camps to join them and calling for the death of Abu Yasser, the leader of Fatah al-Intifada in northern Lebanon, for his role in turning over two of their men to the Lebanese army. Abu Yasser sent a message to his boss, Abu Khalid al-Amli, in Damascus, accusing him of putting camp security in danger by sponsoring the Salafis initially. Abu Yasser was incensed to learn that about thirty Salafis posing as Fatah al-Intifada also came up to Nahr al-Barid from Beirut’s refugee camps. Abu Fadi, the commander of Fatah al-Intifada for all of Lebanon, had even used Salafis as bodyguards. He was expelled from the group and fled to the United Arab Emirates.
Abu Yasser claims that he had been deceived by Abu Khalid. “He tricked the organization,” he says. “Abu Khalid was a dictator, and he is a secular man in every meaning of the word. He was preparing groups to fight the Americans in Lebanon, and maybe he was making a connection with Al Qaeda. The Syrians didn’t know the details of Abu Khalid’s plan, but they knew in general about the ideology of the fighters and that they were coming to Lebanon to fight America, and the Syrians did not know of the connection between Abu Khalid and Al Qaeda. Abu Khalid was expelled from the organization.” Abu Khalid was jailed by the Syrians, but because he was seventy-five years old and had a heart condition, he was placed under house arrest.
The camp’s security committee began to investigate Fatah al-Islam and its associates. One Syrian suspect, born in 1980, had entered Lebanon in March 2007. He had come up to Bedawi from Ayn al-Hilweh, where he joined Fatah al-Islam. Despite his ties to the jihadists, he was released because some of the camp officials worried about upsetting the Islamists in the camp. Another suspect confessed that he too belonged to Fatah al-Islam. When the raid took place, he had been in touch with a man from Jund Allah via his walkie-talkie. He was spirited away to Tripoli, where he stayed in an apartment belonging to Kanan Naji. When he returned to Bedawi he was arrested by the security committee and was found to be carrying an American-made pistol. Another prisoner, born in 1986 in Syria, had been in touch with Fatah al-Islam via the Internet. He was given an address near a mosque in Bedawi and told to go there. He took money from his father, telling him it was to cover the cost of his university tuition, but instead he went to Lebanon, hoping Fatah al-Islam would help him get to Iraq “to resist the Americans, because the Americans are the enemies of Islam.” The young man’s cover in the camp was that he was studying Islam.
In November 2006 things got worse in Taamir, an area between Sidon and Ayn al-Hilweh. Jihadist Salafis took control of the neighborhood and imposed Islamic law. At the entrance to Taamir a banner signed by Zarqawi called for the defeat of America in Iraq. Many Lebanese families left, fearing for their lives. That month a statement signed by the “Al Qaeda Organization in Lebanon,” allegedly based in Nahr al-Barid, threatened the Lebanese government, announcing that Al Qaeda had arrived in Lebanon and would work to destroy the government, which was commanded by the Americans. They would fight the enemies of God until victory or martyrdom, the statement said.
In Nahr al-Barid, however, Fatah al-Islam found a welcoming environment. Pictures of Saddam Hussein were on the camp’s walls and in its homes and shops. Graffiti in support of the jihad in Iraq was also evident. When the Syrians pulled their troops out of Lebanon and lost direct control of the camps, the vacuum they left was filled by mosques, which gained in influence as the leftist resistance groups weakened and money from the Gulf came in. Islamists were seen driving expensive cars. Nahr al-Barid was more conservative and religious than other camps, with the most clerics (about fifteen) and the most mosques (about ten). Even before the July war inhabitants began to notice religious men moving into the camp who spoke in foreign dialects and whose wives were veiled. Up to seventy of them arrived during the war, a phenomenon similar to what occurred in other camps. Following the flight of Fatah al-Islam to Nahr al-Barid, these various groups joined their leader, Shaker al-Absi, openly taking their weapons with them. Up to fifty-six people came to Nahr al-Barid from the Burj al-Barajneh camp in Beirut.
Fatah al-Islam had been planning to establish itself anyway, but in more than one camp at once, at a time of its choosing. In Nahr al-Barid group members took over the offices and weapons depots that had belonged to Fatah al-Intifada. They replaced Palestinian flags with Islamic flags. “When they took down Palestinian flags we knew they had no Palestinian agenda,” said Abu Yasser. New weapons arrived—American M-16s, M4s, and even missiles, unlike the Kalashnikovs that the Palestinian factions were accustomed to. In a meeting with all the camp factions Fatah al-Intifada insisted that whereas before they had been suspicious of the newcomers, now they knew the men were dangerous. Fatah agreed that they should be expelled. Other groups, nervous about potential strife, refused to have any bloodshed in the camp. Fatah al-Intifada warned that Nahr al-Barid had been hijacked by Fatah al-Islam and all would bear responsibility for what would happen. Estimates for the initial size of Fatah al-Islam varied from forty-five to seventy. Some of the men had brought their families; others married local women. Only a minority of them were Palestinians. Most were Lebanese, Saudis, Yemenis, Syrians, and even Iraqis. Many came openly, in vans. Wanted Palestinian and Lebanese men from Ayn al-Hilweh and Taamir made their way to Nahr al-Barid as well, despite the many checkpoints along the way, leading camp officials to suspect senior Lebanese official involvement in the move, since the Interior Ministry was in the hands of pro-Hariri Sunnis. Although Usbat al-Ansar never publicly endorsed Fatah al-Islam, it did dispatch fighters to join the group in the north.
Jihadists with a more violent and nihilistic agenda took over Fatah al-Islam’s leadership council and influenced its leaders, shifting their focus away from Palestine and toward global jihad. Abu Laith, the son-in-law of Shaker al-Absi and one of the founders of Fatah al-Islam, grew frustrated with the group’s change; he left for Iraq but was killed by Syrian security forces at the border. Other members also disagreed with the more extreme elements. Abu Midyan, who was said to have orchestrated the February 2007 bus bombings north of Beirut, refused to fight the Lebanese army because his enemy was Israel. In Nahr al-Barid, Shaker al-Absi linked up with a powerful arms dealer called Nasser Ismail in order to improve his power base in the camp. Ismail helped recruit members, including the more radical Abu Hureira, a Lebanese member of Jund al-Sham. Abu Hureira helped push Fatah al-Islam toward a more extremist position, and he brought many other Lebanese Salafi jihadists with him. These radicals began to alienate the residents of Nahr al-Barid. Abu Midyan and Abu Hureira disagreed about the new direction the group was taking. While Absi did not share the views of these radicals, he needed the military support they brought, and so he could not afford a rift with them. A Saudi cleric linked to Al Qaeda called Abu al-Hareth took over the leadership council. He helped bring more foreign fighters and create cells outside the camp. Some of the newcomers spoke of creating an Islamic state in northern Lebanon. Others didn’t even know they were in Lebanon; they thought they were in Iraq.
In December in Nahr al-Barid a committee from Palestinian factions told Absi that his new faction was not acceptable and that he had to return the Fatah al-Intifada offices, disband his organization, and stop making announcements to the media. Absi did not respond to their demands. At the same time, Abu Khalid, the deputy commander of Fatah al-Intifada based in Syria, was arrested by the Syrians. His boss Abu Musa gave a press conference stating that he was very upset at Abu Khalid, but the notion that the Syrians were completely ignorant of the actions of a faction they controlled strains credulity. For Abu Khalid to take such steps independently of the Syrians would have been foolhardy.
Bernard Rougier speculated that the Hariri strategy was to “control and enlarge the Islamist coalition, which could be used to fight Hizballah on the communal level. The Syrians wanted to impede the Hariri strategy by creating division in the Hariri ranks, so they inserted a Salafi jihadist group that wants to fight Israel because it would take Sunni support from Hariri. Then it took on its own life and the Syrians don’t have to do a thing. And it had a magnetic effect on Islamists in the country. It began to have influence in Tripoli.” Rougier distinguishes the communal agenda, which “views the real enemy as Shiites,” from the jihadist agenda, which “views the real enemy as the West, and Shiites are third or lower on the list of priorities.” But the Syrian regime, dominated by the Alawite sect—which is related to Shiism and which rules a Sunni majority and has crushed Islamist movements in the past—would not encourage an ideology that despises its own Baathist government. While the Syrians had allowed Arab volunteers to pour into Iraq to fight the Americans for the first two or three years of the occupation, the main opposition to the Syrian Baathist regime is a Sunni Islamist one. So it would not likely support the growth of Salafi jihadists so close to its own border. Moreover, Syria would not introduce anti-Shiite and anti-Hizballah elements into Lebanon. A Salafi attack on Israel would be Hizballah’s worst nightmare because it would drag the powerful guerilla army into a war with Israel at a time and place not of its own choosing.
“When Fatah al-Islam took down the Palestinian flag and vandalized posters of Hassan Nasrallah, they started getting a lot of money,” said Abu Yasser. “Their main goal was to be the Sunni military force in Lebanon. The north has a rich history of Salafis, and they wanted to declare their emirate. Those who empowered them were not Palestinians. We let them enter as a baby chicken and they became an elephant. How did they get these advanced weapons? When they were part of Fatah al-Intifada, they were only seventy. They became five hundred. With us they were very poor. We gave them spare clothes. How did they get so much money? And how did they buy all the grilled chicken in Nahr al-Barid?” According to Abu Jaber of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), once a leading resistance movement within the PLO but now completely marginalized, the financial situation of the Fatah al-Islam members suddenly improved as more foreign faces appeared. “They were probably there, but people didn’t see them,” he said. “How did they live for six or seven months?” he asked. “They used to buy three hundred loaves of bread a day. They bought apartments, rented land, buying very advanced weapons, spending a lot of money.” People in the camp grew worried, and some refused to rent them homes. Some said that they were Muslims who were not bothering anybody, while others said that they did not belong in Palestinian society. As Fatah al-Islam began to spread throughout the camp, it seemed to many that the group was preparing for something. It was also clear that its members could get in and out of the camp without harassment by Lebanese security officials.
“The Fatah al-Islam picture got more and more clear,” said Abu Jaber. “In their first announcement their goal was to liberate Palestine and correct the errors of Fatah al-Intifada. And they called men in the camp to join them in liberating Palestine in an Islamist way. After a while their speech changed. They said they came to fight Israel in the name of Sunnis. They said, ‘We won’t fight those who fought Israel [meaning Hizballah], but we have differences with them.’ They did not have their own mosque. They were moving around in all the mosques.” The leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq sent Saudis and other fighters from Iraq to Nahr al-Barid but warned them not to provoke Lebanese Shiites.
Ensconced in Nahr al-Barid, the Fatah al-Islam militants grew in number. Their headquarters had a yard for military training. Above it flew a black flag with an Islamic slogan. Some walked around camp with scarves concealing their faces. Shaker al-Absi insisted that they were independent of Al Qaeda even though they had a similar ideology, and that they had no ties to Lebanese or Syrian officials. He explained that “Muslims” were funding his organization. The secular approach to the struggle had failed to achieve its goals, he argued, and they now rallied under the flag of Islam. He explained that his organization’s main goals were to liberate Jerusalem and oppose the U.S. project in the Middle East. He refused to be involved in internal Lebanese affairs. Fatah al-Islam’s main criticism of Hizballah was not that it was a Shiite party but that it denied other groups the same right to resist Israel. Importantly, Absi denied being a takfiri. (Takfiris typically single out Shiites, as did Zarqawi in Iraq, and sometimes call for their deaths.)
Members of Fatah al-Islam claimed to have “brothers” in all the camps in Lebanon, as well as in Syria, Jordan, and Palestine. But according to an informant with Lebanese army intelligence, the group clashed with mainstream factions in the camp three times and achieved dominance. Fatah al-Islam’s ranks were bolstered by Lebanese Sunnis reacting to the increasingly aggressive steps being taken by Hizballah supporters, whose actions were viewed by many Sunnis as an attack on Sunni power, an occupation of Beirut, and an attempt to seize control of Lebanon. Clerics in Tripoli reported being asked by followers if they were permitted to join Fatah al-Islam. Dai al-Islam al-Shahal, the founder of Lebanese Salafism, explained that Lebanese Sunnis felt targeted, alienated, and punished, and as a result some were joining Fatah al-Islam and others were sympathizing with it. Shahal had maintained direct dialogue with Fatah al-Islam from its establishment in an attempt to influence its ideology and actions.
“Fatah al-Islam was very different after they declared themselves,” said Abu Yasser. “At first their goal was to fight the Americans in Lebanon. But their first enemy was [Fatah al-] Intifada, and they fought us and we had two wounded and they had one killed and three wounded, and then Shaker al-Absi made some new channels with groups in Lebanon.” In March 2007, following accusations by the Lebanese interior minister that the Syrians were backing Fatah al-Islam, the Syrian interior minister responded that Fatah al-Islam was an Al Qaeda organization that was also targeting Syria and had been discovered in August 2002 when several of its members were arrested, including Shaker al-Absi. He added that Absi had coordinated with Zarqawi in Iraq to conduct terrorist attacks. But the Future Movement insisted that Fatah al-Islam was a Syrian tool, and the Movement’s leader, Saad al-Hariri, described the organization as “the gang of Asef Shawkat,” referring to the head of Syrian military intelligence and the brother-in-law of the Syrian president. The television station and newspaper controlled by the Movement also initiated a campaign to convince Lebanese of the links between Fatah al-Islam and the Syrians. Others in the opposition claimed it was a creation and tool of the Future Movement. Both were wrong.
Some members of Fatah al-Islam had fled from the Rashidiyeh camp in southern Lebanon after the UNIFIL forces boosted their activities following the July war. Others came from Taamir and Ayn al-Hilweh. A Syrian volunteer seeking to engage in jihad made his way to Bedawi by accident and asked for Fatah al-Islam at a Fatah al-Intifada checkpoint. He was in his twenties and was carrying a laptop and three thousand dollars. The security committee interrogated him for twenty-four hours. The man had been invited via the Internet by Fatah al-Islam to come fight jihad and “liberate Lebanon.” It was not clear who he was supposed to liberate it from. After Lebanon there would be many steps, the invitation said.
In February up to twenty armed men from Jund al-Sham took over a kindergarten that belonged to the Hariri Foundation and was overseen by Bahiya al-Hariri, sister of the slain prime minister. The area was controlled by Usbat al-Ansar, and the move was seen as an attempt to pressure local officials, improve the group’s financial situation, and obtain housing. Jund al-Sham was already known as Jund al-Sitt (The Army of the Lady), because Bahiya al-Hariri was a financial backer of the armed group. She paid up to one hundred of the men to leave, and they went north to Nahr al-Barid. Some of them were veterans of Iraq. It was a move typical of the “Saudi” mentality of the Hariri family, an attempt to pay off potential troublemakers and buy loyalty. Mustafa Allush, a Parliament member from the Future Movement, confirmed that the transport of the men had been facilitated by Hariri’s people for “humanitarian reasons.” Once Fatah al-Islam was set up in Nahr al-Barid, officials close to the Future Movement and the Independent Islamic Gathering courted the group, hoping it would side with them. To their chagrin, Shaker al-Absi and others insisted on maintaining their independence.
In March Lebanese Interior Security Forces arrested suspects behind the February 13 bus bombings, which killed three and injured twenty-one in the village of Ain Alaq, north of Beirut. The twelve men, including four Syrians and four Saudis who were accused by the Lebanese interior minister of belonging to Fatah al-Islam, confessed to setting the bombs. The four Saudis claimed to have been deceived by Fatah al-Islam. They said they had been planning to go to Iraq and instead found that they were expected to remain in Lebanon. The Saudi ambassador requested that the Saudis be extradited back to their country. Fatah al-Islam representatives denied involvement in the attacks and denied that the detained men belonged to their group. As the heat on the group increased, spokesman Abu Salim Taha warned that if Fatah al-Islam had to respond militarily, it would. Abu Jaber of the PFLP worried that if military steps were taken, the results would be catastrophic. The bus bombers had not actually belonged to Fatah al-Islam, but they had spent one night in Nahr al-Barid before the attack and were said to have called the Fatah al-Islam leadership afterward.
Nabil Seyid, a PFLP official who coordinated the security committee in Bedawi and was secretary general of the factions in the northern camps, explained that the factions did not have control of the camps and had no way of dealing with Fatah al-Islam. “We are under Lebanese authorities, and the Palestinian factions aren’t united, and when they want to make a decision they have to consult.” Abu Jaber, also of the PFLP, admitted that there had initially been poor communication and many disagreements among the Palestinian factions. When suspicions first arose, the factions decided that they could not interfere in the internal affairs of Fatah al-Intifada. Nahr al-Barid had a conservative culture, so Islamists were welcome while Fatah’s men were known for being thuggish and even drunk. “People in the camp had no problem seeing Muslims—they were praying, they didn’t bother anybody,” Abu Jaber said. “The PFLP was suspicious, though. By the time they had declared themselves Fatah al-Islam, they were stronger, situated, stable, they had brought families. A committee of the factions spoke to them and told them to leave the camp, but these people were very strong.” Abu Jaber explained that following the Oslo accords the factions had progressively grown weaker. Less money was coming into the camps. There was no powerful Palestinian regime to dislodge the four hundred well-armed Salafis. “Whoever let them in should kick them out,” he said. “All the camp is surrounded with Lebanese army checkpoints, and these people were coming in and out.” Fatah al-Islam had brought two vans full of weapons in broad daylight, without obstruction, he said. There were popular demonstrations against their presence. Many of the Palestinian faction leaders insist that prominent Lebanese Sunnis and members of the Future Movement tried to co-opt Fatah al-Islam. “What is for sure is that all sides tried to benefit from them, but no one can control them,” a Hamas official from Nahr al-Barid told me. “The Syrians tried to use them, and Future tried to use them in their war against Hizballah. They made many promises, but in the end they did their own program.”
The Lebanese army increased its presence around the camp, surrounding it and establishing checkpoints at the entrances. Nahr al-Barid had been one of the main markets in northern Lebanon, but the security measures put the camp’s economy in a stranglehold. The army searched cars and checked identification papers, causing traffic jams leading to the camp and reducing the number of visitors to the market.
Fatah al-Islam’s men refused to heed calls for their removal or disbandment. They were Muslims, they said, on Muslim land, and they recognized no borders. Their persecution was a necessary result of their ideology and was akin to the persecution the Prophet Muhammad faced when he first began preaching. Absi warned that he had more than two hundred men and that they were observing the army’s movements around the camp. If Fatah al-Islam felt under attack, then it would respond violently, he said. Absi was becoming increasingly influential in Tripoli, especially among youth. Following a bank robbery in Sidon, the Lebanese interior minister gave a press conference on March 13, 2007, stating that Fatah al-Islam was self-funded and relied partially on bank robberies.
In March two Fatah al-Islam members were killed in a clash with Fatah that also brought injuries on both sides. Fatah al-Islam made a show of force in the camp and removed pictures of the late Fatah leader Yasser Arafat. In another clash more grenades were thrown and more men were injured. At the funeral for one of the slain men, a Gazan who had come to Lebanon via Germany, a large number of people turned out, including Salafis and clerics from Tripoli. “We were surprised by how popular they were,” said Abu Yasser. Many Salafis from Tripoli swore oaths of allegiance to the group. By then Fatah al-Islam numbered 150, its ranks bolstered by members of other groups such as Usbat al-Ansar and Jund al-Sham. Some called them “strangers in the camp.” They kept to themselves and spoke in classical Arabic, perhaps to conceal their foreign accents.
In April at least seventy residents of Tripoli, including Saudis and other foreign Arabs, were arrested in Tripoli. Most of them were from the Abu Samra district, which housed important Salafis and their institutions. The suspects were accused of belonging to Al Qaeda. They were said to be linked to a man who had been arrested in Saudi Arabia for allegedly trying to collect money to fund militias in Lebanon. Anger increased among the Salafis of Tripoli at what they felt was their persecution by government forces. Others resented what they perceived as a double standard allowing Hizballah members to have arms but denying Sunnis the same privilege. That month Hamas held commemorations in honor of Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, two leaders who had been assassinated by the Israelis. They played religious and nationalist songs. Fatah al-Islam members complained about the music, which they considered un-Islamic, but Hamas prevailed. Fatah al-Islam also accused Hamas of following Anwar Sadat’s path of negotiation with Israel.
Abu Yasser claims that forty Saudis flew to Beirut and were taken to Nahr al-Barid, where they were kept for months until the tensions with the army began. One of the Saudis called his family back home, and they arranged for his surrender to Lebanese authorities. Many Salafi clerics and state religious officials came to visit Fatah al-Islam, their vehicle license plates indicating that they were from Dar al-Ifta, or the Sunni Endowment, a state body, which was headed by the Grand Mufti, or the Mufti of Lebanon. In May eyewitnesses claimed that large deliveries of new weapons were brought into the camp for Fatah al Islam. In July Abu Salim Taha explained that pressure had been placed on his group to take a side in internal Lebanese conflicts but they had refused to do so they were being targeted.
Accusations were exchanged throughout 2007 between the two opposing coalitions about who was responsible for Fatah al-Islam, with some even speculating that Saudi Arabia and the United States were collaborating with the Future Movement to sponsor jihadists who would confront Shiites.
The March 14 coalition accused the Syrians of backing Fatah al-Islam and similar groups. On August 20, 2007, Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman made similar accusations, claiming that “the road to victory now requires cutting off Al Qaeda’s road to Iraq through Damascus.” Most of the support for Al Qaeda in Iraq came from Syria, he asserted, as did the actual fighters. The majority of Al Qaeda’s foreign fighters made their way into Iraq by first flying into Damascus International Airport, he claimed, “making the airport the central hub of Al Qaeda travel in the Middle East.” It was time to demand that “the Syrian regime stop playing travel agent for Al Qaeda in Iraq,” he said, calling for an international boycott of that airport.
According to Syria’s ambassador in Washington, the urbane Imad Moustapha, these accusations were laughable. “We have in Syria organizations that might be very similar to Al Qaeda in ideology and approach,” he said. “Al Qaeda is not one single organization that has headquarters in Afghanistan. It has inspired groups all over the Islamic world. We have had serious incidents in Syria, some not publicized.” He blamed U.S. policy in Iraq for the spread of these groups. “When the U.S. changed Iraq into this lawless state, Iraq became fertile ground for every extreme organization. The flow of terrorists is not unidirectional. It’s bidirectional. At an early stage we told the U.S., ‘Stop the accusations that we are helping Al Qaeda.’ If they go and fight in Iraq, they will continue their holy war against other regimes. Only yesterday we extradited some Saudis to Saudi Arabia. This is a very burdensome task, and it needs lots of cooperation. In Damascus airport any young man who arrives alone, especially from Saudi Arabia, we don’t let them in. They are very upset about this, and we receive many complaints.” Every few weeks Moustapha received a copy of a list from Syrian intelligence of individuals rejected at Syrian entry points for security reasons. He showed me several months’ worth of the lists, which were marked “top secret” and contained the names of thousands of individuals denied entry, some of whom were Egyptian and Algerian. “Borders can’t be controlled by one country,” he said. “It needs exchange of intelligence, cooperation, the diligent effort of the other side.”
On May 19 a bank belonging to the Hariri dynasty was robbed southeast of Tripoli, apparently by men from Fatah al-Islam. Credible sources from the Palestinian factions and Hizballah and its supporters maintain that Fatah al-Islam received monthly payments in this bank, which were suddenly halted. When the payments stopped they demanded their money and returned armed to rob the equivalent of one hundred thousand dollars, their monthly stipend. Absi told Muhammad al-Haj, the Hamas negotiator, that they had come to receive their transfer, but problems had arisen and they did what they had to do to get the money.
Early the next morning Lebanese security forces raided apartments in an affluent district of Tripoli belonging to Fatah al-Islam members, some of whom were foreigners. The conduit for renting the luxury apartments was said to have been the Mufti of Tripoli. One of the militants called Sheikh Dai al-Islam and asked him to tell the authorities not to arrest them. The response from the security forces was that they would not negotiate and were going to finish them off. The militant threatened to attack the army. Haj, who is also head of the council of Palestinian clerics, claimed to have been surprised by the clashes. Before the bank robbery, he said, “there had been an agreement between Fatah al-Islam and the authorities that Fatah al-Islam would not be involved in Lebanese politics or harm peace and stability, and would not expand its activities outside the camp, and that the thirty foreign Arabs with Fatah al-Islam would be deported.” Despite the close proximity between the Internal Security Force base and the Lebanese army base, and the fact that the army was surrounding the camp, the ISF did not notify the army that it was conducting the raids in Tripoli. The ISF did, however, notify two Lebanese television stations.
The following day a group of fighters led by Abu Hureira, one of the most militant figures in Fatah al-Islam, attacked a Lebanese army location and slaughtered the soldiers. Shaker al-Absi was said to have been uninformed about this in advance and to have emerged from his home in his pajamas at the sound of fighting. Humiliated and angry, the army struck back. Abu Hureira and his followers refused to negotiate. It seems Absi was frustrated that things were getting out of control and felt that he had been forced into a battle. Rumors spread throughout the country that the soldiers had been brutally slaughtered and mutilated, provoking a wave of hatred that targeted Palestinians in general, despite the fact that Fatah al-Islam was composed mostly of non-Palestinians and all the Palestinian factions condemned it. On May 20-21 bombs exploded in a Christian and Sunni neighborhood in Beirut, igniting fears that the fighting might spread.
Shaker al-Absi claimed that he never wanted to target the Lebanese army but was forced to do so by the raid in Tripoli. In the chaos of the first day, said Muhammad al-Haj, it was not possible to establish a dialogue. Once negotiations led to a cease-fire, armed Sunni civilians from the area descended upon the camp to support the army and attack the Palestinians. Haj blames these civilians for reigniting the battle. He was shot by Fatah in a failed assassination attempt after the group grew concerned over his success in mediating between the army and Fatah al-Islam and what it meant for their role in the camp. “They thought that what was being achieved through negotiations would prevent Fatah from forming its security committee to control the camps,” he told me.
When Future Movement leader Saad al-Hariri called upon his forces to support the army and security forces, this was interpreted by his forces to mean that they should join the fight. Hundreds of armed Sunnis from the region descended upon the camp. When fighting began, it became very difficult for civilians to leave because they had to endure artillery fire as well as snipers from the army and Sunni militiamen from the north. Fatah al-Islam took advantage of the armaments of the PFLP-General Command—Ahmed Jabril’s Syrian-sponsored split from the PFLP—and the Fatah Revolutionary Council, commonly known as the Abu Nidal Organization. Members of these ostensibly secular groups—with a reputation for once performing spectacular acts of violence—were helping Fatah al-Islam out of solidarity on the local level, but not on orders from their officers. Interestingly, the Salafi leaders in the camp who had initially welcomed Fatah al-Islam disavowed them now. Dai al-Islam al-Shahal maintained contact between Fatah al-Islam and the Lebanese authorities. When the fighting started Syria closed two border points in the north.
On May 25, Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave an even-handed speech commemorating the liberation of southern Lebanon from the Israeli occupation in 2000. In that speech he discussed the clashes in the north and spoke of two “red lines.” The army and the security agencies in Lebanon were a red line that should not be crossed by attacking them. Likewise, the Palestinian civilians and their camps were a red line, and the security forces should not kill civilians in the name of a war on terror. The Future Movement seized on these statements to accuse the Shiite leader of supporting Palestinian terrorists against the army. Anger swept throughout the north and other Sunni areas in the country. At the same time Lebanese security forces cracked down on local Salafis in Tripoli, and rumors circulated that some were being tortured.
Clerics in Tripoli had to calm many of their followers who sympathized with Fatah al-Islam. Some began to feel betrayed and persecuted by the government. The Future Movement began to lose ground among Salafis. Its leaders had campaigned as protectors of Lebanon’s Sunnis but instead were perceived by some as having launched fitna (strife) in the north. In the slums of Tripoli, resentment was growing against Lebanese security forces, who were picking people off the streets even if they were innocent, beating them, and releasing them as an example to others. Some people in Tripoli felt that Fatah al-Islam members were well-intentioned mujahideen who had been forced to fight in Lebanon when they should have been fighting in Iraq. The majority of the soldiers fighting with the army against Fatah al-Islam were Sunni Muslims from northern Lebanon. Many in the north were not sure how to react. When the first few dead soldiers arrived in their hometowns for burial, some of them were not buried as martyrs because they had died fighting fellow believers. The majority of Sunnis embraced the army, however, and a propaganda campaign in support of the army began in earnest, with one bank issuing credit cards with a military camouflage motif, advertisements on television showing the nation saluting a soldier, and bumper stickers stating allegiance to the army. It was a cathartic experience after the previous year’s war and the divisions it had reinforced in the nation.
Members of the Abu Nidal Organization also provided assistance, including weapons, to Fatah al-Islam in Nahr al-Barid, and some of the Abu Nidal men who were wanted by Lebanese security forces even stayed behind and fought alongside Fatah al-Islam. Over the next three months the Lebanese army regularly announced that it had vanquished Fatah al-Islam, but despite destroying the camp and making forty thousand Palestinians homeless, the fighting continued, and Lebanese soldiers continued to die. Absi had not been seeking a confrontation with the Lebanese army, but once the fighting started he might have hoped that other supporters and Salafis would rise up throughout Lebanon and its camps. Negotiations faltered over the demand to hand over wanted Lebanese men among his ranks. Abu Salim Taha, the Fatah al-Islam spokesperson, blamed the Future Movement for inciting hatred against them. He admitted that there were many foreign Muslims among them. Even though they had no organizational ties to Al Qaeda, they considered them their brethren.
In early June it was Jund al-Sham’s turn to clash with the army, in Ayn al-Hilweh. There had been fears that the fighting in Nahr al-Barid would spread south, and now it was happening. Usbat al-Ansar, which was already part of the camp’s executive committee, played a key role in securing the camp. The Lebanese government gave Usbat al-Ansar a new status by recognizing it as a power broker and partner it could deal with. This negotiated solution allowed the Palestinians to continue policing themselves. It was a stark contrast to the military solution offered in Nahr al-Barid.
In June Lebanese security forces arrested four people in the Beqaa Valley in eastern Lebanon. They also found a large amount of explosives and money. One of the suspects was a Saudi carrying fake Iraqi identity papers. Two Syrians and a Palestinian were found with him. By then another thirty-two Fatah al-Islam prisoners had been captured, most of whom were Lebanese. The Saudi authorities asked for their citizens to be repatriated so that they could learn more about similar groups in the Kingdom, and Lebanon consented. South of Tripoli Lebanese security forces killed five Islamist fighters, at least two of whom were Saudis. In July, after Fatah al-Islam began firing missiles outside the camp, Abu Salim Taha, the Fatah al-Islam spokesman, explained that the group was targeting the army and some missiles had reached Lebanese towns because of miscalculations. He asked the Sunnis to accept his apology. Lebanon’s many Salafist jihadist groups refused to back Fatah al-Islam, as did Al Qaeda. Their focus was fighting Israel, and none of them wanted to jeopardize their position in Lebanon by provoking the authorities.
By late June most of the Palestinian refugees from Nahr al-Barid had fled to the nearby Bedawi refugee camp. In a schoolyard there I was stopped by Abu Hadi, born in Haifa in 1946. “I am a person without an address,” he told me. “I wish I was a donkey or a horse so I would have doctors and lawyers for my rights.” He pulled out a notebook. “My office is my pocket,” he said. He showed me a plastic bag with a sponge and a towel. “My bathroom is in my hand.” A peaceful demonstration of hundreds of civilians, including women and children, marched from Bedawi toward their former homes, asking for the right to return there. Lebanese soldiers opened fire at close range, killing two demonstrators and wounding at least twenty. As the demonstrators fled they were attacked by Sunni civilians from the region, beaten and stabbed. Palestinian families seeking to recover the corpses of their relatives killed by the army’s indiscriminate shelling were told to sign statements affirming that the men had been with Fatah al-Islam or were killed by the group. At the Interior Ministry’s Qibba base near Nahr al-Barid, where many Palestinians were interrogated, at least one of the officers had graduated from an American military program in interrogation described as “debriefing, interviewing, and elicitation.” Numerous Palestinian men reported being detained and tortured for many days. Palestinians throughout Lebanon were beaten at checkpoints.
A SENSE OF FOREBODING united people in Lebanon and throughout the region in response to the destabilizing occupation of Iraq. It also made Sunnis feel vulnerable. North of Tripoli, by the village of Qubat Shamra, where a boy was selling watermelons off the side of the road the day I visited, there was a stretch of broken wall with two lines of graffiti. “We tell you, oh rulers, of treachery and tyranny, the blood of the martyr Hariri is not to be forgotten,” said one. The other listed the successors of the Prophet Muhammad whom Sunnis revere and warned that “the blood of Sunnis is boiling.” It was signed by an unknown group called the Mujahideen Battalions of Tel Hayat, in reference to a nearby village. Further up the road toward the Syrian border, past tall pine and eucalyptus trees, one side of an apartment building was covered with a large painting of Rafiq al-Hariri. “They feared you so they killed you,” it said. “Truly they are pigs.” It quoted from the Koran as well, an example of the strange juxtaposition of Islamism and the Hariri cult. I stopped at Kusha and met a twenty-three-year-old third-year law student called Muhamad, who had learned English from listening to rap music. Muhamad had joined the Interior Ministry’s new Information Branch earlier that year as a volunteer “because of the Shiite campaign against this government,” he said. “You have to do something.” His responsibility was to “keep an eye open for anything strange in town.”
According to Muhamad, Lebanon’s Sunnis had finally come to believe that Lebanon was their country. “After they killed Hariri we woke up,” he said. “Shiites hate us. After Hariri’s death I started feeling hatred of Shiites. I hate Shiites after they thanked Syria in the demonstration.” He also hated Shiites for reacting positively to Saddam Hussein’s execution. “At the end Saddam was a Sunni,” he said. “I love Saddam. He subjugated Shiites. He was a leader in every sense of the word.” Muhamad believed he was helping to defend Lebanon from the “Shiite crescent.” “They’re trying to extend their principles through all of Lebanon. The biggest danger is coming from Shiites, not Israel. The priority is Shiites, to confront their project. I would take a gun and face Shiites, not only me but many people here.”
In the village of Masha I drove by the main mosque, which had a large picture of Hariri on one wall. Above the mosque a large blue sign said, “Palestine and Iraq are calling you, boycott American products.” Elsewhere in town a small shop had the obligatory picture of Saddam with his two sons at his side. A local sheikh had praised Fatah al-Islam as mujahideen.
Throughout Sunni towns in the north and Sunni neighborhoods in Tripoli and Beirut one finds images of Saddam and graffiti praising the executed former Iraqi leader. “The nation that gave birth to Saddam Hussein will not bow,” said one in the Beqaa. In Beirut’s Sunni stronghold of Tariq al-Jadida I found posters of “the martyred leader” Saddam with the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem behind him. On the road to Mishmish, a small mountain town in Akkar, I passed a wall where someone had written “Long live the hero Saddam Hussein.” Entering the town I drove under many banners honoring the army. “Only your pure blood draws the red line,” said one, in reference to Nasrallah’s recent speech. When I visited in late July 2007, the all-Sunni town had already lost three of its men to Fatah al-Islam; eight other soldiers from Mishmish were wounded. “People are very angry at the Palestinians,” mayor Hanzar Amr Din told me. He did not believe the anger would subside after the fighting. “If they think of coming back to the camp, people will destroy it,” he said. “People here were very upset at Nasrallah’s words about red lines,” he said. “Last summer people were happy with Nasrallah for fighting Israel, but saying that the camp is a red line means he is backing Palestinians against the army.”
That summer I found similar sentiments in the Sunni town of Bibnine. A laborer in a sandwich shop compared the situation to the 1970 Black September fighting, when the Jordanians had gotten rid of Palestinians. “I swear on the Koran,” he told me, “if I see a Palestinian I would slaughter him and drink his blood.” I asked him what he thought of Hizballah. “I hope they get rid of them too,” he said. The walls of Bibnine were plastered with pictures of the ten soldiers killed in the fighting, and I was reminded of the similar pictures festooning Shiite towns a year before in honor of the Hizballah soldiers who had died. On a wall near children playing on a road, someone had written with chalk, “Saddam Hussein is the martyr of the nation.” Khuzaimi, a twelve-year-old boy, told me that “we all want to grow up to join the army to destroy this infidel al-Absi.” But since Fatah al-Islam would be destroyed by then, he said, “then we will all go fight Israel.”
Most of the townsmen had taken their weapons to Nahr al-Barid in the first days of the fighting to “help the army,” I was told by Qais, a member of the Internal Security Forces from the town. “Anybody above sixteen went down,” he said—122 soldiers in all. “There is no family in Bibnine without somebody down there,” he said, adding that his family had fifteen men there. “There is a big anger at the Palestinians,” he said. “We consider them responsible for this.” When I visited Bibnine on July 31 the shelling of Nahr al-Barid echoed up to the town. Many of the townsmen worked as fishermen off the coast of Tripoli, but since the fighting had begun they had been forced to stay at home.
“They should be put on the border in the south so they can smell Palestine soil and remember it,” said Abu Muhamad, whose son Osama, a twenty-six-year-old soldier, had died in Nahr al-Barid. He blamed Syria for sending Fatah al-Islam to Lebanon. “My son the martyr, from childhood he wanted to be in the army. He grew up in a military house. I am a retired soldier. I am proud of him. He was brave, not a coward.” Abu Muhamad had two other sons in the army, one of whom was wounded in the battle. “Our first martyr was Rafiq al-Hariri,” he told me. “He was a martyr to the nation, and we all want to be martyrs to the nation.”
From his balcony Abu Muhamad could view the camp smoldering down on the coast. His face was lined and weathered. He looked tired but tried to smile. “The people won’t allow the camp to be rebuilt,” he said. “As soon as the fighting stops, people will go down to prevent it from being rebuilt.” Another guest, the father of a soldier still fighting in the camp, repeated an oft-heard slander that the Palestinians had sold Palestine to the Jews in 1948 and now had sold Nahr al-Barid to the jihadists. “That gang bought their camp,” the man said. He had been among the first armed men to descend on the camp, he told me. “All towns around the camp went down and took the arms of soldiers who were killed,” he said. “Now there is a blood feud between Lebanese and Palestinians,” said Abu Muhamad. “The big problem is not with the Palestinians.” The real problem was not the Nahr al-Barid camp but the one in downtown Beirut, he said, meaning the Shiite protesters. Like most Sunnis in the north, he had been angered by Nasrallah’s “red lines” speech in May. “Call it red lines or green lines or whatever you want,” he said. “Your lines won’t stop us.”
The forty thousand homeless Palestinians of Nahr al-Barid were housed in local schools in the nearby Bedawi camp and in Tripoli, watching from afar as their homes were obliterated. Nahr al-Barid was a thoroughly urban camp, with many low apartment buildings. It was located right off the Mediterranean beach, and the view would have afforded its residents some respite from their fate. At least forty-two Palestinian civilians had been killed by September 2, when the army and media declared a great victory—some even called it a victory over Nahr al-Barid rather than Fatah al-Islam. It was only on October 10 that the army finally began to allow a trickle of Palestinians back to their homes, and only in the so-called “new camp,” a small area that had housed two thousand families on the outskirts of the original camp. The army had been in control of the new camp, and fighting had not taken place there.
About one thousand families obtained the permits from the army and passed through the checkpoints, where soldiers and Lebanese demonstrators heckled them. They found only destruction. It was as if a giant plague of locusts had ravaged the camp. Every single home, building, apartment, and shop was destroyed. Most were also burned from the inside, and signs of the flammable liquids the soldiers had used abounded on the walls. The empty fuel canisters were left behind on the floors. Ceilings and walls were riddled with bullets shot from inside for sport. Lebanese soldiers had defecated in kitchens, on plates, bowls, and pots, as well as on mattresses. They had urinated into jars of olive oil. Most homes had been emptied of all their belongings. Furniture, appliances, sinks, toilets, televisions, refrigerators, gold jewelry, cash—all were stolen. Even the charred walls the Palestinians had been left with were not spared: insulting graffiti had been written on them, along with threats, signed by various army units. The media were not permitted in, and with few exceptions they were ignoring the plight of the Palestinians, if not reveling in it. The army’s behavior confused observers. While it seemed to ignore Fatah al-Islam targets, it systematically destroyed other parts of the camp. Following the battle the army continued to treat the camp as a military zone and imposed an army engineer onto the committee planning the reconstruction, informing other members of what the army wanted done.
The army, which had never been used to defend Lebanon from external threats such as Israel, only to suppress internal dissent, and which had struggled to defeat a small band of extremists, had systematically gone through every bit of the camp and ravaged the infrastructure, destroying six decades of life to render it impossible for the Palestinians to return. All the windows were broken, electrical wiring was pulled out, copper wires stolen for resale or reuse, water pumps removed or destroyed, generators stolen or shot up. The columns typical in the camp, which supported homes, had been shot up so that the concrete was turned to rubble and the rebar exposed. Those few computers that were not stolen had been picked apart, and the RAM and hard drives were all missing. Photo albums had been torn to shreds. Every car in the camp was burned, shot up, or crushed by tanks or bulldozers. Much of the looting and destruction had taken place after the fighting ceased, or in areas where fighting never occurred. The many businesses and shops that had served much of northern Lebanon had been looted of their wares, as had pharmacies and health clinics. Palestinians reported seeing their belongings on sale in the main outdoor market in Tripoli. The camp had once been imbricated into the local economy and culture. Now the Palestinians were unwanted and rejected. For some it was not just the second time they were refugees. Apart from 1948, in 1976 many arrived from Tel al-Zaatar, a camp near Beirut that had housed twenty thousand refugees until Lebanese Christian militias besieged it, massacred many of its inhabitants, and then leveled the camp to prevent the Palestinians’ return. “It is our destiny,” one man said without emotion in his blackened home in Nahr al-Barid, standing by excrement the Lebanese soldiers had left behind on the kitchen floor. The total loss of life from Nahr al-Barid was fifty civilians, 179 soldiers, and 226 suspected Fatah al-Islam militants. About six thousand families lost their homes.
Palestinian children’s art from this period depicts the Lebanese soldiers and Lebanese tanks destroying the camp as Israelis. Videos filmed by Lebanese soldiers circulated on the Internet, showing medical staff from the Civil Defense brigade abusing corpses and beating prisoners. Hundreds of Palestinians had been abused or tortured in Lebanese detention, and some had died from medical neglect of treatable wounds. Although still facing harassment and the occasional beating by Lebanese soldiers, hundreds of Palestinians were at work emptying their homes of rubble. One woman stood on her balcony throwing rubble from inside her home onto the broken street, where it was piled up on the sides. The majority of the Palestinians were still unable to access their homes, and could only wonder what was stolen, broken, and excreted upon. On the roof of a taller building in the new camp, I found Farhan Said Mansur, a sanitation officer standing with his wife and gazing silently across to their distant home, whose broken roof they could just make out—as if looking at Palestine, where he was born. “It is a calamity to all Palestinians,” he said.
Many Salafi jihadists had escaped to the Bedawi camp. Other cells had remained in Bedawi during the fighting. The camp’s security committee still had them under surveillance. Outside Bedawi I stopped with my photographer as he shot a bony horse grazing on a hill. Palestinian mechanics in the area surrounded him, holding his hand and warning him not to take pictures, because it was a Palestinian military position. We noticed concrete bunkers on the top of hills belonging to the pro-Syrian PFLP-GC. Just beyond was the army. In November the influential American-allied Lebanese leader Walid Jumblatt threatened that the Burj al-Barajneh camp in Beirut would be the next Nahr al-Barid, and the Palestinian community felt even more vulnerable. That month the Lebanese cabinet warned that Islamist militants were infiltrating other Palestinian camps. The phenomenon would be dealt with as it had in Nahr al-Barid, said the minister of information, Ghazi al-Aridi. Nobody thought to address the actual condition of Palestinians in the camps.
As the Lebanese Army celebrated its “victory” over Fatah al-Islam, its commander, Michel Suleiman, was to become the next president. He would not be the first president to have punished the Palestinians. Between 1958 and 1964, President Fouad Shehab created an elaborate, ruthless secret-service network to monitor the Palestinian camps. During his 1970-76 reign, President Suleiman Franjieh clashed with Palestinian factions, even using the air force to bomb a neighborhood thought to be pro-Palestinian. I’ve heard followers of assassinated president-elect Bashir Gemayel, whose Maronite Christian militia massacred Palestinians in 1976, brag that he was stopped at a checkpoint in the early years of the country’s 1975-90 civil war with a trunk full of the skulls of dead Palestinians. And the leading opposition Christian leader is Michel Aoun, a retired general who participated in the 1976 killings.
“Social confinement is leading the youth to religious radicalism,” says Bernard Rougier. “Youngsters are socialized by religious clerics who tell them how to understand the world and the ‘true reasons’ of their social exclusion. To end that situation, refugees should be allowed to work in the Lebanese society, in order for them to live under new and different influences (with a restriction: nothing should be done to naturalize them, because it could upset the Lebanese balance of power, and Palestinian refugees would be, once again, caught in the Lebanese inner contradictions; in addition to that, such naturalization would dissolve the negotiations about the right of return). So what needs to be done is to distinguish between the issues, between what is social (the right to work), what is political (and should be discussed at the regional level), and what is linked to the legal situation of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. In order to do that, Lebanese parties would have to stop frightening the Lebanese society about the risk of tawtin (a condition almost impossible to meet in Lebanon).”
As Iraq became a less hospitable place for jihadists and foreign fighters, or as there were less American targets to go after, these veterans, experienced at fighting the most advanced army in the world, were looking for new battles. Andrew Exum is a former U.S. Army officer who led a platoon of light infantry in Afghanistan in 2002 and then led a platoon of Army Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004. He lived in Beirut from 2004 until 2006, and now researches insurgencies and militant Islamist groups at the Center for New American Security in Washington, D.C. “The fighting in Nahr al-Bared is, unfortunately, just the first round in what I fear will be a series of battles fought in the aftermath of the Iraq War,” he says. “On Internet chat rooms, we’re seeing militants turn away volunteers to go fight in Iraq and promising the next fight will be in Lebanon and the Gulf. Lebanon, especially, is a magnet for Sunni extremists. You not only have a haven for these groups in the Palestinian camps—with security services from rival Arab states competing for their loyalty and attention—you also have two tempting targets: both the pro-Western ruling coalition in Beirut as well as the opposition, led by a powerful bloc of Shiite parties. How can we not expect these Sunni militants, who have spent the past four years waging war on the Shiites of Iraq, to try and carry that fight onto the large, politically active Shiite population in Lebanon? Or onto the pro-Western regime that precariously hangs onto power?”
FOLLOWING THE CIVIL WAR Iraq became a less prominent topic on the jihadi web forums. In part the novelty factor wore off. But Iraq was a loss for the jihadists, and as it grew bloodier, with more civilians being targeted, it was less inspiring for aspiring jihadists than merely fighting against the crusader and occupier. But there was very little soul-searching on the forums; jihadis seemed to have moved on without a lot of serious public discussion of what went wrong. This was partly because fighting picked up in other places after 2005, especially in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Somalia.
And while America’s militaristic ambitions will likely engender violent resistance movements regardless of the ideological environment, a major reason for the growth of Al Qaeda is now something beyond anti-Americanism. It is the internal war between Sunnis and Shiites in places like Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, and even Yemen. Al Qaeda can no longer be seen as just a force against U.S. encroachments; it is now part of these local phenomena. In this internal war in the Muslim world, Al Qaeda has become a major driving force of Sunni-Shiite hatred. Al Qaeda in this case means something more general than the actual organization. Even in moderate Lebanon, sectarian Sunnis have been Salafized. They may not have been religious beforehand, but they view Al Qaeda as an effective way to combat perceived Shiite expansion and a potent symbol for them to reclaim their masculinity. One of the many ramifications of this is that the United States is yet again involving itself in forms of spiraling violence whose outcomes are unpredictable and whose unintended consequences will be keeping it busy for decades to come.