I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

  “Well, the Ahl al-Bayt, that is something different,” he said. “They are not like the other Shia.”

  He turned back to the screen. “See, see how they torture Sunnis in Iraq?” he said. “They hate us and the Americans are helping them. They didn’t stop them.”

  He offered more tea. “Are you not married?” he asked me.

  I was still following the screen and taking notes about the video. “No, I’m not,” I said.

  “Unbelievable,” he answered and started reeling off the usual effusive compliments favored by men in Islamist circles, including comparing me to the Prophet’s wives. I took a moment to admire the irony: both my parents’ forefathers were related to the Prophet’s first wife, but I was fairly sure this man wouldn’t have appreciated my mother’s background much, even if she was from the Ahl al-Bayt.

  He said that from time to time, he showed these videos to some of the young men who visited his mosque. I asked Abu Anas where he got them.

  “Some brothers are distributing them,” he said. “If you like, I can help you meet them. But you will need to cover your face.”

  * * *

  ABU ANAS CALLED me that evening to confirm the meeting with the “video brothers.” It was supposed to take place at one of their houses in Zarqa. I’d bought a niqab for the occasion.

  In the car on the way there, Michael read Arabic vocabulary words from orange cards. “Thank you”: shukran; “good morning”: sabah el hair.

  “No,” I answered, “It’s sabah el khair.”

  He repeated it the right way. “I think it’s nice to be able to say some words in Arabic,” Michael said. “It shows them how much respect I have for their culture.”

  I was apprehensive about this meeting. The night before, I’d called the former close associate of Zarqawi who’d chosen my abaya to ask about the “video brothers,” and he’d told me that one of the men was potentially dangerous. For safety, Michael and I asked a Jordanian named Marwan to join us. Marwan was a freelance journalist who had researched jihadist networks; he was sometimes quoted as an expert in our stories, and I’d met him a couple of times before. I also asked our driver Abu Dania, who came from a large and well-known family in Jordan, to accompany us inside.

  As I had on other trips, I’d listed all the Salafi sheikhs and leaders who could vouch for us in case of any danger. This time, since Michael and I were both going to the interview, I carried the paper with me.

  We pulled up to the house, and I drew the niqab across my mouth and over my head so only my eyes would show. We got out and knocked at a door in the wall that opened into a small garden. A man with glasses was waiting at the entrance to the house.

  “As’salam alaikum,” we said in greeting.

  “Wa’alaikum as’salam,” he responded.

  We followed him inside, stepping into a room furnished with couches and a TV. Another man stood there. He had black hair, a long black beard, and angry blue eyes.

  “He is my friend and a sheikh,” the man with the glasses said.

  Michael and I said hello.

  “Is she the Moroccan Muslima?” the angry-eyed man asked in Arabic.

  “Yes, Sheikh, that’s me,” I answered.

  “And him?” The angry-looking man glanced at Michael. “He’s American?” he said in Arabic.

  “Yes, he is American,” the man with the glasses answered.

  The angry-looking one began to smile. He looked at Michael and then said in Arabic, “Let’s kidnap and kill him and make a video out of it.”

  Next to me, Michael was smiling and nodding. “Shukran, shukran,” I heard him say.

  We all looked at Michael, and even the angry-looking man’s expression changed. “Why is he saying ‘thank you’?” he asked us.

  I decided not to tell Michael what he had just thanked them for. Instead, I began arguing with the men in Arabic. “Before you kill my colleague, you will have to kill me,” I said in as loud and serious a tone as I could manage. I was breathing so hard that the light veil covering my mouth and nose flapped up and down. I told them that we had come as their guests and were under the protection of some figures known in the jihadist circles, whom I named.

  “Why are you talking so impolitely to them?” Michael asked me. “They are both here welcoming us and smiling.”

  The two men whispered to each other, and then the one with the glasses invoked one of the tenets of jihadi etiquette: the host had to consent to killing Michael before it could happen with God’s grace. It was his house, the man with glasses said, and he wouldn’t allow Michael to be killed there. Marwan also spoke up, saying that Michael was under his protection and that he wouldn’t allow him to be slaughtered.

  After a few tense moments, we all sat down. I noticed that the host’s wife had come around the corner and was standing out of view of the others, where only I could see her. We greeted each other politely.

  To be safe, I decided to work as quickly as we could. I asked basic questions, such as where they got their footage and how many DVDs they distributed. Michael kept asking for more details, but I told him we had to hurry, as we had another appointment.

  The man with glasses explained that they had received the videos on flash drives from Iraq and burned the footage onto DVDs, which they distributed mainly in Zarqa; from there, they found their way to other cities as well.

  “Do you sell them?” I asked.

  “No, no, we give them away for free,” he said. The effort was financed through private donations, but he refused to tell us who was contributing.

  Our host then excused himself, saying that his wife was calling. When he returned, he told me that she wanted to see me.

  “It’s okay, I already greeted her,” I replied.

  “No, she wants to welcome you in the other room.”

  I didn’t want to leave Michael alone. “It’s fine,” I said. “I’m very comfortable here.”

  “You don’t understand,” the man with glasses told me. “We have rules in the house, and she insists that you sit with her where the women sit.”

  Seeing no way around it, I told him I would visit her in a few minutes. We asked if they had given these videos to the young men from the neighborhood who had left for Iraq.

  “I knew one of them personally,” the host said.

  His angry friend grumbled. “They are all mujahideen, masha’Allah,” he said. “They went to Iraq to kill the evil Americans like your friend, who have sold Iraq to the more evil Shia, who are now torturing our brothers and raping our sisters.”

  “Sheikh, my colleague is one of the journalists who has reported about the torture that was committed by Shia militias,” I told him. “Our paper has published many reports about this and also about the CIA facilities where people were tortured.” I wanted him to see that not every American was guilty.

  “They are all the same,” he answered. “All kuffar, and you should not be working with him.”

  We decided to leave. I asked Abu Dania and Marwan to go to the car with Michael while I said good-bye to the host’s wife. She was sitting in the next room watching TV with her four small children. When I stuck my head in, I realized they were watching videos showing attacks on U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and Shia militiamen holding the severed heads of what they said were Sunni men in Iraq.

  “You’re letting them see all this?” I asked her.

  “Yes. They need to see who the enemies of Islam are,” she answered. “The earlier, the better.”

  It reminded me of what I’d seen in the Nahr al-Bared camp in Lebanon, when the Fatah al-Islam fighter had praised his son for “killing” an infidel. A feeling of sadness and disgust swept over me.

  In the garden, the angry-eyed man stood near the door that led to the street. I could see Michael and Marwan standing next to the car outside, but as I approached, the man closed the gate. I was trapped in the garden.

  “One moment,” he said.

  I wasn’t sure what he was planning to do, but I feared h
e might try to take out his anger on me. Hadn’t he said that I wasn’t supposed to work with kuffar?

  “I need to talk to you alone,” he said. “You want to know why I hate the Americans so much?” He was not shouting, but there was aggression in his voice, and his hands were shaking. “You know what they allowed the Shia to do to me in Iraq? I swear by God I had not even been a jihadist then, but after the torture I saw, I became one. These militias, they put electroshocks on every part of my body; they raped me; they pissed on me, spat on me. I need to take medication now because of my nerves.”

  “Sheikh, I’m really sorry for what happened to you,” I said as calmly as I could. “But what happened to you, it’s not the responsibility of every American or even every Shia. There are people who are fighting for human rights.”

  “Human rights?!” he shouted. “Human shit! All these groups, they are just liars, just using human rights for their interests.” He clenched his hands into fists.

  The host, who had been in the street, opened the door and said, “Please, sister, get into the car.”

  I looked at the other man one more time. “I am sorry for what happened to you,” I whispered.

  * * *

  “IT WAS WEIRD what happened there,” Michael said as we drove back to Amman. “Those men seemed so nice, and you were so tough with them.”

  I took off my niqab and turned to him. “Do yourself and us a favor: please stop with your Arabic lessons!”

  “Why?” he answered.

  “You know what shukran means, don’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “They were arguing about whether they should behead you and make a video, and you were saying ‘thank you’ to them.”

  I explained the whole situation. I also apologized for not telling him what had been said while we were there, and Michael agreed that I had been right not to. “I would have totally freaked out, and then they would have thought I indeed was a spy or something,” he said.

  “Yes, that’s what they would have thought, but you were protected. We three would never have allowed them to harm you in any way.”

  “Shukran, shukran,” Michael said, and we all started laughing.

  * * *

  WE FELT WE were making progress, but we wanted to find someone who had been friends with the young men who’d left for Iraq. “You may need to go back to Abu Anas and ask him,” Michael said.

  I drove up to Zarqa again with my abaya and niqab in my bag, pulling on the abaya before Abu Dania, the driver, and I met Abu Anas at his house.

  “There is someone who I think was close to them,” he said. “But I’m sure he won’t talk to you.”

  “Why are you so sure?”

  He leaned in and whispered: “Because he is only doing what the emir is telling him.”

  “What emir?” I asked.

  “He has the key to everything here in this neighborhood.”

  He gave me the emir’s kunya—his nom de guerre—and said he had done all he could. I reached out to another source, the Zarqawi associate, and asked to meet him at a coffee shop in the center of Zarqa.

  “Who is this emir?” I asked.

  The man was another longtime associate of Zarqawi’s, my source told me. They’d fought together, and the emir had spent several years in prison in the 1990s, when Zarqawi was building and strengthening his network from behind bars. When Zarqawi went to Iraq, the emir had helped supply his old friend with fighters. These days, he divided his time between mentoring suicide bombers bound for Iraq and helping to organize militant operations elsewhere.

  “He is the key,” my source said. “He is a strong man, very strong.”

  “So you know him?”

  He nodded. “Let me talk to him and see what I can do.”

  I smiled. “Please, can you do it now? We are running out of time. I even wore the abaya just for this.”

  He laughed, stood up, and said I should have another juice or tea. He would be back. About a half hour later he returned, a smile on his face. He told me that he’d told the emir who Michael and I were. They’d looked up our stories on the Internet and discussed the possibility of a meeting.

  “He agreed to see you both tomorrow,” he said. “See, I told you the abaya would bring you good luck.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, as Michael and I were about to head to Zarqa, my source called. “You need to come alone, and come now.”

  I told Michael that I needed to see what was going on, and drove off to Zarqa with Abu Dania, the driver.

  I met the source at the coffee shop.

  “He canceled the meeting.”

  “What? Why?”

  “He said because of tooth problems, but I think he got nervous. He doesn’t seem certain any longer.”

  This was a setback. We knew that in order to explain to Americans why young Jordanian men were leaving their families and homes to fight in Iraq, we had to have their voices. But without “Abu Jihad”—as some people called the emir—we wouldn’t be able to reach them.

  “Please, can we visit him with no interview?” I begged, thinking about how well that had worked before with Abssi in Lebanon.

  My source shook his head. “Don’t you ever give up? Let’s go now, but we’ll drive in my car. Your driver has to stay here.”

  It was risky, but two things comforted me: it was the middle of the day and I trusted my source. I told Abu Dania to wait for me at the coffee shop and gave him the paper with the jihadist contact numbers in a sealed envelope, with instructions to give it to Michael if I wasn’t back in a couple of hours. Then I called Michael.

  “He wanted to cancel because of tooth pain,” I told him.

  “Please try to convince him,” Michael answered. “I can offer him some Advil or Ambien.”

  Abu Jihad was surprised to see us, but he wasn’t upset. He was tall and strong-looking with long hair, but on this day his face seemed a bit pale.

  “Sheikh, I heard you wanted to cancel the interview because of a tooth problem?” I asked.

  “Yes, I am sorry but I am in pain. Let’s do it some other day.”

  I tried to explain that we had only a short time left in the country and that the interview with him was crucial. Without it, I told him, we wouldn’t be able to tell the whole story.

  He said he couldn’t do it.

  I couldn’t believe that a mujahid who had fought alongside Zarqawi and spent years in prison was canceling the meeting because of a toothache.

  Then a door opened and an older woman came into the room. She greeted Abu Jihad and asked how he was doing. Then she asked who I was.

  “She is a visitor, Mother,” Abu Jihad answered. His voice was much softer than before.

  She hugged me and kissed my cheeks. “Welcome, my daughter. Where are you from, habibti, Morocco?” she asked, using the feminine form of the Arabic word for “beloved.” She told me she loved Moroccan sweets. “But why are you looking so sad?”

  I explained that I had come all the way from Europe to meet with her son, who was so important for this story, and my colleague had come from the United States. And now he wanted to cancel because his teeth hurt.

  She began to scold him. “Son, this nice girl and her friend have come so far to see you. Of course you will meet with them, or I will curse the milk that I fed you from this breast.” She pressed her right hand to her chest.

  Abu Jihad jumped up and kissed his mother’s head and hand. “Of course, Mother! As you wish!”

  My source watched from a corner, trying not to laugh. I turned to Abu Jihad. “So, Sheikh, can I bring my colleague?”

  “Yes, daughter, go and bring your colleague,” his mother answered.

  “I promise we will bring some medicine for your teeth as well, but I should go now, to bring him from Amman.”

  * * *

  MICHAEL AND I often used a “good cop, bad cop” routine to throw our interview subjects off balance. They expected him to ask the tough questions. Instead, he played the f
riendly conciliator, while I raised thorny subjects like 9/11, militant infighting, or the documentary proof we needed to check the veracity of our sources. We felt they would be more forgiving with me, because I’m a woman and I speak Arabic, whereas Michael was an “infidel” who could easily be suspected of spying.

  We took this approach with Abu Jihad. I asked about his affiliations with terrorist networks and whether he had been involved in funneling money to fighters, while Michael asked how his time in prison had affected him.

  Abu Jihad really was the big boss people made him out to be. He knew everyone. We told him we wanted to meet the young men who’d gone to Iraq. Within an hour, he’d found one of them for us. Every time I feared he was losing interest, I’d ask after his mother and remind him how far Michael and I had come to talk to him.

  Abu Jihad asked us to wait while he fetched the young man, who also spoke on the condition that his name and some personal details be withheld. We called him Abu Ibrahim—the name he would have used if he’d ever gotten to fight.

  He spoke to us with some trepidation, often glancing at Abu Jihad, as if for permission.

  “It’s okay, you can tell them everything,” Abu Jihad said. “They gave their word that they won’t use our real names.”

  Abu Ibrahim was twenty-four and shy and lanky, with brown eyes. The oldest of the six friends who’d gone to Iraq, he wore white traditional clothes. As a teenager from a secular, middle-class family, he’d played billiards, listened to pop music, and had girlfriends. He had wanted to be a professional soccer player.

  “I was just looking to have fun, but I was not alive,” Abu Ibrahim said. “I was missing something. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt it inside.”

  Abu Jihad and other more religious men reproached him: Why are you not praying? Why not follow the rules of God? Abu Ibrahim and the other young men started going to Abu Anas’s mosque and watching videos like the ones Michael and I had seen. He considered his dead friends the lucky ones.

  “I’m happy for them, but I cry for myself because I couldn’t do it yet,” he said. “I want to spread the roots of God on this earth and free the land of occupiers. I don’t love anything in this world. What I care about is fighting.” Zarqawi had been a hero, he told us, but it was his friends’ departure that had convinced him to go to Iraq.