Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East

by Jared Cohen

  In what became an almost daily tradition, I found myself once again mistaking appearance for reality in Iran. There was so much happening behind the façade of this repressed society; without the right guide to show me the scene, however, I would never have experienced that reality. Tonight, my guide was a woman named Mariam, a twenty-five-year-old engineering student from Yazd, now studying at the Polytechnic University in Tehran. It was the students from this university that seized the United States Embassy in November 1979 and held fifty-three American diplomats hostage. Now, more than twenty-six years later, students from this same university were among some of the most hospitable people toward me, an American Jew.

  Mariam and I had met the week before, during a chance encounter in southern Iran. She had come to Shiraz for the first time in several years to attend her cousin’s wedding and we found ourselves in the same café. The coffee shop resembled a carefully built cave, adorned with Persian artifacts, elegant carpets, and booths for customers to enjoy a cup of tea or the taste of a flavored tobacco pipe. I sat alone in a booth and made eye contact with a group of kids in another booth. The girls huddled up and giggled before one of them stood up. Mariam soon approached me.

  She had dark skin, long eyelashes, and rosy cheeks. Her attire was very stylish and while her head was adorned with a hejab, her dark hair—with blond highlights—concealed most of the green striped pattern. She wore a long blue coat with a white scarf that had frays at both ends.

  “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “I am from the United States.”

  She invited me to join her and her friends. They had an arsenal of questions for me. They wanted to know what life is like in America and they wanted to know what Americans think of Iranians. It was an entertaining exchange, but what really got me going was Mariam’s insistence that I explain to her and her friends the whole phenomenon of using toilet paper, rather than water, when we use the bathroom. She seemed truly mortified by what she thought was just plain dirty. I didn’t really have a good rebuttal because, frankly, it was a pretty good question. The best I could do in response was to explain that we do our best to shower from time to time.

  “What are the three things that you want the world to know about you?” I asked, very curious to see how they viewed foreign perceptions of Iranians.

  Mariam adjusted her hejab and looked right at me.

  “One: We are not Arabs; we are Iranian. Two: We are not terrorists. Three: We like and we do everything like other youth around the world.”

  She reiterated this last point several times during the conversation and before I left she said, “You need to make sure you see Iran before you leave. Just wait until I get back to Tehran next week. I will show you.”

  Mariam wasted little time getting in touch with me after she got back to Tehran. In fact, she called me just as she was arriving back into the city limits, insisting that she wanted to take me out that night. Mariam picked me up on Taleqani Avenue in Tehran right in front of the mural at the old United States Embassy that depicted the Statue of Liberty with a skull. Mariam greeted me with the traditional three kisses on the cheek and insisted that I take the front seat, so I crawled into the front seat of her friend’s Pontiac and introduced myself to her friend Nassim in the back.

  Nassim was studying to be a teacher. She wore a long wool beige coat, a light hejab tied underneath her chin, and blue jeans underneath her jacket. From underneath the front of her hejab, I could see that her dark hair was lightened by blond highlights just like her friend Mariam’s. This seemed to be the trend. Her skin was smooth and radiant from the makeup; her eyes were pronounced with blue mascara and her eyelashes were accentuated by thick black eyeliner. Nassim didn’t care how the regime told her to dress; she did things her own way.

  Wherever Nassim and Mariam were taking me, it was clear their purpose was to show me something special and different. If there was one thing I had learned in Iran, it was to expect nothing, and be surprised by everything.

  I was itching with curiosity. “Nassim, where are we going?” I implored.

  Mariam looked at me and answered on her behalf. “Don’t worry, my baby, I think you will like this. You need to see all the sides of Iran.”

  We turned onto Fereshteh Street. Before my eyes caught a glimpse of the scene, I could hear the revving of motors, the beats of hip-hop music, and the repetitious sound of horns as if this evening was a cause for celebration. But as I would later learn, every night for the Iranian youth is a celebration. Fereshteh was more than a street; it was a phenomenon. The long street was packed bumper-to-bumper with cars and there was not an adult in sight. It reminded me of a high-school parking lot; each young person competing to see whose sound system is louder, whose windows are a darker tint, and whose window decals mark the hipper band. The rambunctious youth didn’t constrain themselves to the confines of their souped-up vehicles. Confident boys, with their carefully sculpted hair, sat atop the roofs of their cars, doing what many adolescent males do in this situation: They ogled, pointed, and heckled. I saw three guys sitting on the hood of what looked like a blue sports car holding a large boom box that clearly had the volume pumped all the way up, as I could hear the distortion from the speakers’ reaching more than their maximum sound capacity. Despite the time of night, these three boys sported dark sunglasses in an expression of coolness.

  The girls were equally hip. Each face I saw was meticulously painted with mascara, blush, eyeliner, and lipstick. They all wore the hejab, but it was hardly noticeable. Each hejab was so elaborately decorated and pushed so far to the back of the girl’s head that it looked more like a scarf than a head covering. Their fashion was the latest: designer blue jeans, stunning jackets, and shirts that were no different from what I might see in a night out on the town at home. In addition to the fashion and makeup, I kept noticing that some of the girls had white bandages over their noses, which was something I had also seen when I was in Shiraz. When I facetiously asked Mariam and Nassim whether nose jobs were the “in” thing in Iran, they explained that most of the girls who adorn themselves with the white bandages do so for status rather than healing. Mariam and Nassim were entertained by my disbelief that someone would actually pretend to have gotten plastic surgery.

  Fereshteh Street was more than a forum for fashionable displays. It reminded me of a late-night traffic jam on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Within the traffic jam, of which we were now part, I found boys hanging out the windows of their cars, numerous girls not wearing their hejab, and even boys and girls dancing on the street and on the hoods of cars. It resembled a spontaneous block party.

  Amid the horn honking and hip-hop music, young boys and girls engaged in paper exchanges across cars. Mariam and Nassim explained that the paper transfers I saw were the latest way for boys and girls to give their phone numbers. The girls insisted that I try my luck at this. Never shying away from a chance to live in the moment, I wrote my number on the back of a receipt, crumpled it up, and threw it at the car next to me. Much to my disappointment, the number hit the window and fell to the ground. It was a shame, too, because the girls in the car next to me were very attractive. Crumpled notes of paper are not the only method for number exchanges. In the same traffic jam, boys and girls used their mobile phones to send anonymous Bluetooth text messages to one another, electronically flirting and courting. I was amazed by how much young Iranians did on their mobile phones. Parties, meetings, gatherings, protests, are all organized anonymously by Bluetooth messaging. The cell phone is both a way out and a way in for Iranian youth as they seek to express themselves, while at the same time circumventing the state intelligence apparatus.

  Fereshteh Street is not the only place in Tehran where younger Iranians, rambunctious in spirit, exercise their right to be youth. Jordan Street and Iran Zamin are two other youth hot spots. While each of these places has its own character—Jordan Street, for instance, is known for its drag racing—the general character and symbolic importance of
these forums remains the same. This was the closest young Iranians could get to feeling normal, as if they were living in democratic societies where they didn’t have to worry about the morals police or the intelligence services. They feel free on these streets and despite the fact that the morals police are just a few blocks away waiting to confiscate cars and arrest young socialites, they forget about the society they are living in so long as the music blasts, the fashion is displayed, and the interactions are flirtatious. The wild evening streets of Tehran offer a democratic lifestyle that Iranian youth can only enjoy after dark.

  The parties, gatherings, and social indulgences that the Iranian youth showed me could themselves fill the pages of this book. They showed me a face of Iran that I hadn’t known existed and the shared social activity that we experienced was an instant force that unified us. If one focuses on the parties and the social resistance it is easy to see the Iranian people as a tremendous asset for change in the Islamic Republic. But even if this passive resistance is the dominant characteristic of Iranian society, it does not tell the full story. There are those who chant “Death to America” and there are those who believe in the ideology of the Islamic Republic. While youth supportive of the regime are few and far between, there is one issue that seems to unify almost all Iranian people: the validity of Iran’s nuclear aspirations.

  CHAPTER 4

  NUCLEAR PRIDE

  IRAN, 2005

  I was freezing. Using my sweatshirt as a blanket, I curled up in the back of the old, unheated Russian Skoda. When I’d made the hasty decision to drive from southern Iran back to Tehran, I hadn’t anticipated a huge blizzard causing the trip to take at least three times as long as I’d thought it would. The blizzard led to massive congestion on the roads, and I struggled not to breathe in the thick black smoke from the line of cars and trucks in front of me.

  After what had to have been at least thirteen hours in traffic, my driver and I emerged from the blizzard. The snow had disappeared and I now found myself in the barren desert of central Iran; it seemed we were now the only car on the road. Out the right side of the car, I could see an endless horizon of sand, and on the left, a snowcapped mountain range. I had thought that from Esfahan it would be a drive with no stops until we reached the holy Shi’ite city of Qom. Instead, we made an unexpected stop in Natanz.

  I had nearly fallen asleep when my driver alerted me to an unusual attraction out the left window of the car. The car came to a brief stop as he pointed out his window: “Do you see this?” he asked me.

  I saw what looked like a power plant or some kind of factory. There were clusters of large buildings, smoke coming out of cylindrical structures, and a serious fence encircling the compound. The fence was lined with machine gun towers, each separated from the next by only a few dozen yards. In what seemed to be yet another layer of defense, I could see small bunkers with antiaircraft weapons pointed upward.

  The driver gave a small laugh.

  “This is what causes all of these problems,” he told me. To my left was the Natanz nuclear facility, the notorious site that had been exposed as a uranium enrichment plant capable of producing nuclear weapons.

  Despite all of the current controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear aspirations, the actual nuclear program is relatively old. The Iranian nuclear program is often talked about as if it were a new phenomenon, but it began as an American-supported project in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At the time, Iran was America’s principal ally in the region, aside from Israel. Throughout the early part of the Cold War, the United States had enjoyed a strong alliance with the Pahlavi monarchy in Iran and the Nuri al-Said monarchy in Iraq. When the Iraqi monarchy fell to a revolution in 1958, Iran was the last reliable ally among the predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East.

  When the United States worked with the shah to create the beginnings of the Iranian nuclear program, it was a task undertaken for a very different purpose from what is presumed to be the intention of today’s very different regime. In 1959, the shah established the Tehran Nuclear Research Center at the University of Tehran. Run by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, the facility became the country’s first and achieved operational capacity by 1967. The facility is built around its five-megawatt nuclear research reactor provided by the United States in 1967 as part of bilateral talks between the two countries.

  The following year, Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, in which Iran, along with other signatories, agreed to a wide range of issues ranging from disarmament and nonproliferation to the peaceful pursuit of nuclear energy. Under the auspices of the treaty, Iran has always been permitted to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, but the treaty forbids the pursuit of nuclear energy for military purposes.

  With America as his ally, the shah initially had no reason to pursue a militarily oriented nuclear program. Additionally, during the 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union also undertook policies based on détente, in which both parties at least appeared committed to nuclear arms reductions and some form of rapprochement. Despite détente, however, the shah still enjoyed the support of the United States for his nuclear aspirations. During the Nixon administration, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger envisioned an economically fruitful scheme that would use the allure of nuclear cooperation from private companies and the U.S. government to entice Iran to increase substantially its oil output. As a result, the shah began an ambitious plan to construct several nuclear facilities, using the current high oil prices and soliciting the help of willing American companies. In the late 1970s, President Carter called on the shah to relax his authoritarian grip on Iran and liberalize the economy, but this desire was viewed by many in the American government as separate from security interests in Iran.

  Iran negotiated a number of contracts with private companies and American universities for supplies, personnel, and training for its nuclear program. It was during this period that Iran signed a cooperation treaty with newly nuclear India. Development moved quickly as the shah solicited French and Chinese support for the construction of nuclear facilities in Esfahan and Bushehr. In the years leading up to the Islamic Revolution, the United States and Iran had been involved in negotiations that would provide Iran with facilities for uranium enrichment and fuel reprocessing, two capacities that are needed to produce nuclear weapons.

  Despite a change in the regime, a prolonged hostage crisis, and a war with Iraq, Iran continued development of its nuclear program under the auspices of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Not surprisingly, Iran under a new regime and led by Ayatollah Khomeini hardly had the sway with Western countries that the shah had enjoyed. In fact, Iran lost a number of its previous nuclear contracts with foreign governments and companies as a result of the Islamic Revolution.

  During its eight-year war with Iraq, Iran experienced major setbacks to its nuclear program. Iraqi air strikes throughout the war caused substantial damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities and made further progress impossible until they were repaired. While this was a setback, the government in Iran learned an important lesson about the distribution of its nuclear capabilities and drew on the Iran-Iraq War as its reason for constructing more clandestine and dispersed facilities.

  The Iranian nuclear program resumed in the mid-1990s with an agreement between Russia and Iran for development of the Bushehr facility and an agreement with China for a conversion plant. Iran’s specific nuclear activities were largely unknown throughout the latter part of the 1990s and it was not until a prominent Iranian dissident group blew the regime’s cover in August 2002 that the issue returned to the forefront of the news. Led by Alireza Jafarzadeh, the dissident group announced that Iran had two clandestine nuclear facilities, including a heavy water reactor in the town of Arak and a uranium enrichment facility in Natanz.

  In the time between the August 2002 announcement and my trip to Iran a few years later, the discussions and negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program had degenerated into a game of cat and mouse.
Germany, France, and the United Kingdom joined forces in what became known as the EU-3 to try and find a peaceful solution to the crisis. But as negotiations proceeded, new facilities were revealed in Iran and allegations of cheating and lying came from the United States.

  I entered Iran in the midst of a worsening nuclear crisis. Just three months before my arrival in Iran, the International Atomic Energy Agency—the principal international nuclear watchdog—had ordered Iran to halt preparations for large-scale uranium enrichment. Only months before I left for Iran, then–U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell had publicly declared Iran a growing danger and called for the United Nations to demonstrate resolve by sanctioning the Islamic Republic. Tensions were high.

  Now, as I sat in the back of the car, engine still running, staring at one of the centerpieces of the conflict, I was surprised by how visible it was. The Natanz nuclear facility is enormous, resting at the base of a small mountain range in the middle of the desert. Its dozens of buildings are a short walk by foot from the main road, and its perimeter is demarcated by what I estimated as upwards of one hundred machine-gun and antiaircraft towers. They’re not trying to hide it, that’s for sure.

  Back in Tehran, I couldn’t get the Natanz facility out of my mind. Why hadn’t I stayed longer to get a better look? Why hadn’t I asked my driver to take me to the city center of Natanz to talk to some of the young people there about the nuclear program? Why hadn’t I taken a picture to capture the memory? The answers to all these questions were stupidly obvious. I had no interest in starting off the New Year in an Iranian prison.