Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  A few days later, I went to see Ibrahim Lousha, the torturer on the video. He was being held by one of the brigades in Misurata, about two hours from Tripoli, in a battered old government building. I was led to a big empty room and told to wait, and then suddenly there he was, looking like a mere child as he slumped in a chair. He wore gray sweat pants and a blue V-neck sweater and flip-flops. He had big eyes and a buzz cut, a morose expression on his face. He sat with his hands together in his lap, his left leg bouncing restlessly. The Misurata brigade had become infamous for the torture of Qaddafi loyalists in recent months, but Lousha said he was treated well. No one was monitoring us, aside from a bored-looking guard across the room.

  He was twenty years old, he said, the son of a Tripoli policeman. When I asked him about the torture at Yarmouk, Lousha answered numbly: beatings, electricity, other methods. “We didn’t give them water every day,” he said. “We brought them piss.” Whose? “Our piss. In bottles. Also we gave them a Muammar poster and made them pray on it.” I asked if he was ordered to do these things. He said no, that he and the fellow guards came up with these ideas while drinking liquor and smoking hashish. Wasn’t that an insult to Islam, to make people pray to Qaddafi, I asked. “We didn’t think about it,” he said. He told me that on the day of the massacre, a commander named Muhammad Mansour arrived late in the afternoon and ordered the guards to kill all the prisoners in the hangar. Then he left without saying anything about why they were to be killed or where the order originated. “We looked at each other,” Lousha said. “And then I got the grenades.” He spoke in monosyllables, and I had to press him constantly for more details. “The other guards had the grenades. I told them, ‘Give the grenades to me.’” He threw two into the hangar, one after the other, and the door blew open. He could hear the screams of the dying prisoners. I asked him what he thought about after he went home to his parents and siblings. He had made no effort to escape. “I was thinking about everything that happened,” he said, his face as expressionless as ever. “The whole disaster, the killing. I was thinking between me and God.”

  The next time I saw Nasser, he proudly announced to me that their brigade was not just some freelance unit but officially recognized by the government. It turns out this is true of dozens of rebel bands in Libya, though all it means is that they have sent their names to the Interior Ministry, which has offered them the chance to apply for positions in the country’s new security services. The recruits are mostly being directed to the National Guard, a newly formed body—free of the taint of Qaddafi’s goon squads—that is housed in an old police academy building in Tripoli. I drove there on an April morning and found thousands of men standing outside in the sun. All of them were thuwar, and they were waiting to be paid. The transitional government decided in March to pay each rebel about $1,900 ($3,100 for married men). Anyone could sign up, and so 80,000 men registered as thuwar in Tripoli alone. One man waiting in line told me, “If we’d really had this many people fighting Qaddafi, the war would have lasted a week, not eight months.” It is lucky for Libya that the oil fields did not burn and enough crude is being pumped and sold to keep the thuwar happy.

  Inside the building, I was led into an upstairs room that resembled a hotel suite, with plush carpets and curtains and bright green walls. On the walls were old maps used by the border patrol during the Qaddafi era. After a few minutes, a middle-aged man named Ali Nayab sat down and introduced himself as the deputy head of the new National Guard. He was a fighter pilot in the old Libyan Air Force, he told me, but was jailed for seven years for his role in a 1988 coup plot (he had intended to fly his jet, Kamikaze-style, into Qaddafi’s villa). “I really didn’t want to die,” Nayab said, “but I would have if that was the only way to get Qaddafi.” When I asked about integrating the thuwar into the National Guard, he smiled apologetically and explained that the guard had not been able to do anything yet for the men who signed up. They were still waiting for the transitional government to make decisions. The men, meanwhile, were sitting at home or working with their brigades. “The result is a big void between the transitional government and the thuwar. They are starting to feel frustrated.” Nayab also conceded that some brigade commanders were reluctant to give up the power they had acquired. Many were nobodies before the revolution, and now they command the respect due to a warlord. The longer the current vacuum lasts, the more entrenched these men may become, making it harder for a new national government to enforce its writ.

  One of those commanders is now holding Hamza Hirazi, the officer who oversaw the massacre at the Yarmouk prison. I was eager to talk to him, because no one had yet been able to explain to me one of the central mysteries of the terrible massacres that took place in Yarmouk and other places in the last days of Qaddafi’s regime. As Tripoli was clearly falling to the rebels, the loyalists killed Omar Salhoba and the others on August 23 and 24. Why? And who gave the orders?

  The man guarding Hirazi runs a large brigade of men from the Nafusah Mountains, three hours southwest of Tripoli. His name is Eissa Gliza, and his brigade is based in one of Tripoli’s wealthiest neighborhoods, in a flamboyant villa that used to belong to Qaddafi’s sons. Before the revolution, Gliza was a construction contractor, he told me. Now he commands 1,100 men. When I arrived on a Tuesday morning, he was sitting at his desk in an opulent office, watching a gigantic TV screen. A warm breeze blew in from the Mediterranean, which glittered in the sun a few hundred yards away. Gliza is a powerfully built man of fifty, with thick greasy hair and a stubbly beard. He looked sweaty and tired. As we made small talk, the guards outside got into a screaming match, and then one of them threw a punch and the others pinned him down. Gliza ignored it. He held out his cell phone, showing me a series of sickening videos of men being beaten and tortured by Qaddafi loyalists. “It’s a shame they’re still alive, after what they did,” he said. I asked about a meeting with Hirazi. Gliza said he would try to arrange something, but it wasn’t easy. There had been two attempts on Hirazi’s life already, he said. He was moving Hirazi around constantly. I asked if the government had expressed any interest in Hirazi, given his prominent role under Qaddafi. “The government?” Gliza said with contempt. “They are interested in business and oil. They are the sons of Qatar. They are being directed by Sheika Mozah”—a wife of the emir of Qatar. “They have not seen the front line.”

  On the television, there was an announcement that the head of Libya’s Transitional National Council, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, had threatened to use force to quell a battle going on between two towns in western Libya. Gliza laughed dismissively. “Who? Who will use force?” he said. “Three days ago they went to Zuwarah and said, ‘We’re the national army, we want to go to the front line.’ They didn’t stay one hour. One of them pissed his pants. They say 35,000 men have joined the national army. I tell you, if all 35,000 came here, they could not get past our 200 men. Until there’s a true government, no one will give up power.”

  Not long afterward, an old man walked into the office, dressed in a djellaba, with a long white beard and a skullcap on his head, holding a cane. He began complaining that Gliza and his men were behaving as if they owned the entire neighborhood. They were giving out brigade ID cards to Africans and letting them wander all over the place, demanding money for cleaning people’s cars. The old man’s voice rose to a shout, and his thin arms shook with rage. “What gives you the right to issue IDs?” he went on. “These are not even Libyans!” Gliza shouted right back at him, saying the neighbors should be grateful. It went on for twenty minutes at earsplitting volume, each accusing the other of not showing proper respect, until finally the old man seemed to deflate and hobbled out the door.

  Perhaps the most potent evidence of Libya’s power vacuum is at the borders. In early April, fighting broke out between two bands of thuwar near the western town Zuwarah. The smuggling trade is lucrative, and a similar fight over the country’s southern borders had left about 150 people dead the previous week. When I arrived in Zuwarah, two
days after my visit with Gliza, it was a war zone. The earth shook with mortar blasts, and I recognized the rapid-fire thumping of antiaircraft guns. A man who called himself the spokesman of the local military council offered to drive me to the front line. He said 14 people from Zuwarah had been killed that day, and another 126 wounded. We drove along Zuwarah’s main street, where the buildings were pocked with bullet holes. At the edge of town, the road was clustered with cars and pickup trucks mounted with guns. Two shipping containers marked the start of no-man’s land. Beyond it, the road rose to a dusty hilltop and disappeared from sight. One rebel, a handsome twenty-three-year-old named Ayoub Sufyan who carried a rifle over his shoulder, shouted into my ear in English over the din of the guns: “The government says they sent the national army. Have you seen one of them? After they kidnapped twenty-five of our men, we said that’s enough. We told the government: ‘If you want to help us, fine. If not, we go alone.’ As youngsters, we don’t believe this is our government anymore.”

  A few hundred yards away, just beyond artillery range, I found some of Libya’s best-known rebel commanders standing by the roadside in a state of confusion. Some said they represented the Interior Ministry, others the Defense Ministry, still others the Libya Shield border patrol. Among them was Mokhtar al-Akhdar, the famous leader of the Zintan brigade, which until recently controlled Tripoli’s airport. He seemed born to play the part of a rebel, with chiseled features and a stoic expression, a scarf wrapped elegantly around his head. I asked him what he was doing here. “We’re not fighting,” he said. “We are the revolutionaries of Libya. We want to solve the problem. Both sides here are accusing each other, and we are determined to solve the problem.”

  The violence continued, and the following day, Jalal drove out to a town near Zuwarah to attend a meeting of a group called the Wise Men’s Council. It was held in an old hotel on the seaside, in a conference room with a vast rectangular table set with miniature Libyan flags and bottles of water for each speaker. A series of older men wearing traditional white robes spoke about the lack of any government authority and the inability of any rebel leaders to stop the violence in Zuwarah. They reached no consensus, and after an hour, they began to get up and leave. “This council is useless,” Jalal said as we drove back to Tripoli in his Land Cruiser. “The elders have no control over the street. Not like they used to. We need to speak to youth in language they understand. Some people are here for personal gain. I’m just here because my friends were burned and killed.”

  One morning in early April, Nasser told me, his frustration with Marwan reached a boiling point. He had spent months talking to him, asking him why he killed his brother, demanding more details about Omar’s final days, trying to understand how, if the war was over, the execution of his brother had come to pass. “I see Marwan as such a cold person,” Nasser told me later. “He was the head of the snake. Of all the guards, he insisted on following orders. The others didn’t want to kill. He was so emotionless and still is. I wanted to see: Is he the same person when he sees his family?”

  So Nasser called Marwan’s father and invited him to come see his son. For the last six months, the family stayed away out of fear that the thuwar would take revenge on them all. On the following Friday, eight of them showed up at the base in Tajoura. Nasser greeted them at the door and led them downstairs. “It was a very emotional moment,” Nasser said. “You can imagine how I felt when I saw my brother’s killer embracing his brother.” The two brothers hugged each other for a long time, sobbing, until finally Nasser pushed them apart, because he could not bear it anymore. Later, he took one of the cousins aside and asked him if he knew why Marwan was being held. The man said no. “I told him: ‘Your cousin killed six very qualified people whom Libya will need, two doctors and four officers. One of them was my brother.’ “The cousin listened, and then he hugged Nasser before the family left.

  For Nasser, the family meeting was a revelation. “He was very emotional,” he said of Marwan. “His sister loves him; his brother loves him. You see him with them, and it’s such a contrast with this cold killer.” He seemed comforted by this, less burdened, though he could not say exactly why. He told me that he now felt that he understood Marwan a little better, even if his crime remained a mystery.

  On the following Friday, Marwan’s father returned, this time with two relatives. Nasser helped them carry crates of food—yogurt, fruit, homebaked biscuits—down to Marwan’s cell. When Nasser came back upstairs, Marwan’s father was standing by the door. He went straight up to Nasser and looked him sorrowfully in the eye. “He embraced me and kissed me on the forehead,” Nasser said. “So he must know.”

  Two days later, as we talked in his office, Nasser asked me: “What’s the definition of revenge? To make the family of the person who did it feel what my family felt? I could have killed Marwan at any time, nobody would have known. But I don’t want to betray the blood of our martyrs. We want a country of laws.” He picked up the files on his desk and put them into his cabinet. He seemed preoccupied, as though he were trying to convince himself of something. He rubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray and turned to me again. “Besides,” he said, “where is the honor in taking revenge on a prisoner?”

  I couldn’t be sure exactly what was motivating Nasser in his long struggle with Marwan. Certainly, part of it was anger, which has not subsided and possibly never will. But the long months of interrogations had given him an unexpected solace, too, a chance to get to know his brother better and to sift through his own failings. “I keep asking the prisoners small details, like how many times he was beaten, what he talked about, how he seemed,” Nasser told me. “How he used to get into fights, demanding proper medical attention for the other inmates. Whenever they were tortured, they would be brought to his cell so he could treat them.” Nasser had been moved by the stories he heard of his brother’s bravery. Once, Omar paid a guard to take a prescription notice to a pharmacy. He had written a plea for help on the note, in English. But the woman at the pharmacy simply translated the note for the guard, who went straight back to Yarmouk and beat Omar severely. Omar kept on trying, sending notes to colleagues who either could not, or would not, help.

  One thing in particular was haunting Nasser. According to the prisoners, Omar had talked a lot about Nasser in jail, saying he was sure his brother would rescue him if he could. “I feel such remorse I wasn’t able to help him,” Nasser said again and again. He told a long story about a well-connected soldier he’d known, who might have been able to do something if he had pushed him hard enough. He said he hadn’t seen Omar during the last days before the arrest, and now he chastised himself, imagining alternative endings. “I would’ve done anything, even gone to the front for Qaddafi’s people, if that would have saved my brother,” Nasser told me. “At the end of the day, it’s what’s inside you that counts.” But he didn’t sound convinced.

  Nasser didn’t stop with the recent past. He reviewed his whole life for me, trying to understand where he went wrong. He was always the family’s bad angel, he said, a prodigal son. Omar was the conscientious one. He returned to Libya after a decade abroad in 2009, telling friends that he was ashamed of Libya’s backwardness and eager to help out. He brought back books about Qaddafi written by dissidents and a conviction that the country needed to change. At the time, Nasser told me, he thought his brother was being naїve. Now he understood he was right. It was as if Omar had become a screen onto which Nasser’s own failures were projected: the lies, the cowardly survival mechanisms that come with living under a dictatorship. I had the sense that Nasser was struggling to learn from his brother, and in an odd way, trying in turn to teach something to Marwan. After Marwan’s family left, Nasser went downstairs and spoke to him. “I said, ‘Look what I did, and look what you did,’” Nasser told me. “‘You killed my brother, and I arranged for you to see your family.’”

  Omar’s life cast a similar shadow onto other people. One was his closest colleague, a doctor named Mahfou
d Ghaddour. Omar’s fellow prisoners from Yarmouk told me he was always trying to contact Ghaddour, whom he saw as a possible savior. In fact, Ghaddour was aware that Omar was being held in Yarmouk—one of the frantic messages Omar sent from the prison got through to him—and yet he did nothing. Ghaddour told me so himself, during a long talk in his office at the hospital. “I started looking in that place,” he said, “using contacts with people in the government. But it was somewhat difficult. They started changing their mobile phones. I had difficulty getting help.”

  Ghaddour said this with a wincing half smile. I found it impossible to believe. I knew other people who got relatives out of Yarmouk. As a prominent doctor, Ghaddour had plenty of contacts he could have called on. And even if he failed, he could at least have told Omar’s family, or his in-laws, who were desperate to know where he was being held. Ghaddour must have sensed my skepticism. He continued with a long, rambling narrative in which he tried to blame other people for not rescuing Omar from the prison and talked at length about how dangerous it was in Tripoli at that time. But there was something pained and apologetic about his manner, as if he were groping toward a confession. He cared about Omar but did not want to make trouble for his own family. He had done what so many others had done in Qaddafi’s Libya—kept his head down and let others take the risks. These are the survivors in Libya, the ones who adapted to a place where fear was the only law. Most of the brave ones are dead.