AHMAD BAKR HATED ISRAEL as much as Hezbollah did. Even so, Bakr did not enjoy coming to the Bekaa. Bakr was Saudi, and like most Saudis, he was a Sunni Muslim. Hezbollah’s members were Shia, followers of the other major branch of Islam.
Both types of Muslims agreed that the Quran was the word of Allah. But unlike the Sunni, the Shia revered early Muslim rulers as “imams,” nearly godlike figures. They eagerly awaited the return of the twelfth imam, whose arrival would herald the End of Days. To conservative Sunnis like Bakr, the Shia belief in the twelfth imam amounted to idol worship — a serious offense against Islam.
But when he was in Lebanon, Bakr kept his views to himself. He was simply being practical. In the Bekaa, Hezbollah served as judge, jury, and executioner. And Bakr ran a jihadi training camp in the Bekaa that needed the group’s approval to exist.
To get that approval, Bakr had met nine months earlier with a Hezbollah general at a farm near Baalbek, the dusty town that served as the group’s headquarters. A friendly Saudi intelligence agent arranged the meeting. “I can guarantee you safe passage,” the agent said. “After that, it’s up to you.”
The next day, Bakr flew to Beirut. As he’d been instructed, he rented a car and attached a red strip of tape to the trunk. He drove to Baalbek and parked in the lot beside the Roman ruins that loomed over the town. The site included the remnants of the Temple of Jupiter, a giant Roman shrine. The temple’s columns stood seventy feet tall and were mounted on one-thousand-ton stone blocks. But the ruins left Bakr cold. To him, they were just another site for idol worship, like the golden-domed shrines in Iraq where the Shia buried their martyrs. He would have been happier if they were all blown to rubble.
A few minutes after he parked, a black Toyota 4Runner stopped beside him. A man in a long-sleeved black shirt and black pants knocked on his window. The man frisked him and waved him into the 4Runner. Bakr wondered if he’d be blindfolded, but no one seemed overly concerned. These men didn’t need to protect themselves, not here. Attacking Hezbollah in the Bekaa was a fool’s errand. The Israelis had tried in 2006. Even with their planes and missiles, they hadn’t touched the group’s leaders. Hezbollah had come away from that war stronger than ever.
The Toyota headed north. A few minutes later, it turned east onto a rough dirt road with vineyards on both sides. The road dead-ended at a concrete wall that protected a massive beige house, three stories high, with balconies and turrets and a green Hezbollah flag flapping from a pole. A golden-domed mosque, a miniature version of the shrines in Iraq, stood beside the building. The 4Runner stopped at a black gate guarded by two militiamen. They saluted as the gate swung open.
THE HEZBOLLAH GENERAL WAS a small man with deep-set brown eyes. In his cream-colored shirt and gray slacks, he could have passed for a Beirut businessman, except for the long white scar that hooked around his neck. He had nearly died in a 1996 car bombing that had been blamed on both the Israelis and the Syrians. He sat on the house’s back balcony, looking out over the garden, where an old man tended to scraggly tomato plants and a half-dozen lemon trees. “Coffee?”
“Please.”
The general poured them both cups. The sun had disappeared, and the balcony was pleasantly warm. Aside from the scrape of the gardener’s shovel on the soil, the house was silent.
“You’ve come a long way,” the general said.
“Not so far. Thank you for seeing me.” For the next few minutes, Bakr explained what he wanted. When he was finished, the general put a hand on Bakr’s shoulder.
“Where will these men operate?”
“Not Iran or Lebanon.”
“Of course not. And not Israel, either. Any action against Israel comes on our own terms.”
“Not Israel. Iraq.” By the time Hezbollah found out he had lied, it wouldn’t matter. “We have the same enemy there.”
“Yes. Still, what you want, it’s very expensive.”
“Tell me.”
“Two hundred thousand dollars.”
Bakr had expected a much higher price. “That’s fine.”
“Every month.”
These Shia thieves, Bakr thought. Two hundred thousand dollars a month for a broken-down farmhouse and land too rocky even to grow hashish? But he didn’t have a choice. He planned to house as many as forty men, and he wanted room for practice with small arms and explosives, and maybe even more important, the high-powered rocket-propelled grenades that could defeat armored vehicles. In all, he figured he had to have at least two thousand acres with an absolute guarantee that he wouldn’t be disturbed, which meant he needed government or quasi-government protection. The only other options were the Sudan or maybe the Algerian desert. Lonely, inhospitable places. The Bekaa would serve him far better, and Lebanon and the Kingdom were connected by highways and nonstop flights.
“I can’t afford that.”
“How much, then?”
“A hundred thousand.”
They compromised on one hundred fifty thousand dollars, and both sides kept the bargain. Bakr transferred the money faithfully each month, one numbered Swiss account to another. In turn, the militia never bothered his men and ensured that the handful of Lebanese police and army units in the Bekaa also stayed away.
The camp had taken three months to build. It included a one-story concrete barracks and dirt-covered berms where Bakr’s men could practice wiring and blowing bombs without disturbing the neighbors. It lay in the barren northern end of the valley, on the western side, in the foothills of the Qornet as-Sawda, the highest mountain in Lebanon, more than ten thousand feet. At first glance, it didn’t look like much, a couple buildings, a couple trailers. But with Al Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan long since obliterated, it was the largest and most sophisticated training center for jihad anywhere in the world.
AHMAD BAKR STOOD AN inch short of six feet. Serving in the National Guard for eight years had given him a soldier’s broad shoulders. He was relatively dark for a Saudi, more brown than tan. He’d grown up in Tathlith, a speck of a town in southwestern Saudi Arabia. Even within the Kingdom, the area was known for its religious fervor. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on September 11 were Saudi. Of those, eleven had come from the southwestern corner of the Kingdom.
The eldest son of a tribal chief, Bakr had been known for his religious fervor, even as a child. He had memorized the entire Quran before he turned twelve. He woke at dawn to pray and fasted each Ramadan without complaint.
The incident that sealed his belief came just before his seventeenth birthday. A few months before, his father had given him a Toyota Land Cruiser, a monstrous old beast with twenty-inch wheels and a raised chassis. He spent his days rumbling through the desert northeast of Tathlith. Nuri, his cousin and best friend, trailed behind him in a pickup. Bakr raced up the dunes, his wide tires kicking up clouds of sand, the Land Cruiser’s engine growling. As he grew more experienced, he changed the Land Cruiser’s gearing so he’d have even more torque at low speeds. He sought out the steepest dunes, ones that other boys avoided.
And then, in empty desert one hundred fifty kilometers from Tathlith, Bakr came upon the biggest dune he had ever seen, more than one hundred meters high. It soared out of the desert, its sand glistening. It changed color as Bakr rolled closer, darkening from neon white to a cooler clay. Bakr gunned his engine and rolled up the sandy ridge that formed the side of the dune. Halfway up, he stopped. Beyond this point, the ridge turned too steep to attack directly. To reach the top he would need to cut across the center of the dune, zigzagging across its face. Nuri pulled up beside him, jumped out of the pickup.
“It’s too steep, cousin. And too soft. You’ll get stuck.”
“Then you’ll drag me out.”
“Don’t—”
Bakr gunned the engine, ignoring his cousin’s pleas, and plunged across the dune.
He’d gone less than one hundred meters when he realized that Nuri was right. The dune was too tall and steep, its sand too fine. Even with the Land Cruiser’s ma
ssive tires, he lost his grip. The truck slowed, kicking up clouds of dust. Bakr downshifted into second, floored the engine. His tires caught, and the Toyota lurched forward. Bakr feathered the steering wheel, turned right, cutting across the dune to regain speed. Then he hit another soft patch and sank into the sand and came almost to a halt.
On the dunes, momentum was the only way to survive. On a slope this steep, the sand under Bakr’s downhill tires would cave as soon as he stopped moving. In seconds, he would be rolling sideways. He wouldn’t stop until he hit the bowl at the base of the dune. By then the Toyota would be a steel pancake, with him as filling. Worst case, he would trigger a sandslide that would envelop him. Neither he nor the truck would ever be found.
The engine knocked. Bakr downshifted again. He was in first now, no more gears left. With no alternative, he slammed the truck into reverse, floored the gas, and spun the steering wheel hard left. His best chance was to point the truck downward and then race down the dune. He’d be stuck in the soft sand at the bottom, for sure. The Land Cruiser would be a loss. No way could Nuri winch it out. But he had no choice.
The engine roared. His tires gripped the sand. The nose of the Land Cruiser pulled right, giving Bakr an extraordinary view down the face of the dune. Rivulets poured down from his tires. Bakr feathered the gas and rode backward up the dune as if Allah himself were tugging him free. Save me now and I am your servant for eternity, he thought—
He popped the clutch, grabbed the gearstick, and slammed the truck into first—
But as he did, a slab of sand broke under his front tires and the Land Cruiser’s front end lurched down. The back wheels came off the ground—
And even before Bakr registered what was happening, the Land Cruiser began to flip, tail over nose over tail, eight loops in all, before coming to rest right side up.
The back of the truck was crushed. Yet the front somehow survived. The windshield pillars were intact, though the glass itself had popped out halfway up the dune. Sand filled half of the passenger compartment, covering Bakr to his waist. But his only real injury was the broken nose he had suffered when his face slammed into the steering wheel.
Bakr unbuckled his belt and drove his shoulder into the door to pop it open. Sand plunged out of the Toyota and rejoined the desert. Bakr stepped down, took one shaky step, another. Then he began to run, his legs pumping, slipping, kicking up sand, blood streaming over his chin. He looked up at the unbroken blue sky. Still alive. Hamdulillah. Thanks be to God.
For the rest of his life, Bakr would remember that moment as “the calling.” He knew he wasn’t a prophet. Muhammad was the last prophet, and only an infidel would think otherwise. But he had no doubt that Allah had saved him that day in the desert. Allah had heard his prayer. Bakr would never forget the vow he’d taken. Save me now and I am your servant for eternity.
A PROMISE THAT LEFT the question of what exactly Bakr had been called to do. But he didn’t need long to figure out the answer. In August 1990, five years before “the calling,” Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. The little sheikhdom was Iraq’s nineteenth province, Saddam said. He was putting it in its rightful place. Kuwait had even more oil per capita than did Saudi Arabia, and as a rule, Kuwaitis didn’t enjoy manual labor, including the labor of defending their borders. They fled even before Saddam’s tanks arrived.
The Iraqi attack terrified the House of Saud, too. The Kingdom’s army was hardly more capable than its Kuwaiti counterpart. If Saddam decided that eastern Saudi Arabia was actually Iraq’s twentieth province, the Kingdom couldn’t stop him.
But the United States could. And the United States preferred the Saud family to Saddam. A half-million American troops headed to the Saudi desert. As he would twelve years later, Saddam dared the United States to attack. The result was a butt-whupping that brought to mind nothing so much as a one-round Mike Tyson knockout. The ground war to force Iraq out of Kuwait began in January 1991. It also ended in January 1991. The hostilities lasted four days before Saddam’s supposedly mighty armies fled.
The United States didn’t bother to chase them. America would later regret that decision. But at the time it seemed like the safest course. With the war over, oil prices dropped. The Kuwaitis came home from the exile they’d endured at five-star hotels in London. New York City threw a ticker-tape parade. Then everyone more or less forgot that the Gulf War had ever happened. Except for Saddam. And a few million Saudis.
MUHAMMAD DIED IN THE Arabian town of Medina on June 8, 632 A.D., two decades after bringing Islam to the world. In the years that followed, the men who had prayed with him wrote down everything he had said for posterity. His words were collected in books of hadith, or narrations. The hadith are not part of the Quran, which Muslims consider the actual word of God. But they are vital nonetheless. One of the most important came on Muhammad’s deathbed, when he decreed that “two religions should not exist together in the peninsula of the Arabs.”
In practice, the hadith has never been strictly enforced. Tens of thousands of Christians work in Saudi Arabia, although they are not supposed to pray inside the Kingdom. But the flood of American soldiers onto Saudi soil in 1990 was an incitement that conservative Muslims could not ignore. The presence of hundreds of thousands of infidels, including many women, ran against the express wishes of the prophet. Clerics all over Saudi Arabia turned their anger against the United States. When some soldiers remained in the Kingdom even after the Gulf War ended, the clerics grew even more infuriated.
Tathlith lay almost a thousand miles from the American bases. But at Bakr’s mosque, the local cleric — a man named Farouk, one of Bakr’s eleven uncles — preached about the threat the Americans posed as if their tanks were just over the horizon. Every Friday at noon, he explained that the United States always sided with the Jews against Islam. American weapons enabled the Israelis to control the Palestinians and occupy land that belonged to Muslims. In fact, the Jews ran the United States. Because of them, America had a hundred nuclear missiles pointed at Mecca. Only Allah’s divine strength stopped them from vaporizing the Grand Mosque and Kaaba.
Farouk didn’t limit his criticism to the United States. Clerics in the Kingdom were not supposed to attack the royal family, which spent billions of dollars supporting mosques and religious schools. To make sure that the clerics were staying in line, the Ministry of Islamic Affairs sent monitors to the Friday sermons. But like many clerics, Farouk had tired of princes who gambled and whored and drank their way across Europe. During sermons, he avoided talking about the royal family. But afterward, in the mosque’s back offices, he made sure his followers knew his opinion. The House of Saud failed to follow Islamic law. To preserve their power, the princes had violated Muhammad’s hadith and had accepted Crusaders on sacred Arabian soil.
Under these circumstances, jihad to restore Islam to its rightful place was not merely a choice but an obligation. The Saud family, the puppets of the United States, could not be allowed to rule Mecca and Medina forever.
Bakr had heard these sermons for years before his near-death experience on the dune. He never questioned them. Why would he? Aside from a few trips to Mecca and Medina, he rarely left Tathlith. Nearly all his closest friends were also blood relatives. He had been raised to accept the word of his father without question, and to venerate Farouk for his knowledge of the Quran.
The Friday after Allah saved him, Bakr visited his uncle and explained what had happened in the desert. The bridge of his broken nose throbbed as he told the story.
“And you say the car flipped eight times.”
“I don’t count them, but that’s what Nuri said, yes. Is it a sign, uncle?”
“Have you had any dreams since then?” Observant Muslims took dreams seriously as potential signals from Allah. In this, they followed the example of Muhammad, who was often guided by dreams.
“Yes, uncle.”
“Tell me, then.”
“In one, I’m riding a horse over the desert. I want the horse to tu
rn, but it won’t. It rides faster than any horse ever has. Then it throws me. But I’m not hurt. I land on the sand. I’m lost, but I’m not afraid. I see a flock of sheep and follow them. Then the desert turns into a highway. In the distance I see a stone, black like the Kaaba. The sheep run ahead, but a truck smashes them. The driver is made of glass. Beside him is a demon with yellow eyes. The truck bears down on me. And then — well, then I woke.”
“You’re trying to reach the Kaaba. But the corruption of our rulers stops you. It makes perfect sense.”
“So everything that’s happened, it’s part of a plan?”
“You’ve been chosen. There’s no other explanation.”
You’ve been chosen. The words everyone one day hopes to hear. For a Muslim boy living almost in the shadow of Mecca, to be chosen by Allah was a blessing too rich to bear. Bakr’s blood avalanched through him.
“Then what’s my next step, uncle?” Bakr expected to be told that he should go to Afghanistan, join the jihad there.
Instead, his uncle sketched out a very different path.
AT TWENTY, BAKR JOINED the National Guard — the one-hundred-thousand-man militia that served as the Saud family’s private fighting force. For the next eight years, he served ably, getting the military training he knew he would need. He kept his fundamentalist views concealed. To his superiors, he was a devout Muslim but a loyal Saudi.
Meantime, he quietly looked for men who might one day prove useful in his quest. The mukhabarat closely watched the National Guard. Bakr knew that being identified as hostile to the regime would land him in prison for decades. Nonetheless, he connected with soldiers and officers who shared his views.
Eight years passed. Then, on a spring morning, as Bakr napped in his two-room apartment in the National Guard barracks outside Mecca, a knock woke him. He opened the door to see two military police officers. “Captain Bakr? Please come with us. And leave your sidearm.”
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