by Jamal Naji
When she started talking, I felt she hadn’t forgotten about what I did in Paris, despite the passing of so many years. But the way she addressed me had changed. Instead of getting worked up, she was calm, and sober, and wise. She said to me, “I expected this to happen one day, for the sin only dies when the sinner dies.”
“But I have repented,” I said. “Truly repented!”
She sighed. “Repentance is between you and God. As for sin, it follows its owner like a vicious shadow.”
I became annoyed. “I came to you for help, not to be scolded!”
She looked into my eyes as if she wanted to crawl inside them and said, “You do not love al-Walid. Maybe you wish he would die.”
She shocked me with that. “Would I wish for my own son, who I gave birth to, to die?!” I said in protest and disapproval. “Why would I?”
“Even if he did die, your sin will only die when you die,” she said.
I calmed myself and said, “Fine. What should I do about this affliction named Sari?”
She answered after a pause, “Your husband is dead. Al-Walid is far away from you. Your father can’t see. What is troubling you?”
I didn’t receive one bit of comfort from what she said, and when I said goodbye and was on my way out, I heard her say, “If that fellow Sari comes back, call the police.”
Sometimes I experienced incidents I could not understand or explain, and they complicated my problems even more. When my mother uttered the word “police,” the image of that sheikh I had seen on the steps of the mosque with Sheikh Abu Muhsin popped into my mind – the short sheikh with the beard and the white head wrap.
Once again I had the feeling it wasn’t just some passerby I had seen at the door to the mosque. He was part of some bigger story.
So who was he?
Abu Hudhayfah
This is your will, Lord of the Worlds. To You belongs praise and gratitude. And You are the master over all things.
During our raid on the western sector, in which we confronted the Syrian regime soldiers, Commander Al-Thuqafy was martyred.
Glory to God. The eloquent speech he gave before we set out for the western sector was his last speech in this world.
What pained me was that we were unable to retrieve his pure body and bring it back with us when we withdrew, for he was martyred deep inside a congregation of enemy tanks – he and nine of the mujahideen he chose to accompany him in the front line. The regime forces closed in on them and got the better of them after the mujahideen killed several of the enemy in that violent and vicious battle.
Even though I envied him the blessing of martyrdom, I felt the major loss we suffered as a result. He was our chief commander, after all, who directed our incursions, and the one who negotiated our relationship with the high command, and from whom we derived strength, determination, and fortitude.
But God the Almighty chose him to be by His side, and there is no complaint against the judgment of God, who is most glorious.
When we returned to our camp, the unexpected happened. The car of the financial officer, who came by about once a month, entered the camp, followed by the car of one of the high commanders, which also had three masked men inside. Sharhabil and three leaders from the jihadi groups in the camps were waiting for them. They all went together to the tent of the martyr Al-Thuqafy, entered it, and closed themselves inside.
The other matter that threw me off balance was that before we got back to the camp, the mujahid Darrar al-Ghoury had been the target of an assassination attempt that he barely survived. And he lost his ability to speak as a result.
They finished their meeting and came out of the tent. We were all congregated around Darrar al-Ghoury. The financial officer stood among us and asked for God’s mercy for our great martyr Al-Thuqafy and for all of our martyrs. Then one of the masked men by the name of Abu Ibada came forward, announcing that he had come as a representative of the high command. Abu Ibada began talking without removing the covering over his mouth. He praised God for His judgment, and for His choice, which fell upon one of our noblest leaders on the battlefield. Then he reminded us of the unlawfulness of salat al-janaza (burial prayers) or al-gha’ib (in absentia prayers) for the martyr killed by the infidels, because our noble Prophet ordered the martyrs of the Battle of Uhud to be buried in their blood; He did not wash them or pray over them.
After Abu Ibada recited the fatiha for the souls of our martyrs, while we silently recited it along with him, he said that our high commanders were in a constant state of vigilance over our battle against falsehood, and that they assigned as replacement for any commander a host of new commanders from among the best mujahideen. He promised God to avenge the martyr Commander Al-Thuqafy and the rest of our martyrs. Then Abu Ibada said that the leadership of the camp had now been entrusted to the mujahid Sharhabil, based on an emergency decision taken by the high command immediately upon hearing the news of Al-Thuqafy’s martyrdom.
His voice was muffled because of the mask, but I heard everything he said. I felt comfortable with their choice of Sharhabil as commander of our camp, so I approached him and gave him a congratulatory embrace. And everyone else did the same.
Sharhabil seemed different this time. He stood up straight, and the features of his face were missing their familiar shadows, making him appear serious and tense, especially when he carried out his interrogation of what happened with Darrar.
Darrar al-Ghoury
My wounds healed and I recovered my ability to speak, with God’s help, so I thanked my Lord, and performed two prostrations, praising Him for the blessing of healing.
I learned that Sharhabil had become the camp’s commander, and I remembered that wretch Sari. All my worries and doubts came back to me.
Certainly Sari was the one who’d sent that conspirator to kill me. I no longer had any doubt.
Maybe he found out that Sharhabil had not been martyred, that I had lied to him and failed to carry out my mission, and so he wanted to get rid of me.
Sari had a very long reach. I certainly was in the best position to know that. And it wasn’t far-fetched for him to find out I hadn’t died and send someone to try to kill me again. Then again, it would have been possible for whoever tried to kill me to kill Sharhabil; he was Sari’s real target, not me.
I thought and thought, and then an idea flashed in my mind like a bolt of lightning: Sari believed Sharhabil was dead and now he wanted to get rid of me in order to cover his tracks.
Either way, Sari wanted to kill me – whether I killed Sharhabil or not.
How wicked was that creature! How vile!
I no longer had a place among the mujahideen. At any moment Sari could betray me in his way, or send someone to kill me. And besides, I wanted to escape these straits I had put myself in; I was neither with the mujahideen in heart and soul, nor was I against them. O God! How difficult was my position! And O God, how I wished I had died when the bullets hit my chest and my head! At least I would have been saved from this torture which was the worst kind of torture in the world.
When I told Commander Sharhabil about my desire to go back home, he appeared surprised. He tried to make me change my mind. When I insisted, he said, “No one compels a mujahid to put his faith in his religion except his conscience and his obligation to the religious duties of the Law of God, the Almighty, the Exalted. Each has his own circumstances and excuses.”
Then, squeezing my hand, he said, “We will talk before you return to your home.”
I was bent on returning to Jordan. I had something to do there after what had happened to me.
But I didn’t expect Commander Sharhabil to agree so easily.
Abu Hudhayfah
Darrar surprised us with his decision to return to his family and home.
Commander Sharhabil said to him, “Could it be that you’re frightened after being shot by the enemy?”
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“Yes,” Darrar said. “I am frightened . . . Frightened I will die from an assassination and not as a martyr for the sake of God.”
“It’s OK, Darrar,” I said to him. “When misfortune comes, fear of it creates another misfortune. Be patient and bear it. Stay here in this blessed shelter where the blood of the mujahideen mingles together in the soil. Don’t you see that God’s watchful eye has healed your wounds and your tongue without any hospital?”
Commander Sharhabil said to him, “What is the value of life if you don’t find something in it to fight for?”
“Give me any mission to carry out in my homeland and I am ready to do it,” he replied. “Jihad is not confined to only one land, and Paradise opens itself to martyrs wherever they fall.”
That statement of his caught my attention. I remembered the conversation with Commander Sharhabil about it later on.
Our attempts to stop him didn’t bear fruit. It seemed the attempt to kill him had an effect on his psyche. When Commander Sharhabil was certain he would go back to his home, he sent a gift for his own mother along with him and explained how to get to her shop.
His gift to his mother was one of the spoils we took when we raided one of the regime camps. It was a heavy gold chain with a pendant inscribed with the name of Allah in thick Naskh calligraphy that he found in the pocket of a dead soldier after stripping him of his weapons and ammunition.
As I walked with Commander Sharhabil in the camp, under the light of the full moon, I said to him, “I don’t understand why Darrar insists on returning to his family.”
“All the light of the universe cannot uncover what’s in the darkness of a man’s heart,” he said. “The darkness of the depths.” Then he suddenly corrected himself, saying, “Except for the light of faith, which ensures the dissipation of darkness from all places.”
I said, “Did you notice that Darrar said, ‘Give me any mission to carry out in my homeland’?”
“Clarify,” he said.
“I believe you should look after Darrar before he goes back home. Who knows what the future has in store for us?” I suggested he give him some financial support, to help him get by as he moved on, and to make him feel connected to us.
He asked me, “Can jihad and loyalty be bought with money?”
“No,” I said. “But money has been one of the weapons of war throughout the conquests of Islam.”
The day Darrar left us, the financial officer came and took him aside in Commander Sharhabil’s tent.
Sari Abu Amineh
What would I tell the Basha?
After we finally got rid of that scoundrel Darrar al-Ghoury, I got word from Yasin, the one who killed Darrar, that Walid wasn’t really dead like Darrar had told me. And I learned that the picture of the suicide attack that he sent me was just a fabrication designed to make me think he had done the job I hired him to do.
Walid was still alive. But the Basha thought he was dead.
It was as though one thing constantly led to another, relentlessly. As though heaven wanted to fulfill Uroub’s prediction by force, or was helping fate to carry out its mission.
There was nothing to put one at ease, and I no longer had the strength to face the Basha with news like Walid was still alive.
O God, O God. If the Basha only knew.
The Basha called me on the phone and said, “Come quickly.”
I went to him. He sat me down beside him and said, “Are you sure Walid was killed?”
“Of course, Basha,” I lied. “Walid is dead.”
“Why do I feel he isn’t dead?” he asked angrily.
“Maybe it has something to do with blood relations, Basha,” I said.
He scratched the back of his neck with his fingernails. “I don’t understand.”
“The blood bond that connects you to Walid,” I clarified. “Maybe that’s what is giving you that feeling.”
His eyes widened and he gave me that look that always frightened me. “I don’t think you believe what you are saying,” he said.
Then he looked towards the window, in a way that made me feel he was waiting for something to happen.
Darrar al-Ghoury
When I went to Commander Sharhabil, the financial officer was in his tent. He greeted me politely and then handed me a bundle of money and said, “That which God bestows upon us is halal for all mujahideen. Take this assistance. Maybe it will help you at home, for you are one of the ones who are true to their religion and their beliefs. Commander Sharhabil has praised you and sets high hopes on you wherever you may go.”
I tried to give the money back, but a cloud of anger appeared on Commander Sharhabil’s face.
I signed the financial officer’s document and he locked it up in his leather case. Then he got up and reached out to shake my hand, saying, “May God protect you, Darrar. Good luck.”
He left the tent and I remained behind with Commander Sharhabil.
He sat me down beside him and then took out a little notebook from his pocket in which he wrote down the address of my house in Mashari’, and my phone number, and gave his blessing for my return home. Then he said, “You know, Darrar, our jihad never ends, and it is not restricted by time or place. Syria is not our final destination, and you are one of us no matter how far you go. Who knows what the days have in store? Go with the blessings of God to your home. We will remain brothers in jihad no matter where we end up.”
Then he hugged me close; I could feel the trembling beat of his heart.
I said my goodbyes to Abu Hudhayfah and the other mujahideen in the camp – those men with whom I lived the bitterness of life, and its sweetness, if there was anything sweet about it.
I started looking all around me, at the hills and the distant houses, at the trees and the rocky chain of mountains and the stones, the tents and the ditches, the threadbare clothes, the utensils spread out on the ground. My heart stopped and I felt weak.
O God! How difficult it was to say goodbye to the mujahideen, even in my condition.
It took me a full day and a night to reach Daraa, switching onto four different trucks along the way, and a cart pulled by a black mule. The trucks transporting me and several other people who’d been displaced from their homes stopped twenty-three times, at checkpoints and fortifications set up by mujahideen from various squads. I knew them by the mottos they had painted in black letters on barrels, and by the flags they had stuck into the barrels and fastened to their pick-up trucks.
I crossed the Jordanian border through Al-Ruwayshid, with a masked Syrian smuggler whose name and address I had gotten from one of the Syrian mujahideen before leaving the camp. He let me ride behind him on his motorcycle that didn’t have any fenders, after I gave him 10,000 Syrian liras.
I was amazed by the smuggler’s driving skills. He followed a path he knew well that was covered with parallel and crisscrossed tracks from tires of similar motorcycles. I saw dozens of men, women, and children along the way, speeding headlong towards the Jordanian borders. Their clothes were tattered, their children were screaming and crying, and the women’s faces were filled with such pain and sorrow it broke one’s heart. As for the men, the way they looked at us seemed to be envying us the luxury of riding on motorcycles that could speed past them.
I was not expecting to be smuggled across the border with such ease and simplicity. In fact I never saw any crossing point and no one stopped us at all. When I got off the motorcycle in the town of Ruwayshid with my linen sack hanging from my shoulder, a service taxi driver approached me, saying, “Amman . . . Amman.”
I followed him to his car and he took me and three other passengers to the north transportation station in Amman, for fifteen dinars, which I’d handed to him before we set out.
Muntaha al-Rayyeh
A skinny young man who said his name was Omar came to see me at my shop. He had a dark face w
ith a horizontal scar across his forehead and the whites of his eyes were the color of a dried-out lemon. He had a light scraggly beard, only four fingers on his right hand, and was the type that made whoever was looking at him feel he was fidgeting and trying to pull himself together.
He spoke to me without looking me in the eye. The entire time while he was talking he looked down at the floor tiles. He said he had come on behalf of al-Walid and handed me a gold pendant with Allah inscribed on it.
“This is a gift from Walid. And he asks if the scent of perfume oil in his room that you used to clean is still there or has it disappeared?”
What that fellow said was the best proof that he had truly come on al-Walid’s behalf, because no one knew about the incident with the smell of perfume oil in his room except for him and me.
With a joyous and welcoming spirit I asked him, “How were you able to find the shop?”
“He gave me the name of the shop and of the street and told me how to find it,” he answered.
I told myself that this meant that al-Walid and the people he was with were keeping an eye on us from a distance, without our knowledge.
I sat him down on the other side of the counter and asked him to tell me everything about al-Walid: Where was he? What was he doing? Was he eating well? Who was washing his clothes for him? I didn’t stop asking questions until he showed me on his cell phone screen a picture of al-Walid that he had taken a few days before returning.
In the photo, al-Walid looked thin, and had his long beard and his hair wrapped in a black headscarf. He looked much older than his age, to the point that I thought he might be suffering from some illness, like anemia maybe. But Omar assured me he was healthy and strong-willed, and he pointed out that ten years among the ranks of the mujahideen would cause any man to lose a lot of weight.
