Aftermath: following the bloodshed of America's wars in the muslim world Part 5

The war in Iraq had changed everything in the Muslim world, creating new confusion and new certainties. In the late 1990s experts on the Muslim world had spoken about the failure of political Islam, even explaining that the September 11 attacks were its last nihilistic act. The planners of the American war in Iraq claimed that the democracy they would install in place of Saddam's dictators.h.i.+p would create a domino effect, spreading to other authoritarian states in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Syria. Nearly three years later, with religious parties dominating the Iraqi elections, Hamas winning in the Palestinian elections, the Muslim Brotherhood increasing its power in the Egyptian elections, and authoritarian regimes in the region appearing unthreatened by democracy, it was radical Islam that had spread. In fact, it was experiencing a renaissance.

The Story of Hudheifa Azzam.

The father of modern jihad was Abdallah Azzam. Azzam was born in 1941 in Jenin, Palestine. Following the 1967 war and the Israeli occupation, Azzam, then a high school teacher, based himself in Jordan and led religious fighters from different Arab countries in cross-border raids against the Israelis from the "sheikhs' camps" supported by the Muslim Brotherhood movement. Azzam led the Qutbi wing of the Jordanian Brotherhood, which was named after Egyptian Sayyid Qutb and made up of those closest to Salafis in their way of thinking. Qutb, who led the Muslim Brotherhood after Ha.s.san al-Banna, was executed by the Egyptian regime in 1966. His most important book was Milestones on the Road. The two most important concepts in Qutb's writings were jahiliya and takfir. Takfir, as mentioned above, means excommunicating, or declaring a Muslim to be a kafir. Jahiliya is the pre-Islamic ignorance that Islamists accuse present Muslim governments of having reverted to. Governments that have reverted to such a state can be declared infidel, and jihad against them is legitimate.

During the 1970 civil war in Jordan, when the regime battled Palestinians in what came to be known as Black September, Azzam ordered his men to leave Jordan to avoid killing other Muslims. Azzam was alienated by the dominance of secular nationalism over the Palestinian liberation movement and hoped to internationalize jihad. He studied in Egypt's prestigious Al Azhar University, receiving a PhD in Islamic law and graduating with honors. He went on to teach in Saudi Arabia as well as in Jordan. Following the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, Azzam moved to Pakistan, where he founded Maktab al-Khidmat al-Mujahideen (the Office of Mujahideen Services). The office served as the main clearinghouse for Arab fighters seeking to join the jihad in Afghanistan; it housed, trained, and educated them. Although the top Saudi cleric p.r.o.nounced jihad in Afghanistan a fard ayn (direct obligation), the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood refused to issue a similar fatwa, so Azzam left the movement. Azzam believed that defensive jihad-i.e., defeating infidel invaders in Muslim lands-was a fard ayn. He singled out Afghanistan and Palestine as the most obvious cases. (During the war in Iraq, similar declarations that defensive jihad was a fard ayn were made throughout the Muslim world.) Azzam's books and sermons formulated his thoughts on jihad, and he mentored Osama bin Laden until 1987, when the Saudi decided to form his own camp for Arabs. Azzam was not radical enough for this new camp; Ayman al-Zawahiri, who would become bin Laden's key deputy and ideologue, virtually excommunicated him.

In November 1989 a car bomb killed Azzam and two of his sons. In the car that followed Azzam's doomed vehicle sat his eighteen-year-old son, Hudheifa, who had been fighting since 1985. In December 2005 I met Hudheifa in a cafe in Amman. Dressed in light blue jeans, wearing a leather jacket and red polo s.h.i.+rt, speaking excellent English, still fit and smiling often, he did not look like an expert in international jihad. Hudheifa, who was light-skinned like his father, with a neatly clipped and groomed beard, ordered a hot chocolate and recounted his tale. When Azzam brought his family to Pakistan, he settled them first in Islamabad, where he taught part-time. He set up the Office of Mujahideen Services in Peshawar in 1983, opening guest houses for mujahideen and training camps in 1984. Hudheifa began his training at the age of thirteen in the Sada (echo) Camp in Peshawar, and in 1985 he trained in Afghanistan's Khaldan and Yaqubi camps. He fought his first battle alongside his father and brothers in Jaji that year. The all-Arab unit included Saudis, Moroccans, and Algerians. When he was not fighting, Hudheifa studied at the Mahad al-Ansar (Supporters' Inst.i.tute), a school his father had established for the children of Arab mujahideen. Rivals of Azzam condemned him for his friends.h.i.+p with Afghan jihad leader Ahmad Shah Ma.s.soud and for his relative moderation. "Al Qaeda separated from Abdallah Azzam," said Hudheifa. "They wanted to fight against the whole world. Our school specialized in defensive jihad: Palestine, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Chechnya."

Hudheifa fought from 1985 until 1992. He befriended Ma.s.soud in 1985 and fought alongside the famed hero, taking Kabul with him in 1992. He then went to continue his studies at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, but for the next six years he and some Arab colleagues tried to bring the warring parties in Afghanistan together, shuttling back and forth between Ma.s.soud's Northern Alliance and the Taliban's Mullah Omar (he blamed the failure to reach peace on the intervention of Pakistani intelligence). "We were the Arab mujahideen respected by everyone," he told me.

From 1994 to 1995 Hudheifa was in Bosnia, working to funnel money and supplies to the nascent country's beleaguered Muslims, and fighting on their behalf as well. He tried to enter Chechnya, but the Russians had blocked the road and he was forced to turn back. Hudheifa was arrested in the airport when he returned to Jordan in 1996, and again in 1997. He was also arrested in Pakistan, as governments that had supported the jihad began fearing the blowback. In 2000 the Jordanians returned his pa.s.sport to him, and he was allowed to live freely, selling cars and nuts, importing and exporting, and receiving a license to work as a mobile phone distributor (on his personal multimedia mobile phone Hudheifa showed me films he had saved of Iraqi resistance attacks against the American military). He completed his master's degree in Islamic studies and the Arabic language. When I met him he was working on a PhD in Arabic literature from the cla.s.sical Andalusian period.

Three days after America's war in Iraq started, Hudheifa and other followers of Azzam crossed into that country, basing themselves in Falluja. "We were trying to convince Muslim scholars to begin the resistance," he explained. "They had no plan. They were sleeping. For one month they did not agree. They said, 'Go back to your country.' We were more than thirty or forty Arabs, without weapons. We went from mosque to mosque, from school to school. People said. 'The U.S. brought us democracy.' They believed the lies of Bush, that he will bring democracy and freedom." Everything changed on April 28, he said, when American soldiers killed seventeen people at a demonstration and twelve more at a subsequent one. Soon after that, rumors spread of four American soldiers raping a seventeen-year-old girl, with pictures distributed on the Internet. "This story was the main cause of starting the resistance in Falluja," Hudheifa explained. "The rape made them reconsider, but there was still no action. I was watching from far only with a smile. In the beginning they said, 'Go make jihad in your country.' After the rape they said, 'Okay, we want to start now or tomorrow we will find our mothers or daughters or sisters raped.' This story exploded the resistance in Falluja. Then they called us for a meeting and said, 'You were right.' We had told them from the first day the Iraqi army abandoned weapons to take them, but they said, 'This is stealing, haram [forbidden], looting. You could buy an RPG for three U.S. dollars in those days. The Americans changed the ideology of the people with their oppression. They could have been the best power in the world."

Hudheifa spent four months in Iraq imparting his knowledge to the indigenous resistance. His background gave him immediate currency. "I am the son of Abdallah Azzam," he said, "so everybody wanted to listen, and I have experience in three or four jihads in different countries, and a lot of the Iraqi resistance had no plan. We gave them our experience so they could start from where we stopped, so they don't start from zero. Jihad is an obligation as a Muslim. If you can't support jihad with fighting, you can support with ideas or teaching. So we tried and we still do. Followers of Abdallah Azzam helped plan the resistance in all of Iraq, and we had hoped for a united resistance with s.h.i.+tes. We were aiming to bring unity between Sunnis and s.h.i.+tes with resistance on both sides, but the s.h.i.+te leaders.h.i.+p was against us and Zarqawi spoiled it, making it fail." The Iraqi resistance requested his father's books, he told me, and beginning in June 2003 they became widely available in Falluja and Ramadi.

He explained that his father "talks about the crimes of Saddam and what real jihad is." His father had also opposed Saddam, he told me, trying to make it clear that Azzam's followers opposed the Baathists as well and were not fighting in support of the former regime. "My father was kicked out of the University of Jordan for opposing Saddam's war against Iran, and he was sentenced to death in Iraq for his work against Saddam. We are not with Saddam or the Baathists. We want to support the Muslim population."

Things were more difficult now, he explained. "After September 11 all money-transfer systems changed, but they can't stop financial support for the resistance." Wealthy businessmen from outside Iraq still sent money. "We have Iraqis who were in the Office of Services and are now in Iraq," he told me. But still, the good old days of jihad were in Afghanistan. Back then, "We used to go safely and securely, get a plane from anywhere to Pakistan and find vehicles from different organizations who sent us to rest houses, who took us to safe training camps and then safely to Afghanistan. Now if you want to go to Iraq, there are thousands of dangers facing you. Going into Iraq is very dangerous."

Hudheifa was fiercely opposed to terrorists like Zarqawi, who, he said, gave jihad a bad name. "We say to people who give funds, 'Don't give to Zarqawi. Give to Iraqis, give to the a.s.sociation of Muslim Scholars. They are the right way. Our school supports them.'"

Hudheifa viewed his support for the Iraqi resistance as consistent with his support for other indigenous Muslim movements fighting in self-defense. "Iraq is a defensive jihad," he said. "Troops from abroad came to a Muslim country." Hudheifa told me he was proud of his work in Iraq. "Praise G.o.d, we were successful. Everything is going much better. Much better than we were planning. It won't take like Afghanistan, nine years, to kick the U.S. out. It will be much faster. If I find a way to go into Iraq, I would go. I told the government. But we must know our aims and goals. Just exploding cars is not enough. We need a plan for the future. When the Americans leave, we will look for the next place."

Although Azzam had opposed attacking Muslim governments, other veterans of the Afghan jihad took a different view, preferring to target what they called "the close enemy" first rather than "the far enemy," such as the Americans. Sheikh Jawad al-Faqih was one such veteran who seemed to want to target all enemies. I met him at the home of a Salafi contact called Abu Saad. Sheikh Jawad was a fearsome Brobdingnagian man with a thick beard and a clipped mustache (en vogue for Salafis); a large head; thick, fiery, protruding eyebrows; immense hands; and a raspy voice. He was a Salafi Hagrid. He wore a black salwar kameez and a white ishmag (head scarf) without an eqal (rope), which was the Salafi way. Like a good Salafi, he strictly adhered to the requirement that one's beard be longer than what a hand's grip can hold. A Palestinian whose uncles had fought the British occupation of Palestine, he had initially been influenced by secular nationalism. In 1982 he found "the correct way," and abandoned his nationalist sentiments. "I looked at all Islamic groups, only praying and fasting," he said. "I didn't like it. To be a real Muslim you have to fight and make the wrong right and hit powers who work against the right and attack Christians, Jews, and the mukhabarat."

When he encountered followers of Juheiman al-Utaibi, a Saudi radical who in 1979 had led the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and was later executed by Saudi authorities, Sheikh Jawad explained, "I found their ideas were what I was looking for." Sheikh Jawad had served in the Jordanian special forces, and he applied the skills he learned when he joined a militant group called Muwahidun, which meant Unitarians, or Monotheists. But in 1985 eight of the members were arrested. Sheikh Jawad was spared arrest because he feigned mental r.e.t.a.r.dation. He was disappointed with his comrades in arms upon their release. "They were afraid," he said. "Their ideas about jihad changed in jail, so they refused to work with me." Disgusted with his fellow Jordanians, Sheikh Jawad was determined to leave. In 1989 he went to Yemen with another Jordanian, and together with seventeen Yemenis they made the journey to Pakistan. He had previously tried to go to Afghanistan but failed. In Pakistan he stayed for two nights in Peshawar's Beit al-Shuhada (home of the martyrs) guest house before entering Afghanistan's Sada Camp, where he received training in Soviet bloc weapons and was sent to the Jalalabad front. "I refused to be with Afghans," he explained. "They had beards, but they were communists or used drugs." He added, "I don't like Afghans except for the Taliban." Sheikh Jawad fought in four battles before being injured and transferred to a hospital. Osama bin Laden, known to friends like Sheikh Jawad as Abu Abdallah, spotted him carrying a heavy mortar across a river. "He liked me and said, 'Sign this guy up,'" said Sheikh Jawad. "He was impressed with my strength. Abu Abdallah was a brother, a jihadi. He was very humble. He helped the jihad with money."

Sheikh Jawad returned to Jordan, and then "a friend of mine asked me to come back to make operations on the other side of the border," meaning Israel, so "we smuggled weapons into Palestine." During the Gulf War he trucked food aid from Jordan into Baghdad. At the time many Afghan veterans gathered in Jordan, preparing to enter Iraq to defend it from American occupation, which would not come for another fourteen years. Instead, together with a doctor called Samih Zeidan, Sheikh Jawad established Jeish Muhammad (Army of Muhammad), and he imposed a strict training regimen on his recruits. Sheikh Jawad admitted to carrying out operations against infidels: attacking a British target, attempting to attack U.S. marines, "killing a priest," and "exploding a Jew." He established cells of fighters he called "families," each of which consisted of five fighters who did not know the ident.i.ties of any other families. Sheikh Jawad claimed that Jeish Muhammad had cells around the Arab world. Most were veterans of the Afghan jihad. In 1991 a disgruntled member of Jeish Muhammad confessed the names of the organization's members to the Jordanian intelligence. In 1992 members established a new organization called the Jordanian Afghanis, which bombed a movie theater in the city of Zarqa.

Sheikh Jawad disliked living in Jordan and viewed Jordanians as unreliable. "I was jailed thirteen times," he said, "nine times because Jordanians named me, even when they gave their word that they wouldn't." Likewise, he was suspicious of fellow Palestinians in Jordan. "This generation of Palestinians," he explained, "their fathers fled Palestine, so they can't be trusted." Sheikh Jawad was now a car dealer, but he missed the jihad. "I wish I was in Afghanistan now like I wish I was in paradise," he told me. Likewise, he hoped to go to Iraq but worried that the Jordanians would turn him in. "If I reach the borders they will tell the Americans or the rafidha, [but] I wish I could go."

"Iraq has a different taste. The water, the dates, the yogurt. It is the country of the caliphate. I am addicted to Iraq, addicted to jihad."

Outside, the opulent western Amman homes are unpainted, the cinder blocks still showing, rebar protruding from unfinished rooftops. Hastily constructed square houses are piled one atop the other haphazardly along the hills, an architectural patchwork like in a South American barrio, with narrow alleys covered by laundry hanging between rooftops. Empty lots become trash lots. Thin metal minarets jut up from the cacophony, their mosques mere unadorned squares like all the homes but with a speaker attached to the metal tower. In a maze of narrow treeless streets in Rusaifa, south of Amman, shops cover the heads of female dummies in the windows; on the streets some women wear the burqa. Muddy cars drive through roads built in wadis (dry riverbeds) and trash collects on cliff sides. In the distance the yellow and red hills and dunes of the desert look cold against the gray winter sky. Like a Jewish settler in the West Bank, Muhamad Wasfi built his home on a deserted moonscape. It too appeared unfinished yet old, the yard covered with garbage, shrubs, a tricycle, and a toy gun.

Abu Muntasar, as he is called, wore fake Nike training pants and a matching blue sweats.h.i.+rt. He had a strong thick body, with a belly that showed he was not as active as he used to be. His thick beard was unkempt, but his mustache was groomed short like a Salafi's, and his hair was close-cropped. He had a false front tooth. Jordan's winters are bitter, and we sat close to a gas heater in his guest room. Though Abu Muntasar was born in the West Bank in 1963, his father worked for the Jordanian Army. "I still remember the day I left Palestine," he said, "with all the pieces of the Palestinian people. The Jews were raping and killing, so people were scared for their honor and left for Jordan." His family moved first to Amman and then to Zarqa, northwest of the capital, where many military families were based. Abu Muntasar served for two years in the Jordanian military before earning a degree in business management and working as a civil servant. "At that time I generally began learning Islamic thought," he explained. He admired the radical Islamic Group of Egypt and hoped to establish a similar Jordanian movement. "As Palestinian people we want to find a solution for our question," he told me. "Although I was young, I saw no other solution for our problems other than Islam, so I wasn't affected by secular Palestinian movements. I wanted to do something for Islam and Muslims and help establish the Muslim state and make Palestine the capital of our new caliphate." I asked him if he thought this was possible. "I believe it without any doubt," he said. "This has been proven by the Prophet Muhammad in his words."

He viewed Jordan's Islamic movements as contained or co-opted by the government. Like many Salafis, he was autodidactic, reading the works of Abdallah Azzam and the radical Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel Rahman currently imprisoned in America for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He read their books and listened to tapes of their sermons, admiring them for going to Afghanistan. In 1989 he went to Pakistan and then Afghanistan "to see the reality of Muslims and their movements, of the Islamic nation and jihad." He dreamed of starting a jihad in Sham (the lands of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine) and liberating his homeland. "I was lucky," he said, because he got to meet his hero Rahman in the Saudi-run Ansur guest house. The sheikh lectured Abu Muntasar and others about jihad: its justification, its history, and its future. "It was the first and last time that I saw the sheikh, but for me it is a rich history," he recalled with nostalgia. Before going to the Jalalabad front, he was trained in the Sada and Salahedin camps, and fought under the leaders.h.i.+p of an Egyptian called Abu Uthman. He also fought with Afghan leader Abdul Rasul Sayyaf but complained that "Sayyaf disappointed many people in the final years of the jihad by taking the side of the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. He should have taken the other side."

In 1990 Abu Muntasar reached an agreement with jihad officials in Afghanistan that would allow him to bring his wife and children and work as a teacher with the sons of mujahideen, while continuing to fight during his vacations. Iraq invaded Kuwait upon his return to Jordan, "and my ideas changed," he said. "The war was here." Although a huge international coalition punished Saddam for violating international law, Israel's defiance of United Nations rulings were ignored, he said. "It was a critical point for any Muslim who loves his religion and nation," he said. Together with a Jordanian doctor called Muhammad al-Rifai, who was a leader of Jordan's Afghan Arabs, he "established a jihad fighting movement based on spreading tawhid and jihad, and we directed our energies against Israel." Led by Rifai, his movement was called the Organized Movement of Islamic Call and Jihad. The main goal of the organization, which he claimed had thousands of members and supporters, was to establish a caliphate and then to destroy Israel. Abu Muntasar, the organization's speaker, spread its ideas in mosques and schools, although he had no formal religious education. "Islamic thought is something personal," he said. "I taught myself. I was a leader and had to learn more and teach in people's homes and mosques, even funeral houses." Following the Gulf War, the Jordanian government cracked down on Islamic movements, and Abu Muntasar was jailed with many of his a.s.sociates, since their group was affiliated with the Jeish Muhammad. Abu Muntasar had opposed operations in Jordan. "We knew it would be useless, and we had a much more important goal," he said. In prison he was beaten and tortured. "Torture is how they got information," he said. "Torture is the best way to get information." (I joked that perhaps I should torture him, then, to get more answers.) Following their release from prison, Rifai returned to Afghanistan and then sought asylum in England, while Abu Muntasar worked as a part-time imam in mosques and roved the country to teach and lecture.

Abu Muntasar described the 1990s as his trial-and-error period. He opposed attacking the Jordanian government, explaining that "the near enemy exists to protect the far enemy, but if you attack the near enemy, then you alienate the population. They will say the dead man is a member of this or that tribe, he prays with you, it will get people to hate you. But if you attack the far enemy, you are also attacking the near enemy, but the regime cannot say anything to you because people will hate them. If you kill a Jew or Americans, people will like you." Abu Muntasar was arrested once more for his speeches, and later for his activities with Zarqawi. "What I am concerned with now is continuing the Islamic call and establis.h.i.+ng an Islamic way of life and waiting for the correct jihad. The next battlefield is Sham, and we must prepare the people of Sham for this. What happened in Iraq and before in Afghanistan has extension. The U.S. wants to get inside the capital of Islam, which is Sham. This entrance will be through Syria. Syria will be the slaughterhouse of Americans and their supporters, so they are welcome to get inside Syria and be butchered."

Abu Saad called me one night and picked me up from my hotel in Amman. In the front pa.s.senger seat sat thirty-seven-year-old Abu Muhamad. Though he was seated in the front and I in the back, lighting my notebook with my mobile phone in order to take notes, I could see from how his head touched the car's roof and his long legs pressed against the dashboard that Abu Muhamad was a giant man. He had a dark sima above his prominent brow, and though I could see his thick lips, his face was shrouded by a dark ishmag with an eqal. He refused to tell me whether he was originally Palestinian, explaining that nationalism was against Islam.

Soon after the fall of Baghdad, Abu Muhamad had made his way to Baquba, a town east of Baghdad near the Iranian border. "I was thirsty for jihad," he explained. "I felt I had a duty to go to Iraq. It's a duty of any Muslim if he can." He had previously lived in Iraq for five years before, and so had established relations.h.i.+ps with "good people on the right side," and he knew the country's geography and dialect, so he pa.s.sed for a local. Abu Muhamad had been married in Iraq in 1989, but when he returned to fight the Americans he had not expected to see his family again. Though at first he and his friends were unorganized, they soon met fighters from western Iraq and became more involved in the jihad. Abu Muhamad had been a sniper during his Jordanian military service. The Iraqis had not needed much training. "Do you know an Iraqi who doesn't know how to fight?" he asked me. Abu Muhamad, who had known Zarqawi before the war, ended up in a group of five or six fighters belonging to Zarqawi's movement but composed mainly of Iraqis. The group was commanded by a former Iraqi pilot. "G.o.d's support came and sent us brothers from Ansar al-Sunna who trained us in street fighting," he explained. "Jihad will spread around the world. The Americans are trying to attack Syria, and we are expecting them to attack."

He refused to discuss most of the operations he had taken part in but admitted they had involved shootings and bombs and explained that most suicide bombers were not Iraqi. Jihad was an obligation for Muslims, he told me. "It is not about Iraq. The higher goal is to establish an Islamic state." Referring to Osama bin Laden, he told me, "Sheikh Abu Abdallah said, 'The foreigners and infidels and their interests are everywhere, so anywhere you can hit them you will hurt them.'"

He complained that Jordan was protecting Israel. "If this regime gave the youth freedom they would eat Israel," he said. "They wouldn't even leave their bones. But regimes are trying to protect Israel." Abu Muhamad supported attacks against Iraq's s.h.i.+te civilians because he considered them rafidha. "The infidel sects are one, if they are Jews or s.h.i.+tes." He explained that Ibn Taimiya, the thirteenth-century scholar loved by Salafis, had said that s.h.i.+tes "were worse than Jews or Christians. s.h.i.+tes hate Islam and hate Sunnis."

Abu Muhamad's days began early, although he and his fellow fighters rarely left the house during daylight, executing most operations at night. During the day, "one of the brothers would lecture, or we prepared for operations." Before his departure for Iraq he had been arrested, accused of being a mujahid. "They called us takfiris," he complained. "The man who says, 'Don't drink alcohol, don't dance, but pray instead'-they call him a terrorist." Although Sheikh Jawad had spoken a rich Arabic, referring to the Koran, Abu Muhamad's speech was heavily colloquial. He called Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak a "pimp" for going to pay condolences to Tony Blair following the July 7 London bombings.

Abu Muhamad had not been in Iraq for a year, but he longed to return. "Iraq has a different taste," he said. "The water, the dates, the yogurt. It is the country of the caliphate. I am addicted to Iraq, addicted to jihad."

Yet no one was more addicted to jihad than the "Sheikh of the Slaughterers," Ahmad Fadhil Nazal al-Khalaylah, more commonly known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He hailed from Zarqa, which had been the capital of radical Islam in Jordan since the 1960s and had also produced most of the Jordanian jihadis fighting in Iraq. Zarqa's population of nearly one million is made up mostly of Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 and a second wave of refugees who came in 1967. Abdallah Azzam had also settled there.

Zarqawi, who took his city as his namesake, had been a wild young man, with no interest in religion. A high school dropout, he had a reputation for getting tattoos, drinking alcohol, getting into fights, and ending up in jail. Like many disaffected Muslim youth, he was moved to fight in Afghanistan by stories of mujahideen heroism there. But by the time he arrived as a twenty-three-year-old, the Russians had withdrawn, so he took part in the civil war. His journey to Afghanistan was arranged by Azzam's Office of Mujahideen Services, then run by Azzam's follower Sheikh Abdel Majid al-Majali, or Abu Qutaiba. Azzam's son Hudheifa told me that in 1989 he picked up Zarqawi from the airport in Peshawar and took him to the Beit al-Shuhada guest house. "Zarqawi was a very simple person, silent, he didn't talk. As a witness I can say that he was very well trained in military skills, especially in making bombs. In English you say 'braveheart,' but he had a dead heart-he was never scared. Bin Laden wanted Zarqawi to join Al Qaeda, but he didn't like Al Qaeda's ideology, so he left for Khost. I saw him in Gardez and Khost; if he was alone against a thousand soldiers he would not retreat. He was not a leader at the time, just an ordinary person and a good fighter."

Sheikh Jawad, the imposing former jihadi, had a similar view of his friend Zarqawi, whom he called Abu Musab. "He used to come to my house," he said. "We went to Afghanistan together. Abu Musab was a normal man, afraid of G.o.d, a very natural man, didn't have a lot of knowledge." Sheikh Jawad told me that Zarqawi gave two of his sisters as wives to Afghans in order to strengthen his relations.h.i.+p with his hosts. "Afghans took care of him, and he gained experience," he said. Zarqawi was placed in charge of Jordanians arriving in Afghanistan and later led a group called Jund al-Sham (Soldiers of Sham).

In Pakistan Zarqawi met Isam Taher al-Oteibi al-Burqawi, known as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. Maqdisi was a self-taught Palestinian cleric living in Kuwait. Like many Palestinians who relocated to Jordan from Kuwait, he had belonged to an important Kuwaiti Salafi organization called Jamiyat al-Turath al-Islami (The Society of Islamic Heritage), led by the Egyptian cleric Sheikh Abdel Rahman al-Khaleq. Khaleq had come to Kuwait from Egypt in the 1960s, a period when many Egyptian Islamists moved to the Gulf to teach in order to escape government persecution. This persecution persisted until Egyptian clerics like Omar Abdel Rahman, who led the Islamic Group, declared the state itself to be the enemy. This sort of radical Islam was a product of Egyptian prisons, and when these Egyptians were encouraged to take their struggle to Afghanistan they clashed with Abdallah Azzam, who emphasized the importance of fighting defensive jihads. Egyptians such as Abdel Rahman and his followers sought to fight Arab regimes first. Their followers were the takfiri par excellence, sometimes viewing all of society as the enemy and demonstrating a willingness to ruthlessly kill civilians. Maqdisi was influenced by this school of thought and brought it back home with him.

Hudheifa Azzam met Maqdisi in Pakistan and was similarly unimpressed. Like Zarqawi, he said, "Maqdisi is also an ordinary person," adding that at first Maqdisi had condemned his father as an infidel, but after Azzam was a.s.sa.s.sinated he apologized and said he had been mistaken. Upon arriving in Jordan in 1991, Maqdisi led Jordan's Salafi movement, composed of Jordanian and Palestinian Salafis who had fought or trained in Afghanistan. Maqdisi called his organization Tawhid (Monotheism), but he later changed the name to Bayat al-Imam (Oath of Loyalty to the Leader). He traveled around Jordan with his book Milat Ibrahim (The Creed of Abraham), which was the most important source for Jordanian Jihadis. The book, also available on Maqdisi's website, discusses some of the main duties the followers of Ibrahim have, such as demonstrating that they are innocent of any infidelity and improper wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d and declaring infidels to be infidels. Just as infidels are infidels with G.o.d, the followers of Ibrahim have to be infidels with the G.o.ds and laws of the infidels. Likewise, they have to demonstrate hatred and enmity for the infidels until they return to Allah and renounce their previous infidelity. The followers of Ibrahim also have to renounce tyrants and impious or un-Islamic governments, call them infidels, and call all the people who "wors.h.i.+p" them infidels as well. These tyrants include stone idols, the sun, the moon, trees, graves (a reference to the Sufi and s.h.i.+te practice of visiting the graves of saints and imams), and laws made by men. It is the duty of the sect of Ibrahim to expose the infidelity of all these forms of wors.h.i.+p and idolatry and manifest their hatred and enmity to them as well as showing how silly these things were. Infidels, tyrants, and oppressors all deserve hate and public condemnation.

According to Maqdisi, democracy was a heretical religion const.i.tuting the rejection of Allah, monotheism, and Islam. It was a bida (innovation), placing something above the word of G.o.d and ignoring the laws of Islam. Only G.o.d could legislate laws, and G.o.d's laws had to be applied to the apostates, the fornicators, thieves, alcohol consumers, unveiled women, and the obscene. Maqdisi held that the regimes that ruled Muslims were un-Islamic and illegitimate. Therefore, Muslims did not owe them obedience and should fight them to establish a true Islamic state.

When Zarqawi returned to Jordan, he sought out former mujahideen he had met in Afghanistan, including Maqdisi. In the summer of 1993 Zarqawi visited Muhamad Abu Muntasar Wasfi. "He sat there, where you are," Wasfi said, pointing to the pillow I was resting on. We sat in his cold guest room as his sons brought in sweet tea and came in to replenish our gla.s.ses. Wasfi stroked a cat that wandered in. His children screamed and fought in the next room. His youngest boy, Mudhafer, came in to ask him for some money. "I like to call him Abu Musab al-Khalaylah," Wasfi told me about Zarqawi. "Abu Musab had heard of me. He was a simple Muslim who wanted to serve Islam. He didn't stay long here, and the next day he came with another guy. We sat and we spoke about our hopes and dreams and ambitions to establish the caliphate and raise the flag of jihad against the enemies of Islam everywhere. I disagreed with him on some strategic issues, like his view of Israel and Palestine. He didn't have an idea of making jihad against Jews and Israel. Abu Musab wanted to change Arab regimes."

Zarqawi invited Wasfi to join Bayat al-Imam and offered him the position of emir, or commander, from the Arabic word amr, meaning "to order." Wasfi joined but refused the position, claiming that because he was Palestinian he would be subjected to greater retribution by the Jordanian authorities, who were more lenient on Jordanians. Maqdisi, Zarqawi, and Wasfi led the group, limiting their initial activities to proselytizing. "We had no ability to make jihad," Wasfi admitted, "but despite the lack of ability it didn't mean we should stop." Maqdisi had seven grenades from Kuwait, which he gave "to some brothers to make operations in Palestine to kill Israelis," Wasfi said. "The brothers were arrested, and the government uncovered the organization and arrested the leaders, but before that we were fugitives for four months. We were arrested and tortured." Wasfi claims to have suffered "sleep deprivation, beatings, tearing off beards." As a result he has rheumatism and his knees often hurt; he couldn't kneel properly when he prayed for the first year after his release. "When we were put in group prison, we worked on expanding the organization inside and outside the jail. It was my job to organize prisoners. Jail was very good for the movement. Jail enhanced the personalities of prisoners and let them know how large was the cause they believed in. Inside jail is a good environment to get supporters and proselytize. Inside jail is oppression." Wasfi admitted they recruited from criminal ranks. "Even the worst criminal is still repressed because they did not impose Islamic law on him, and when you talk to them with Islam they see the difference between a system of punishment made by humans and a system made by G.o.d. This made them supporters of the Islamic call and enemies of oppression."

The Jordanian authorities placed all the Islamist prisoners together and in isolation from other prisoners. They formed relations.h.i.+ps, exchanged ideas and knowledge, and established trust in one another. They continued organizing jihadists, especially former criminals like Zarqawi, until their release from the Sawaqa prison in a 1999 amnesty. Wasfi was the movement's spokesman. He explained that even while in prison Zarqawi and Maqdisi reached an outside audience, influencing people in the various cities where they were imprisoned. By then, the awkward and solemn Zarqawi had begun to bloom in his own jihadi way, while Maqdisi, despite the anger and violence of his ideas, avoided conflict. "Zarqawi was very charismatic," said Wasfi. "Maqdisi was calm and pa.s.sive. We were dealing with prison authorities in a very aggressive way, and Zarqawi was tribal, so his tribal position gave him more power than a Palestinian. If your root is pure Jordanian and you have a big tribe, then you have more power. Prisoners liked a strong representative like Zarqawi, and he fought with the guards. He was very harsh and strong when dealing with members of the organization. He prevented them from mixing with other organizations so they would not be influenced by other ideas, and he prevented them from moving around freely in the prison, even me, but I rebelled against him." Few other jihadis dared to defy Zarqawi save Abdallah Hashaika, who was the emir of the Jordanian Afghans. Zarqawi organized a coup, forcing Maqdisi to hand over control of the movement. When Wasfi told me this, Abu Saad, who was present for the meeting, grew anxious-he didn't want me to learn of tensions within the movement.

Zarqawi's aggressive personality attracted the tough young men imprisoned with him, and Maqdisi was relegated to a theological position, issuing fatwas. Like jihadi Salafis outside prison, the jihadis in Sawaqa were embroiled in internal conflicts, declaring one another infidels. "In prison a disagreement of ideas led to problems," said Wasfi. He refused to get into the details but added that "Abu Musab had many wrong decisions that I did not accept, like enmity with other groups." Five months before his release, Wasfi abandoned the movement. After his release he focused on "personal dawa," or working to spread Salafism on his own. Though officially forbidden to teach, he still does in secret. "After Zarqawi was released, he asked me to work together, but I refused," Wasfi said.

The men's time in prison was as important for the movement as their experiences in Afghanistan were, bonding together those who suffered and giving them time to formulate their ideas. For some it was educational as well. Hudheifa Azzam was impressed with the changes prison wrought in the men. "Maqdisi returned to Jordan from Afghanistan and educated himself," he told me. "He had a lot of time to read in jail. When I heard Zarqawi speak, I didn't believe this is the same Zarqawi. Six years in jail gave him a good chance to educate himself."

Shortly after his release in 1999, Zarqawi left for Pakistan, where he was temporarily arrested before making it to Afghanistan along with his key followers. Zarqawi was influenced by Egyptian jihadist groups such as Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Group, which held that the leader should be based outside the country in order to avoid hara.s.sment by the mukhabarat. Maqdisi opposed conducting operations within Jordan.

In Afghanistan Zarqawi found both Al Qaeda and the Taliban insufficiently extreme for him. Zarqawi also criticized Osama bin Laden for not calling Arab governments infidels and attacking them. For Zarqawi, the near enemy was the priority, while for bin Laden it was the far enemy. Hudheifa Azzam explained that bin Laden's Front for Fighting the Jews and Crusaders, established in 1998, required its members to take an oath of allegiance and to fight rival movements, both of which Zarqawi refused to do. Al Qaeda was far more pragmatic; its members negotiated with Pakistan and Iran. Zarqawi was such a strict Salafi that he condemned the Taliban for lack of piety. He criticized them for not being Salafis, insufficiently imposing Sharia, and recognizing the United Nations, an infidel organization. And he condemned Al Qaeda for a.s.sociating with the Taliban. Zarqawi established his own camp in the western Afghan city of Herat, near the border with Iran. Following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Zarqawi made his way through Iran to autonomous Kurdistan in northern Iraq-a point worth noting, since the Bush administration claimed Zarqawi's presence in Iraq was proof of an Al Qaeda connection. But Zarqawi linked up with the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam in a region outside Saddam's reach. With Saddam removed from power on April 9, 2003, Zarqawi had a new failed state to operate in. By the summer of 2003 he had claimed responsibility for the devastating attack against the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad's Ca.n.a.l Hotel. Zarqawi allied himself with Ansar al-Sunna, the reconst.i.tuted Ansar al-Islam, which was composed mostly of Iraqis, whereas the members of Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad group were mostly foreign Arabs.

In October 2004, Iraqi intelligence claimed that Zarqawi's group consisted of 1,000 to 1,500 fighters, foreign and Iraqi. Zarqawi's inner circle was made up of nine emirs, all of whom were non-Iraqi and close friends. The movement had stored weapons in secret depots in Iraq.

Their plan was to turn Iraq into h.e.l.l for all its residents, to prevent an elected government from taking power, and to create a civil war between Sunnis and the hated s.h.i.+tes. Zarqawi's group was responsible for the gruesome videotaped beheadings of foreigners and Iraqis accused of collaborating with the occupation. Their bombs slaughtered ma.s.ses of s.h.i.+tes as well.

Though Zarqawi had run his own camp independently of bin Laden in Afghanistan, in October 2004 he swore an oath of allegiance to Al Qaeda, renaming his organization Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers and also joining the Salafiya al-Mujahedia, or Salafi Mujahideen, movement in Iraq. Bin Laden soon announced that Zarqawi was the head of Al Qaeda's operations in Iraq. Either Bin Laden wanted to co-opt a rival jihadi group that was getting most of the attention and actually confronting the Americans, or Zarqawi needed the Saudi financier's help, or at least the connection with the hero of international jihad, in order to attract more foreign fighters and support. On December 9, 2004, Zarqawi's military committee issued a statement about the upcoming January elections. It addressed "all the parties partic.i.p.ating in the elections." It threatened s.h.i.+tes around the world for supporting the crusader occupation of Iraq. It called Ayatollah Ali Sistani the greatest collaborator with the crusaders. It condemned the apostate police, national guardsmen, and army for attacking Falluja. It warned the rejectionist s.h.i.+tes and their political parties, the Kurdish pesh merga, the Christians, and the hypocrites such as the Islamic Party that the Tawhid movement would increase attacks on them.

Though Al Qaeda under bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri had not made s.h.i.+tes their targets and did not publicly condemn them, Zarqawi held that s.h.i.+tes were the most evil of mankind. He compared them to a snake, a scorpion, and an enemy spy, like the thirteenth-century cleric Ibn Taimiya, the father of Wahhabism and Salafism. s.h.i.+tes were polytheists who wors.h.i.+ped at graves and shrines, he argued. They were to be avoided at all costs. They could not be married, they could not bear witness, and animals they slaughtered could not be eaten. Zarqawi defended operations that caused Muslims to die. Martyrdom operations, as he called suicide bombings, were sanctified by Muslim scholars, and defending Islam was even more important than defending the lives of Muslims.

Zarqawi reserved special hatred for the Jordanian monarchy and security forces. He sought to delegitimize the Hashemite kingdom and its claim to power based on its descent from the Prophet Muhammad. It was true that King Abdullah was a descendant of Muhammad, but through Abu Lahab, the Prophet's uncle, who had fought against him. This claim was first made in 1995 by two Jordanian brothers from the al-Awamli family, who sent out a ma.s.s fax condemning the regime. They were shot in their homes following a confrontation with Jordanian police. Zarqawi's confrontation with Jordan culminated in the November 9, 2005, attacks, dubbed by Jordanians "our 9/11," in which almost all the victims were Jordanians or Palestinians. By this point his actions were proving too much even for the most radical to stomach.

Hudheifa Azzam viewed Zarqawi and his followers as "against everybody, even themselves. The followers of Abdallah Azzam opposed killing civilians and conducting operations in Muslim countries, he told me. "Our militant activities are only against the military," he said. "No one can give the green light to kill an innocent human being. In 9/11 and 7/7, innocent people were killed." Hudheifa also opposed targeting s.h.i.+tes. "Abdallah Azzam said s.h.i.+tes are Muslims," he told me, "and even if they are not Muslims, their blood is still protected."

Shanateh.

The war in Iraq galvanized young admirers of Zarqawi and other mujahideen, who frequented jihadi websites and Internet chat rooms, where they could watch filmed encomiums to their heroes and violent depictions of their latest exploits. There were several groups of young men on trial in Jordan when I visited, all failed jihadis, but perhaps more important than succeeding in their quixotic and ill-planned schemes was the time spent in Jordanian prisons, where they could meet their heroes. Like inner-city fans of hip-hop in the United States, where time in jail could be a rite of pa.s.sage that established street credibility, for these young men in Jordan, jail time proved they were tough enough and dedicated to the cause.

On January 10 I attended another hearing for the ten young men from Irbid. The only two witnesses for the prosecution were set to testify. The courtroom was heavy with blue uniformed security officers. As the judge spoke, the prisoners swaggered and laughed. The first witness was Lieutenant Saud, clad in a motorcycle jacket. He put his hand above a Koran and swore to tell the truth, then stated that he had received information about a group of dangerous terrorists near the Syrian border and was ordered to arrest them. Upon questioning by the defense he admitted that he had found no weapons in their possession. The second witness, with long hair and a long beard, was accused of selling the defendants a Kalashnikov. The prosecutor read the witness's confession, but the witness renounced it, claiming he had never sold any weapons and explaining that the mukhabarat had threatened him and ordered him to lie. The judge ordered him rearrested for perjury. Ashen-faced, he was led away as the prisoners in the cage shouted "Allahu Akbar! The way of G.o.d is jihad! G.o.d is your master and America is their master! Bush is your master! You have the worst master!" All the accused claimed to have been tortured, and all renounced their confessions. As the session ended the prisoners shouted, "This session we just wanted to hear the testimony, but in the next session we will teach them!"

"Most people here hate and hate and hate the U.S. administration," attorney Samih Khreis told me. "And most people, if anybody has the opportunity to explode the White House, they would." Khreis often represented Jordanians accused of terrorism; his clients had included Azmi al-Jayusi, a close Zarqawi a.s.sociate, as well as members of Bayat al-Imam and Jeish Muhammad. A high-ranking member of the Jordanian bar a.s.sociation, Khreis remembered seeing mujahideen recruiters on the streets of Amman in the 1980s, working with the support of the Jordanian government and inviting young Jordanians to join the jihad in Afghanistan. "Governments taught them these ideas, Salafi, takfiri, to push them to Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, and after the jihad they returned and they compared the government's conduct with what they had taught them, so according to this thinking the governments were infidels. What happens daily motivates anybody to go to jihad. The magic turned against the magician. When they were against Soviets they were good, but against USA they are terrorists?"

Although in the past most recruits to the jihad were uneducated and poor, he said, "after the war in Iraq there was a large increase, and many educated men joined, like engineers. This was new. Most men going to Iraq now are educated and from Irbid, and most are Jordanians, they come from good families." He added that most families of accused terrorists were proud of their sons. Most of them were beaten and tortured during their interrogations, he told me. "Electric torture, sleep deprivation, being tied by hands so you are on your toes. They do it to get confessions." Khreis's youngest client was an eighteen-year-old jihad hopeful. "I take these cases because the American government is against them, and I am not with the USA, and the Jordanian government wants to satisfy USA." Like many Jordanians, Khreis believed Zarqawi was not responsible for the November 9, 2005, hotel bombings in Amman. "The hotel bombings were done by the Mossad, maybe the CIA is involved. There is a secret agreement between the Jordanian government and the USA to bring American forces here to attack Syria, so they want to prepare people for the attack on Syria."

An insider in the Royal Court who studied Jordanian att.i.tudes explained such beliefs as shanateh, or schadenfreude. "Whatever is shanateh to America, we like it." A June 2005 Pew poll found that 60 percent of Jordanians trusted bin Laden and 50 percent supported violence to get rid of non-Muslim influence. The report stunned the Jordanian government. "We said, No way, our people are not like that," the insider said. But when the Jordanian government conducted its own research it found similar responses. "Even if we a.s.sume the Pew poll is exaggerated, maybe 25 percent trust him very much and 35 percent trust him somewhat. The Pew poll is exaggerated, but if Zarqawi wants to recruit here, how many does he need? Even if one-half of 1 percent join, he's okay." Despite the support Zarqawi and bin Laden received in the polls, the insider believed it did not reflect a true radicalization; it was merely shanateh. "When it comes to Israel, we are helpless," he said. "Hundreds of millions of Arabs, and we can't hurt Israel or America. So we can be happy with what is happening to America in Iraq."

This inside source also blamed the Jordanian government's tolerance of Salafism. "This is an appeas.e.m.e.nt from the security services. The church got them to ban The Da Vinci Code, but in Abdali you can buy Salafi books. Since the '70s they are turning a blind eye." He added that the requirements for studying Islamic law at the University of Jordan were lower than for any other subject. "Sharia students are the ones who get the worst scores and can't get into other schools, the ones with no critical thinking skills. The Sharia school in the university accepts the dumbest students. They tell them, 'All other majors are closed to you. Become a preacher.'" There are more than three thousand mosques in Jordan, he told me, but one-tenth of them lack a regular imam, which means that "anyone can stand up and do the Friday sermon." In addition, he said, "1,450 imams earn less than one hundred dinars a month, so you can buy them easily. So the quality of the preachers is low."

A Jordanian woman who ran youth empower ment and education programs throughout the Middle East worried that recruits were drawn to Salafism because "they are discouraged and depressed. Across the whole region youth lack dreams because they have been repressed by the system. It's not just poverty. Wealthy individuals are joining the jihad. There is a lack of hope and dreams. The youth feel they are of no value to society and become a burden, so of course they are attracted to these extreme ideologies."

Muhammad Abu Rumman, a Jordanian journalist specializing in Islamic movements and a former Muslim Brother himself, attributed the attraction of Salafism to hopelessness. "The political environment and conditions make them feel bad," he told me. "They have no hope for the future with the political system here, so they try by themselves to do what the government cannot do. They are victims of conditions in Jordan and the Arab world. Political consciousness is born in bad political, economic, social conditions. There is no religious reform. Religious understanding is not supporting democracy and human rights. It always says all the bad things are because we are far from Islam and we don't obey Allah so the U.S. invaded Iraq." He explained that the Muslim Brotherhood, which was Jordan's only opposition movement but refrained from questioning the government's legitimacy, "represents the middle cla.s.s and shares in the system and government, but in their religious speech they use the same language as Salafis. These youth do what people say and don't do. We all speak of Iraq. The preachers speak of Iraq, and of jihad in Iraq and Palestine. The king would be in danger if he tried to stop this. All of the society speaks the same language."

Ha.s.san Abu Haniyeh, a Jordanian researcher specializing in Salafism and a former reformist Salafi, agreed: "The main motivation for terrorists is unemployment and poverty. The people are between the hammer of the Americans and the anvil of exclusion from partic.i.p.ating. If you open an office for volunteers for the jihad in Iraq here you would take a million, and from the rest of the Arab world you would take millions." Abu Haniyeh complained that the American project of reform in the Arab world had given democracy a bad name. "The U.S. terminated us, the reformers," he said, "because now the word 'reform' is a bad word, an American word. If people hear the word 'reform, ' they think of Iraq, which became a model of violence. And now the reform and the reformers are isolated from people, people don't like them. Now the reform project became empty from the inside because the replacement of our regimes is very terrifying, so there is nothing left, only extremist talk."

Yasar Qartarneh was a sharp, raucous, slightly overweight man who jokingly called himself an Islamist and liked to provoke. Qatarneh worked for Jordan's Inst.i.tute for the Study of Diplomacy, a think tank within the Jordanian government funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "Terrorism is linked to events on both sides of the border," he said. "For fifty years Islamist activists and politicians were the regime's main source of legitimacy." Now the chickens had come home to roost. He was concerned that just as America had given reform a bad name, so had Zarqawi tarnished resistance. "We have to draw a line which Zarqawi, G.o.dd.a.m.n him, blurred. It was very legitimate to fight occupation. Zarqawi blurred the line, and now you can't distinguish if what he does is terrorism or freedom fighting."

The solution, according to Abu Rumman, was in Iraq. "If Sunnis played a political role in Iraq, Zarqawi would disappear, because who will support him?" Jordan was in a difficult position, watching its neighbor to the east nervously. In December 2004, King Abdullah warned of a "s.h.i.+te crescent" from Lebanon to Iraq to Iran that would destabilize the entire region. Iraq's s.h.i.+tes had demonstrated against Jordan in the past, condemning the country for its steady trickle of suicide bombers who crossed into Iraq and committed atrocities against s.h.i.+te civilians. In September 2005 Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal warned that a civil war in Iraq would destabilize the entire region and complained that the Americans had handed Iraq over to Iran for no reason. From the Jordanian and Saudi perspective, indirectly supporting Sunni violence in Iraq was advantageous, because it would give Iraq's Sunnis greater political leverage. Jordan was dependent on the Saudis. In 2007, when the Jordanian state was bankrupt, the Saudis paid Jordanian civil servants' salaries. Compounding these difficulties, Jordan's fragile authoritarian regime and precarious balance of Jordanian and Palestinian was being tested by the ma.s.sive influx of refugees from Iraq.

CHAPTER FIVE.

Exiles.

" YO U HAVE NOW ENTERED IRAQ," MY TAXI DRIVER JOKED. WE HAD, in fact, just entered Seyida Zeinab, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus built around the eponymous shrine to Zeinab, granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad. This shrine city, long a destination for s.h.i.+te pilgrims, had become home to many s.h.i.+tes among the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who had sought refuge in Syria from the h.e.l.l their home had become in Iraq. "Everybody is Iraqi," one taxi driver joked after he stopped to ask several people on the street for directions to a mosque and they replied in Iraqi Arabic that they did not know. "There are more Iraqis than Syrians." Another, after complaining that the Iraqi refugees had driven up prices and insisting that there were four million of them in his city, explained, "Anybody who has a war comes to us: Sudan, Somalia."

It was early 2006, the seventh day of the Muslim month of Muharram, and s.h.i.+tes around the world were preparing for its tenth day, known as Ashura, in which they commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein, brother of Zeinab, slain in 680 in a battle that crystallized the division between Sunni and s.h.i.+te Islam. A vast commercial district had grown around the shrine. Built at first to house and care for the pilgrims and seminary students, the district had become home to so many Iraqis that walking through its streets I was transported back to Baghdad-to Kadhimiya, the s.h.i.+te commercial district built around the shrine to Imam Kadhim. "It's like they froze Iraq in 2003 and put it in a museum," exclaimed photojournalist Ghaith Abdul Ahad, who accompanied me. And indeed, we were both struck by the feeling of being in a safe Baghdad. After nearly three years in the war-torn country, I had started to fear Iraqi men; all strangers were potential kidnappers.

All around us the streets bustled with men speaking Arabic in the Iraqi dialect, overflowing indifferently onto the road nicknamed "Iraqi Street." The walls were festooned with posters from Iraqi elections past. Inside a bakery I saw a poster of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, father of populist cleric Muqtada. There was a mobile phone shop named after the Euphrates River and barbershops called Karbala and Son of Iraq. Ali Hamid, a Sunni barber from Baghdad's s.h.i.+te district of Shaab, had been working in the same shop since 2003; he explained to me that many barbers had fled Iraq to Syria because Islamic radicals had forced them to close their shops. "In Iraq there is a sectarian war," he told me. "Here we all get along." He attributed this to the vigilant Syrian authorities. "Praise G.o.d, thanks to the Syrian government we have no problems. If anything happens, they deal with it. As shop owners we are not allowed to talk about sectarianism. Word spread to all business owners. You live in a different country, not your country, you have to respect their rules." He added that Iraqi refugees feared the Syrian regime anyway. They had fled to Syria looking for a place to live and were tired of problems. In 2006 Ali began seeing large numbers of Iraqis coming. He noticed many more tea stands springing up and more pedestrians crowding the district.

In one alley, not far away, I found the famous Baghdad restaurant Patchi al-Hati. Patchi is sheep's head, the meal I have dreaded most in my years in Iraq. The restaurant's owner had left Iraq four months earlier, "because of the terrorism and looting," the chef explained over an immense steaming pot boiling with the pungent smell. Anybody with money in Iraq was a target for kidnappers and extortionists. "They heard we were a famous restaurant and thought we were millionaires," he told me.

In another alley I walked past the field office for Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri, guarded by plainclothes Syrian security officials. Haeri had been a student of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr during his exile in Iran. Following the overthrow of Saddam's regime, Haeri had urged his followers to kill Baathists. He had once been close to Muqtada, but the two had fallen out. Further down the street I found the office of Muqtada's representative, also guarded by Syrian security officials, who were friendly with the Sadr officials and zealous in demanding I provide official permission before entering. That evening I attended the recitation of Hussein's story. Dozens of shoes were piled on the stairway and in a wooden shelf outside a room where men clad in customary Mahdi Army garb-black s.h.i.+rts with black head scarves or headbands-sat listening to Sheikh Ali wail the story of Hussein's bravery and betrayal, ending with the slaughter of his family and finally his martyrdom. The men began to sob, burying their heads in their hands or between their knees. For Sheikh Ali, the story of perfidy and resistance to tyranny was a parable for his community's current oppression, as he saw it at the hands of Americans and Sunnis. "They are doing the same thing with the poor children and people on the streets," he cried out. He concluded by asking G.o.d to end the Americans' occupation, free their hostages in Baghdad, and bless the Mahdi Army.

Sheikh Raed al-Kadhimi was Muqtada's representative in Syria. He blamed the American occupiers, along with "people who operate in Iraq under the umbrella of the Americans and former Baathists who aim to destabilize Iraq" and takfiris, for the refugee flow into Syria. "They do killings and kidnappings," he said, "and now attacks happen with mortar sh.e.l.ls from both sides, so people resort to a safe place and they come to Syria." Sheikh Raed was proud of his leader Muqtada, who he claimed "began the revolt against the Americans and fought them. He made it difficult for the American army." On the eve of the tenth of Muharram a procession organized by Sheikh Raed's office gathered. Dressed in black, they were led by youths wielding immense wooden flagpoles with different colored flags that they struggled to wave from side to side. Others carried framed pictures of Muqtada and his father. It was a latmiya procession, in which the men chanted songs lamenting Hussein's martyrdom and vowing fealty to him. "We have chosen our destiny," they sang, "we are the sons of Sadr, soldiers for the Mahdi." The thousands of onlookers waited until dawn for the culmination of the events. By four in the morning hundreds of men dressed in white robes had a.s.sembled in tents. They carried short swords, which they cleaned in buckets of soap. They patted their heads for several minutes, perhaps to numb the surface or steel their nerves. After performing the dawn prayer, they lined up and, led by trumpeters and drummers, began a march through alleys lined with shrouded women looking on. The drums and trumpets rang out a martial beat and were followed by chants of "Haidar!" another name for Ali, father of Hussein and Zeinab. The men, and many boys, swung their swords rhythmically, hitting their foreheads and drawing blood, which soon drenched their faces and robes. As onlookers filmed the scene on their phones and the sun rose above them, the men danced in b.l.o.o.d.y ecstasy. When they reached the shrine the event ended suddenly, and people returned to their homes or hotel rooms. In the Iraqi shrine city of Karbala and Baghdad's Kadhimiya district, I had seen these events end in explosions and terror attacks. In Damascus it felt almost anticlimactic.

The Displaced.

As the violence in Iraq caused its population to hemorrhage, Iraqis fled to wherever they could. Millions were displaced, some seeking shelter in Kurdistan, others in safer neighborhoods, cleansed of minorities, or safer provinces. Others fled to Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Denmark, and anywhe