smiled whenever she begged
This went on for a year before Nathalie/Samira found a way to pursue her dream. The man’s wife received an anonymous letter telling her of the affair. He suspected that his young lover had sent the letter herself, but regardless he had no choice but to send Azzam away. He arranged for her passage to an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, allowing himself a certain satisfaction in knowing that his betrayer would probably not be long for the world. Too bad, he thought. A wonderful body, but there will be other young desert flowers to nurture.
Azzam turned her hatred into her motivating force to learn martial arts, especially the killing techniques, as well as weapons training. She’d excelled and soon returned to Jordan. There she led sorties into Israel and detonated roadside bombs to kill passing Israeli army patrols. She also ambushed a school bus full of Israeli children.
The first time she’d seen a dead child as a result of her work, Azzam experienced a curious regret. The lifeless eyes of the child, the strangely pale skin, and blue lips had haunted her sleep. Once, the face had been that of her brother, Ishmael, and for the first and last time she’d questioned the morality of her actions. But then she’d remembered that Ishmael had died at the hands of the Israelis, and she’d quickly suppressed any more feelings of remorse. After all, she reasoned, her own childhood had been destroyed by the Israelis, why shouldn’t their children suffer, too. There are casualties in every war, she told herself and thought no more of it.
The only downfall to her new path was that she was still alive. Several times, she’d accompanied some young man to the entrance of a disco or shopping mall, and then waited at a safe distance, listening with envy for the sound of the explosion, the screams, and the wailing of the ambulances.
After a time, Azzam learned that she was to be arrested by authorities in Jordan who were under pressure from the United States and Israel to crack down on militants coming over the border. She’d fled only minutes before the Jordanian secret police kicked down the door of her apartment. Watching the agents rush her building, she’d listened for the
She’d arrived back at the training camp in Afghanistan, where she’d been noticed by a high-ranking lieutenant in the al Qaeda organization who took her under his wing and into his bed.
Tired of being put off from her destiny by the leadership of Hamas, disgusted by the “peace talks,” and flattered by the offer, Azzam switched her allegiance. She liked how her new masters thought in terms of big blows against the infidels, right where they lived-not these insignificant attacks on the Israelis, who merely picked up the pieces, retaliated against some Palestinian neighborhood, and then moved on. She hoped someday she would be allowed to lead such a mission, so she remained with her current mentor/lover.
After he’d hammered away at her body and finally spent himself, he liked to pontificate on subjects he’d learned from the great man himself, Osama bin Laden. Driving the United States out of the Middle East so that Israel could be destroyed was only the beginning of the
After the Jews had been driven into the sea, the apostate regimes of Egypt, Turkey, and the most corrupt of them all, Saudi Arabia, would be toppled by revolution with the assistance of
Once in control of the world’s most important oil supply and with nuclear capabilities already nearing completion in Iran, the Caliph would unleash the worldwide
Although she’d hardly opened the family Quran growing up, Azzam now studied the book until she was
“While the Quran does prohibit the killing of women and children in principle,” her mentor said, “it is also written that if their deaths are in retaliation for the killing of Muslim women and children, or to prevent such killing, then it is allowed. The Crusaders and Zionists have been murdering our women and children for hundreds of years; this is merely payback and to stop them.”
So she had accepted the deaths of noncombatants, combined with her more immediate goal of self- destruction. She begged for a suicide mission but kept getting told, “You are more valuable to us alive now. There will be plenty of time to die later.”
In the meantime, he said, the leaders of al Qaeda had a special mission for her. They were sending her to Chechnya in southern Russia. There she would meet Muslims yearning to break free from the yoke of their Russian oppressors. The Muslim population in Chechnya, he said, had a story similar to that of Palestinians. They, too, had their lands stolen and were victims of wars of aggression, first by tsars, then the Soviets, and now the army and secret police of the Russian Republic.
However, she was cautioned, the Russians were not the only enemy. Worse in some ways were Chechen nationalists who wanted to form an independent republic. These nationalists were Muslim in name only and intent on forming a democracy in which Islam would be the state religion but have little power.
Not only were these nationalists a disgrace to Islam, her mentor explained, but they represented a danger to the ultimate goal of a united Islamic state. Muslims who were lured into the evils of Western-style democracy- whether in Iraq or Chechnya-might be loath to give up their elected governments and submit to Islamic law. Therefore, any such attempts to install a democracy in the Middle East had to be stamped out.
Chechnya had been in a state of war off and on since the early 1990s. However, the secular nationalists were trying to negotiate a peace settlement with the Russians and establish their republic. It was therefore imperative that the Russians be forced to continue to fight Chechen independence. To accomplish this, the al Qaeda movement in Chechnya was planning a series of bombings and other violent acts in Russia to keep the Russian population angry and unwilling to deal with the nationalists.
However, al Qaeda had to be somewhat circumspect. It had to appear that al Qaeda was aligned with the nationalist movement; it was important that the Russians, and the Western governments, associate the independence movement with Islamic terrorism.
“Let the nationalists complain all they want to the Western press that they are being blamed for acts they do not condone,” her mentor said. “We will make sure to give them credit, along with ourselves, for every death. It is the way of these Crusader nations to lump all Muslims into the same pot anyway; they see no difference between any of us and will eventually drive even the moderate nationalists into our camp.”
So Azzam had been sent to Chechnya to work with local Islamic hard-liners to implement the strategy. She understood the importance of the assignment, but she couldn’t help but feel she’d been sent to a backwater in the struggle. However, it was also how she met Ajmaani, who claimed to be an orphan with no last name and was to serve as her liaison with the Chechens, so she thanked Allah for that small favor. It was difficult to say when professional respect had turned to lust and even, though Azzam had thought herself incapable, to love. Somewhere in the adrenaline rush of placing their lives on the line and the periods of inaction-a congratulatory touch had turned to a kiss that had turned to the wild, sometimes violent, meshing of their bodies. And then it had been easy to return to the cause, satiated for the moment, willing to die while still high on the scent of her lover.
Azzam had been nearly beside herself with both pride and envy when her brothers in al Qaeda flew the planes into the World Trade Center. More than twenty-seven hundred dead!
