The Silent Man

walked home, Nasiji pushed him onto a side street off the main road.

The Shia was skinny, not a fighter. Nasiji looked around to be sure no one was watching, then dragged the kid into a garbage-strewn alley invisible from the road. He punched the Shia in the stomach until the boy doubled over. The kid’s shoulders heaved as he gasped for breath.

“You’re nothing,” Nasiji said. “Say it.”

“I’m n-n-nothing.”

The kid looked up. Nasiji caught him across the face with a straight right, snapping back his head. The boy collapsed onto the broken concrete.

“Please,” he said. “I didn’t do nothing.”

“Give me your hand,” Nasiji said. The Shia limply raised his arm. Nasiji grabbed the boy’s hand and twisted his pinky sideways until it snapped. The kid pulled back his arm and screamed, a sharp animal cry. Nasiji lined up to kick him. And something more. Hurt him. He didn’t know where the words came from, but suddenly he had an overwhelming urge to hear the boy scream. Nasiji looked around for a brick, a stone, anything. Kill him. The Shia must have seen the madness in Nasiji’s eyes, for he scrabbled backward, his legs kicking wildly.

“Allah. Please. I beg you. I’m sorry. Whatever I’ve done, I’m sorry.”

Nasiji looked away from the boy to find a brick. When he turned back he saw for the first time how pathetic the Shia really was. The kid’s T-shirt was dirty and his sneakers didn’t match. Tears and snot flowed down his face. Nasiji’s rage faded and a heavy shame filled his belly. He stepped back. “Filthy cur. Go back to Shula and never touch a girl in Ghazaliya again. We don’t want your fleas.”

The kid scrambled and ran. Nasiji walked out of the alley, his head pounding, heart beating so quickly that even an hour later it hadn’t returned to normal. What if a rock had been handy? What if he hadn’t had those few seconds to collect himself?

Nasiji told no one about what had happened that day, what he’d almost done. He stopped fighting and devoted himself to studying. For a decade, he pushed aside his murderous thoughts, locked down the beast inside him.

On the overpass in Ghazaliya, beside the bloodied bodies of his father and mother and sister and brother, he opened the cage.

HE JOINED THE SUNNI MILITIA battling the Shia for control of Ghazaliya. But he quickly tired of fighting other Iraqis. The Shia weren’t to blame for this madness. Everything had been fine until the invasion. The United States had destroyed Iraq. Nasiji saw the truth now.

So Nasiji left Ghazaliya for Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, where former Baathists were organizing the Sunni insurgency. He was easily accepted. Everyone in Tikrit knew what had happened to his father. Nasiji had only one quirk. He had no interest in operations against the Shia. Only Americans.

He quickly gained a reputation as fearless and vicious. In early 2006 he led an ambush against an American convoy traveling through Mahmoudiyah. His men killed three soldiers and kidnapped two more, hiding them in a farmhouse a few miles south of Fallujah. Nasiji interrogated the men for a few days, but they didn’t have much to tell. He told them he’d let them go if they begged for their lives. They knew he was lying, perhaps, but they couldn’t help themselves.

He watched their mouths move as they spoke, but he couldn’t hear them at all, only the little voice in his head whispering, Kill them. When their pleas were done, he blew out their brains and left their bodies in a field for dogs to eat. Then he uploaded the video to a jihadi Web site, to prove to the world that Americans were weak when they didn’t have tanks or helicopters to protect them.

After the Mahmoudiyah operation, Nasiji’s anger curdled into something calmer and nastier. Over the course of a year, he and his men had killed two dozen soldiers with ambushes and roadside bombs. A good haul. But hardly enough to make a difference in this war. The American bases were impenetrable. He could only pick soldiers off one by one as they traveled in convoys. Eventually he’d be shot in a firefight, or the Americans would learn his name and seek him out. Inevitably they’d get him. Besides, how would killing even a hundred soldiers make a difference? The Americans didn’t care how many of their soldiers died here, or how much damage they caused.

“Ordinary people die all the time here and they don’t care,” his brother Amir had said on September 11. “Now they understand.”

But Amir had been wrong. The Americans hadn’t understood the message of September 11 at all. To teach them, Nasiji would need to give them a lesson they would never forget. He would need to use the knowledge he’d gained in Munich to turn their cities into lakes of fire.

NASIJI WENT BACK to Tikrit with an unusual request. He heard nothing for two weeks, and he wondered if he’d overreached. Then, near midnight, as he rested in a house in Ghazaliya, his phone trilled. “Sayyid. It’s arranged. For tomorrow.” The voice belonged to a Syrian he knew only as Bas. “Tell me where you are.”

Nasiji gave his location.

“I’ll send a car at six a.m. Whoever you’re with, don’t tell them. Just go.”

“Of course. Bas?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

That night Nasiji hardly slept. Curled on his metal cot, his AK laid neatly on a sheet on the concrete floor beneath him, he folded his arms behind his head and wondered: Would the sheikh listen to him? He was nothing, a jihadi like a million others. He closed his eyes and saw his father’s BMW on the overpass. What he’d first seen that day wasn’t the bodies or even the bullet holes, but the puddles of oil and gas leaking from the car. As if he hadn’t been willing to look into the BMW itself, as if the fluid took the place of the blood he knew he’d see when he looked up—

And then he had, he had looked up—

No. Enough. Put it aside. “Not what they’ve done to you,” he murmured to himself. “What you’ll do to them.” He passed the night half-asleep, his eyes fluttering open every few minutes. He was glad for morning.

Six a.m. came and went, and then seven. Nasiji worried that his driver had been ambushed or arrested. But as he was about to call Bas, a white Toyota Crown with tinted windows pulled up outside the house.

FOUR HOURS LATER, Nasiji found himself in a house south of Ramadi, kissing the hand of a heavy man in a dishdasha, the flowing white robe favored by Saudis.

The man was Sheikh Ahmed Faisal. He and his cousin Abdul were third-tier Saudi princes — and the biggest source of cash for the Iraqi insurgency. The Faisals did in Iraq what Osama bin Laden had once done in Afghanistan, funneling in cash and jihadis to fight the United States. Abdul rarely left Riyadh, but Ahmed came to Iraq every so often to track the progress of the war.

Ahmed raised his hand. “Please sit,” he said. The Saudi’s black beard was neatly trimmed, his robe immaculate, making Nasiji conscious of his own scruffy beard and dirty jeans.

“Thank you, Sheikh,” Nasiji said. “This visit is an honor. Every day, all of us in Iraq appreciate your great kindnesses.”

“I’ve seen the video from Mahmoudiyah. If we had more soldiers like you, the Americans might be gone already.” Ahmed spoke a refined classical Arabic that Nasiji had heard only on Al Jazeera. The sheikh tapped the silver case on the table between them. “Cigarette?”

“No, thank you. I’m sure you have many men more important than me to see, so I won’t take much of your time.” Quickly, Nasiji outlined his plan.

When he was done, Ahmed lit a fresh cigarette and took a deep drag. “Young man,” he said. “Many others have had this idea. They’ve all failed.”

“I have certain advantages.”

“Your training. Yes. If not for that, I would not have met you.”

“If I get the material, I won’t waste it.”

“But there’s something else. You must understand the consequences of this. When the moment comes, you won’t have doubts?”

“Has anyone told you what happened to my family?”