Aftermath

out. Few roads led into the tightly connected narrow streets, where the plethora of mosques and the austerity and solidarity, among other things, reminded me of Falluja. I stopped to see if the mukhtar, Shaaban al-Ajami, was home. He was not. A muscular policeman with long hair stood in front of a mosque across the street, watching us. Suspicious locals stopped me to ask who I was. A hardened woman led us to a roadblock, just past a large intersection leading to the Syrian border crossing at Masnaa. Lebanese soldiers perched indolently atop their armored personnel carriers, phlegmatically watching anarchy as several hundred men with automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, pistols, and hand grenades manned roadblocks of earthen barriers and fires. Some wore masks. There was nobody in command—it was a mob, not a militia, and so even more frightening. The men were angry, afraid, suspicious, shouting at strangers and one another, each one an authority unto himself. They carelessly swung their weapons around, oblivious to where they were pointing. Some rested the barrels of their rifles on top of their feet, a sign they had no professional training. A car approached with a family inside. They surrounded it, shouting at the passengers. A woman inside shrieked in fear. Local police showed up in an official pickup truck; the young muscular policeman with long hair emerged and greeted the armed men, warmly kissing and embracing them.

When strangers approached, the men immediately demanded to know if they were Sunni or Shiite. Hundreds of Syrian laborers carrying bags and baskets descended from buses and walked between the earth barriers on their way to the border. Two old men were detained, their identity cards revealing them to be Shiites. Locals sitting in the shade by shops quickly descended when they heard Shiites were found. Rifles were loaded and a frisson passed through the mob. The harrowed Shiites were finally released unscathed.

Nabil Jalul, a redheaded thirty-four-year-old local leader, carried a tiny pistol he could hide in his pocket. He wore a ski mask but raised it above his brows so we could talk. He used the language of the takfiris I had met in Iraq, those extreme Sunnis who declare other Muslims who do not share their austere practices (especially Shiites) to be kufar (infidels). He called Shiites rafidha (rejectionists), an anti-Shiite slur, and told me they had been armed by the Nusayris, a slur for Alawites, meaning the Syrian regime. Shiites were agents of the Israelis, he said, and they had not liberated their holy sites in Iraq from the American occupiers, so who could take Shiites in Lebanon seriously when they spoke of liberating Jerusalem from the Israeli occupiers? “We fight based on a creed,” he said, while “they” (meaning Hizballah) used weapons against other Lebanese. “Resistance is not about entering Beirut and oppressing its people. This roadblock is for victory in Beirut and the Sunnis. We won’t open the road until they open the airport.”

Nabil referred to Hizballah (which means Party of God) as Hizb al-Lat (Party of Lot), meaning the party of sin. Like many other Salafis, he also called them Hizb Ashaytan (Party of the Devil). “We are the shabab of Majd al-Anjar,” he said. “We fight the rafidha. We ruled for hundreds of years. We have many mujahideen and martyrs in Iraq. If the Sunnis of Beirut call us, we will come.” He told me many jihadist websites published calls for Sunni volunteers to come to Lebanon. Some required secret passwords, but he wouldn’t give me his.

Nabil had no formal military training, but, like many in the Beqaa, he began handling weapons at a young age. His life changed when he fell under the influence of Abu Muhamad, a local of Kurdish descent who had been one of Zarqawi’s deputies. Abu Muhammad’s real name was Mustafa Ramadan. An ethnic Kurd from Beirut who had once been a hoodlum who drank alcohol, he married a woman from Majd al-Anjar and moved to Denmark. He returned a Salafi and recruited some youth from the town to his own network, finally going to Iraq with his sixteen- year-old son. Abu Muhamad was trained in Afghanistan and was part of Basim al-Kanj’s Dinniyeh group. He was arrested in 2002 in a mosque in Majd al-Anjar. After four months in prison he used his connections and paid his way out. In Iraq he was said to have dispatched the car bomb that killed SCIRI leader Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim in 2003. He died fighting in Iraq, in an attack on the Abu Ghraib prison that nearly breached its walls.

Nabil’s brother-in-law was killed fighting in Rawa, a town in Iraq’s Anbar province, in June 2003. I visited the town the morning after dozens of Iraqi and foreign fighters had been slain in their desert camp by Americans. Locals buried them by a mosque, placing their ID cards in bottles that served as tombstones. Other youths from Majd al-Anjar were buried in Rawa that day. One of them was the son of Abu Muhamad, which was why he was also known as Abu Shahid, or father of the martyr. At least seven young men from the town were martyred in Iraq, and Nabil had a plaque in their honor in his guest room.

Nabil was jailed from 2004 until 2005, accused of plotting to bomb Western embassies and other targets. He later proudly showed me the many articles about his arrest and release. He was released with other jihadists at the same time as Samir Geagea, a Lebanese war criminal and leader of the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces. The release of the radical Sunnis was meant to placate Sunnis and bolster the Sunni credentials of the Future Movement.

Majd al-Anjar was an important smuggling center. After the American invasion of Iraq, Nabil smuggled weapons and fighters into Syria and Iraq. Smugglers from the town relied on dirt roads through the mountainous border. All of Lebanon’s political factions relied on smuggling through Syria, Nabil told me. Many of the Lebanese officers at the border received salaries from smugglers that could reach five thousand dollars a month. Smuggling was still a good business, but it was more difficult now. Only special explosives were smuggled from Lebanon to Iraq, such as C4 and TNT. He showed me a picture of himself from the early days of the Iraq War, with a beard down to his chest. Back then he was so religious he refused to own a television.

Abu Muhamad would come from Iraq and meet Nabil in Damascus, where they rented apartments. Nabil delivered truckloads of weapons to him: bombs and explosives as well as missiles and silencers for pistols. They bribed Syrian customs officials and used clandestine dirt roads. Nabil’s friend Ismail Khatib purchased the weapons, sometimes with his own money, and handled communication with their brethren in Iraq. “We were a very tight group,” Nabil said. “We couldn’t be penetrated.” Ismail’s cousin Ali was among the dead in Rawa in 2003. After another fighter was killed in Iraq and two trucks of weapons were seized, the authorities began to watch their network. The Syrians, who still maintained bases in Lebanon at the time, had an intelligence headquarters nearby. Nabil was arrested on September 19, 2004, two months after his last delivery of weapons to Syria. The Syrians were the ones who sent Nabil to prison. “They decided to stop the flow of foreigners into Iraq,” Nabil told me, “just like all the Arabs who changed their policies suddenly and decided to look good for the Americans.”

Majd al-Anjar was also an important stop in the network that smuggled fighters to Iraq from Lebanon and its Palestinian camps, especially Ayn al-Hilweh. Dozens of men from that camp were martyred in Iraq. Among its most famous martyrs was Abu Jaafar al-Qiblawi. His poster hung above one of the main roads in that camp. Nabil was his friend and had smuggled him into Syria. Ismail took him on to Iraq. In the last film showing Zarqawi, Abu Jaafar was the one who handed a machine gun to him. He was killed with Zarqawi in June 2006. After his death a thirteen-minute video, filmed in August 2005 on the banks of a river, showed his last will. In the video he held a machine gun and addressed his parents, calling on his father to remain steadfast and his brothers to join the jihad. The mujahideen would be victorious, he said, in their fight against the greatest power in the world, America, which was the leader of nonbelief. America had to be destroyed, he said, and Muslim lands had to be liberated. He sang songs for his mother and to his beloved. One of Abu Jaafar’s brothers was killed in the Nahr al-Barid battle in 2007, and another was arrested in 2008 by the Lebanese army while attempting to smuggle a Saudi fighter out of Ayn al-Hilweh.

When Nabil and the men in his network were arrested (they were found with fifty kilograms of TNT and five kilograms of C4), they were tortured by members of the Interior Ministry’s Information Branch. During the interrogations Nabil was hit in the back of his head with a club; his legs were bruised for months after the beatings. Nabil was accused of being the number-two man in the group. Ismail was tortured to death, and his funeral in Majd al-Anjar was an occasion for massive demonstrations. With Ismail’s death, Nabil lost his connections to Iraq and no longer smuggled on behalf of the jihad. Nabil bragged about those days. “We are Al Qaeda,” he told me. “We had connections to Abu Shahid.” Nabil knew seven or eight men who had returned home to Majd al-Anjar from Iraq, and he knew there were others. In town I met a middle-aged Iraqi Baathist who, I was told, had been in the resistance, though he refused to discuss his past except to say he had served the state. “I’m wanted in Syria for terrorism,” he told me, adding that he was also wanted in Lebanon for opening fire in a fight. Sheikh Dai al-Islam al-Shahal from Tripoli visited Nabil after his release from prison. “Dai al-Islam is a friend of mine,” he told me. “He knows the truth, but he won’t speak all of it.” It was clear Nabil didn’t think highly of him, and he made a contemptuous face.

Back at the roadblock Nabil and others set up in Masnaa, a convoy of expensive cars drove up, and Sheikh