Lebanon. It was the first time such charges had been made against U.S. residents, but the charges were very similar to ones in numerous court cases in Jordan since the beginning of the Iraq War. These trials were held in the Marka military court, a squat white building across the road from a military airbase that is planted atop a hill in eastern Amman, the somnolent capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Apart from dealing with wayward soldiers, the court also handles security and terrorism cases. Relatives of prisoners stand on line on the curb outside, most dressed in traditional gowns, deep lines on their unshaven faces, waiting to be searched and allowed in. The winter winds blow hard on Amman’s hilltops and muffle the approaching sirens of a police sedan, which is followed by a dark blue van, windowless except for some bars on the back that show only blackness inside. The van is always followed by a pickup truck, with two masked counterterror agents manning a heavy mounted gun on the bed.
On Wednesday, December 28, 2005, the van entered Marka through the main gate and circled around the back of the courthouse. Ten shackled prisoners were taken out and led into a cage in the courtroom. Their lawyers chatted jovially in a smoke-filled waiting room; then made their way past the numerous police officers, security officers, and soldiers bustling back and forth in search of something to do; and headed into the small courtroom, lit with bright fluorescent lights, lined with old wooden benches, and full of blue uniformed Amn al-Am, or General Security, officers.
Muhamad Ibrahim al-Ghawi, twenty-five years old; Faris Sayid Hassan Shoter, thirty-two; Muhamad Jamil al-Titi, twenty-two; Rauf Aballah Abu Mayha, twenty-two; Muhamad Mahmud al-Sharman, twenty-nine; Basil Muhamad al-Ramah, twenty-nine; Monaem Ibrahim Hasan, thirty-one; Raed Ahmed Kaywan, thirty-three; Muhamad Qasim Sulaiman Ramah, thirty-five; and Majdi Khalid Hassan al-Fawar, twenty-one: all stood in the cage, chatting in good spirits, smiling and waving at the few relatives who sat in the back. The cage had a chain-link fence around it, an innovation imposed after one prisoner called Azmi al-Jayusi, a friend of Jordanian terrorist leader Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, threw his shoe at the judge while on trial for attempting to bomb the Jordanian security headquarters. Other prisoners had been known to sing songs in honor of Zarqawi during trial.
All ten prisoners in the cage wore dark blue denim prison suits, wool caps, and slippers. Their beards were shaggy, as was their hair, which curled out of their caps over their ears and the backs of their necks. They were hard to distinguish from one another. Some had a dark stain sunk in above their brows in the center of the forehead. It was a
Salafi ideologues dominated Jordan’s mosques, and young men filled their ranks. Salafism found a home in Jordan beginning in the 1970s, when a Syrian cleric called Muhamad Nasir al-Din Albani began teaching in Jordan at the invitation of the Muslim Brotherhood. Eventually he settled in the Jordanian city of Zarqa to avoid persecution by the secular Syrian Baathists and began preaching about the need to purify Islam. Hundreds came to hear him speak, and he influenced the ranks and hierarchy of Jordan’s clergy. The regime was threatened by the crowds he drew, and he was prohibited from speaking in public. Unable to operate openly, Salafism became an informal underground movement. The late 1970s were a crucial period, as the leftist, secular, and nationalist projects in the Arab world appeared to be failing. Saudi radicals rose up against their regime, temporarily taking the mosque in Mecca; the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan; and the Iranian Revolution was both a model for political Islamists and a threat to Sunni regimes. By the early 1980s Arab regimes had decided to dispose of their excess radicals by dispatching them to the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.
Jordan was a ripe environment for political Islam. Since the British invented it in 1924, the kingdom had been ruled by the Hashemites, or Albu Hashem, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad who gained their legitimacy by belonging to Ahl al-Beit, the family of the Prophet. In 1970, when King Hussein fought an uprising of nationalist Palestinians—some of whom promulgated the slogan “The liberation of Jerusalem begins in Amman”—the Muslim Brotherhood, previously disenfranchised, supported King Hussein. The King rewarded them by granting them control over the Ministry of Education, allowing them to inculcate generations of Jordanians. Founded by Egyptian Hassan al-Banna in 1928, it sought to establish a Muslim state through nonviolent cultural revolution.
Radical Islam had received a needed fillip from the Afghan jihad, which began in 1979. But it was following the Gulf War of 1991 that jihadism became an international ideology. The Saudi government’s dependence on the American infidels to protect it from Saddam, and the U.S. presence in the holiest Muslim land, coincided with Muslims’ increasing resentment of their own governments. Arabs who had fought in the Afghan jihad began returning home and were disillusioned with what they encountered, so they sought to bring the jihad home too. The Israeli peace process was but one more betrayal for them. Also following the Gulf War, the Kuwaitis expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of whom settled in Jordan. Returning Jordanian jihadis were repelled by the ostentation that accompanied the arrival of wealthy Palestinians to their poor country. One such jihadi was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who would lead the Tawhid and Jihad organization of Iraq, later known as Al Qaeda in Iraq. Other Palestinians brought with them a radical jihadist Salafi ideology. Two of them were Abu Muhammad al- Maqdisi, the most important ideologue for modern jihad and Zarqawi’s former mentor, and Abu Anas al-Shami, who went on to become Zarqawi’s key cleric and religious adviser in Iraq. Maqdisi’s writings influenced the jihadis who carried out the 1995 bombings in Saudi Arabia that targeted Americans as well as the September 11 attackers. Zarqawi, Maqdisi, and Shami were heroes for young Jordanians such as those on trial in Marka.
Bordered by Palestine and Iraq, Jordan was caught between the two most important struggles in the Muslim world, at once both anticolonial wars and jihads. On November 9, 2005, Zarqawi brought the terror back home to Jordan when he dispatched four Iraqi suicide bombers to Amman, three of whom succeeded in detonating their deadly vests in three different hotels, killing sixty and injuring one hundred. It was Zarqawi’s third successful attack in Jordan. Each time he had used non-Jordanians to avoid infiltration by Jordan’s
All of the prisoners held in Marka in 2005 were from Irbid, a northern city by the Syrian border. Six of the ten were originally Palestinians, their parents or grandparents having been expelled from their homes west of the border in 1948 or 1967. One of them paced back and forth in the cage, chanting lines from the Koran. Others joked with their relatives. One leaned forward in conversation with his lawyer, complaining that “the verdict was already decided before the trial. This is just a formality.”
The charges against the ten stated that there were five other suspects who had escaped. According to the prosecution, they had met in the Qaqa’a Mosque in the Irbid’s Hnina neighborhood, which they visited frequently. The charges mentioned that the men engaged in theological discussions about calling common people, rulers, and scholars infidels. They had agreed it was necessary to fight the Americans in Iraq and planned how they could recruit others, collect money to go to Iraq via Syria, and attack the Americans and the Iraqi Security Forces. In late July 2005 they pooled money to purchase a Kalashnikov and bullets. At different times they snuck into Syria, some of them ferried by a friend who owned a school bus. In Syria one of them met with a Tunisian who took him to an apartment where a Libyan and Saudi were staying. They discussed what operations he could execute and urged him to drive a car bomb, but the charges stated that he refused to become “suicidal.” He tired of waiting in Syria and returned to Jordan, where his friends gave him a hard time for turning back. (Another one was invited to become a suicide bomber, but he too refused and returned to Jordan, where he was arrested.) Others later snuck into Syria and discussed joining the ranks of the mujahideen fighters in Iraq. Still others snuck into Syria with a Kalashnikov and four magazines full of bullets. In Syria they argued, and two of them decided to return to Jordan, where they too were arrested.
All the officials in the court had mustaches. Three military judges in olive uniforms sat behind a long wooden bench. Behind them were framed pictures of former King Hussein and current King Abdullah. Two young soldiers with red sashes from their waists to their shoulders stood against the wall. The chief judge sat in the center. As he prepared to read the charges, one of the prisoners shouted, “Say God is great!” The prisoners erupted in unison, yelling fiercely, “God is great! The way of God is jihad!” Perhaps they were imitating one of their role models, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, who made a similar show during his trial in Egypt for the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. The judge waited for them to finish shouting as if he was used to it and read the four charges, which were possession of an automatic weapon with intention to use it in illegal activity, initiation of illegal activities that could harm Jordan’s relations with a foreign country, sneaking and helping to sneak from and to Jordan with an automatic weapon, and helping to sneak into Jordan illegally. When the judge got to the
