Aftermath

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 leadership 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 associates, 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 establishing 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 passenger 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 relationships with “good people on the right side,” and he knew the country’s geography and dialect, so he passed 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. “God’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 Shiite civilians because he considered them rafidha. “The infidel sects are one, if they are Jews or Shiites.” He explained that Ibn Taimiya, the thirteenth-century scholar loved by Salafis, had said that Shiites “were worse than Jews or Christians. Shiites 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 God, 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 relationship with his hosts. “Afghans took care of him, and