satisfy USA.” Like many Jordanians, Khreis believed Zarqawi was not responsible for the November 9, 2005, hotel bombings in Amman. “The hotel bombings were done by the Mossad, maybe the CIA is involved. There is a secret agreement between the Jordanian government and the USA to bring American forces here to attack Syria, so they want to prepare people for the attack on Syria.”
An insider in the Royal Court who studied Jordanian attitudes explained such beliefs as
This inside source also blamed the Jordanian government’s tolerance of Salafism. “This is an appeasement from the security services. The church got them to ban
A Jordanian woman who ran youth empower ment and education programs throughout the Middle East worried that recruits were drawn to Salafism because “they are discouraged and depressed. Across the whole region youth lack dreams because they have been repressed by the system. It’s not just poverty. Wealthy individuals are joining the jihad. There is a lack of hope and dreams. The youth feel they are of no value to society and become a burden, so of course they are attracted to these extreme ideologies.”
Muhammad Abu Rumman, a Jordanian journalist specializing in Islamic movements and a former Muslim Brother himself, attributed the attraction of Salafism to hopelessness. “The political environment and conditions make them feel bad,” he told me. “They have no hope for the future with the political system here, so they try by themselves to do what the government cannot do. They are victims of conditions in Jordan and the Arab world. Political consciousness is born in bad political, economic, social conditions. There is no religious reform. Religious understanding is not supporting democracy and human rights. It always says all the bad things are because we are far from Islam and we don’t obey Allah so the U.S. invaded Iraq.” He explained that the Muslim Brotherhood, which was Jordan’s only opposition movement but refrained from questioning the government’s legitimacy, “represents the middle class and shares in the system and government, but in their religious speech they use the same language as Salafis. These youth do what people say and don’t do. We all speak of Iraq. The preachers speak of Iraq, and of jihad in Iraq and Palestine. The king would be in danger if he tried to stop this. All of the society speaks the same language.”
Hassan Abu Haniyeh, a Jordanian researcher specializing in Salafism and a former reformist Salafi, agreed: “The main motivation for terrorists is unemployment and poverty. The people are between the hammer of the Americans and the anvil of exclusion from participating. If you open an office for volunteers for the jihad in Iraq here you would take a million, and from the rest of the Arab world you would take millions.” Abu Haniyeh complained that the American project of reform in the Arab world had given democracy a bad name. “The U.S. terminated us, the reformers,” he said, “because now the word ‘reform’ is a bad word, an American word. If people hear the word ‘reform, ’ they think of Iraq, which became a model of violence. And now the reform and the reformers are isolated from people, people don’t like them. Now the reform project became empty from the inside because the replacement of our regimes is very terrifying, so there is nothing left, only extremist talk.”
Yasar Qartarneh was a sharp, raucous, slightly overweight man who jokingly called himself an Islamist and liked to provoke. Qatarneh worked for Jordan’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, a think tank within the Jordanian government funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “Terrorism is linked to events on both sides of the border,” he said. “For fifty years Islamist activists and politicians were the regime’s main source of legitimacy.” Now the chickens had come home to roost. He was concerned that just as America had given reform a bad name, so had Zarqawi tarnished resistance. “We have to draw a line which Zarqawi, Goddamn him, blurred. It was very legitimate to fight occupation. Zarqawi blurred the line, and now you can’t distinguish if what he does is terrorism or freedom fighting.”
The solution, according to Abu Rumman, was in Iraq. “If Sunnis played a political role in Iraq, Zarqawi would disappear, because who will support him?” Jordan was in a difficult position, watching its neighbor to the east nervously. In December 2004, King Abdullah warned of a “Shiite crescent” from Lebanon to Iraq to Iran that would destabilize the entire region. Iraq’s Shiites had demonstrated against Jordan in the past, condemning the country for its steady trickle of suicide bombers who crossed into Iraq and committed atrocities against Shiite civilians. In September 2005 Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal warned that a civil war in Iraq would destabilize the entire region and complained that the Americans had handed Iraq over to Iran for no reason. From the Jordanian and Saudi perspective, indirectly supporting Sunni violence in Iraq was advantageous, because it would give Iraq’s Sunnis greater political leverage. Jordan was dependent on the Saudis. In 2007, when the Jordanian state was bankrupt, the Saudis paid Jordanian civil servants’ salaries. Compounding these difficulties, Jordan’s fragile authoritarian regime and precarious balance of Jordanian and Palestinian was being tested by the massive influx of refugees from Iraq.
CHAPTER FIVE
“YOU HAVE NOW ENTERED IRAQ,” MY TAXI DRIVER JOKED. WE HAD, in fact, just entered Seyida Zeinab, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus built around the eponymous shrine to Zeinab, granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad. This shrine city, long a destination for Shiite pilgrims, had become home to many Shiites among the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who had sought refuge in Syria from the hell their home had become in Iraq. “Everybody is Iraqi,” one taxi driver joked after he stopped to ask several people on the street for directions to a mosque and they replied in Iraqi Arabic that they did not know. “There are more Iraqis than Syrians.” Another, after complaining that the Iraqi refugees had driven up prices and insisting that there were four million of them in his city, explained, “Anybody who has a war comes to us: Sudan, Somalia.”
It was early 2006, the seventh day of the Muslim month of Muharram, and Shiites around the world were preparing for its tenth day, known as Ashura, in which they commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein, brother of Zeinab, slain in 680 in a battle that crystallized the division between Sunni and Shiite Islam. A vast commercial district had grown around the shrine. Built at first to house and care for the pilgrims and seminary students, the district had become home to so many Iraqis that walking through its streets I was transported back to Baghdad—to Kadhimiya, the Shiite commercial district built around the shrine to Imam Kadhim. “It’s like they froze Iraq in 2003 and put it in a museum,” exclaimed photojournalist Ghaith Abdul Ahad, who accompanied me. And indeed, we were both struck by the feeling of being in a safe Baghdad. After nearly three years in the war-torn country, I had started to fear Iraqi men; all strangers were potential kidnappers.
All around us the streets bustled with men speaking Arabic in the Iraqi dialect, overflowing indifferently onto the road nicknamed “Iraqi Street.” The walls were festooned with posters from Iraqi elections past. Inside a bakery I saw a poster of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, father of populist cleric Muqtada. There was a mobile phone
