Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East

by Jared Cohen

  It was then that I realized that I was alone.

  I’ve been in a lot of dangerous situations before, but something about this one really scared me. It was nearing 130 degrees and I was alone in what appeared to be a war zone in the middle of Iraq. If I’d known then that I was actually in the heart of the Iraqi insurgency, I would probably have had an anxiety attack.

  In my last ten days in Iraq, forty-six American soldiers had been killed throughout the country, with a significant portion of those fatalities occurring in the Al Tafal Region southwest of Mosul. In addition to this, an American journalist in Basra had been shot in the head and killed during that same period. If Iraq was unsafe to travel for soldiers and journalists, what did that mean for me, a twenty-three-year-old unarmed American Jew?

  Fortunately for me, I was tired, disoriented, and willing to convince myself that I was jumping to conclusions about my location. But the danger of the situation became immediately apparent when I stepped out of the car to stretch my legs and look around. On a cement wall, I could see a defaced painting of the former Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein. Just east of the defaced image, a tattered old Ba’ath flag flew high above a local checkpoint. No longer under the protective banner of the Iraqi Kurdistan regional government, I stood staring at the standard of the new Republic of Iraq. I had no idea where I was.

  I knew that I had fallen asleep in Kurdistan, expecting to wake up when my driver had arrived at the Iraq-Turkey border. Instead, I was alone, somewhere in the heart of Sunni Iraq. The only thing that kept me from giving in to utter dread and terror was the irony of the situation: After years of recklessly putting myself in harm’s way, I’d finally acted responsibly and somehow ended up in the most dangerous situation in which I’d ever found myself.

  I was suspicious of every person who walked by. The Kurdish government was no longer protecting me and there was plenty to be afraid of: As not simply an American, but as an American Jew, an “entrepreneur” could make a nice chunk of change by telling insurgents of my location. Once captured by insurgents, well, I’d seen the horrifying videos too.

  Fearful of everybody, I didn’t want to talk to anybody. But I had to know where I was. If I didn’t get out of Iraq and safely to Syria or Turkey, I could be killed. Frozen in terror, I could do nothing but watch as a middle-aged man walked slowly by, eyeing me suspiciously.

  He wore a long, dirty white robe and had a large, full beard. His face was wrinkled, especially around his nose and eyes, which were squinting at me from beneath particularly bushy eyebrows. He wore a white head scarf kept in place by two woven black rings. He was also almost certainly not an insurgent. The bucket and metal tool he carried identified him as an average workingman.

  “Shu ism haida medina?” I asked the man.

  “Al-Mawsil,” he answered in an almost unintellegible voice.

  I was in Mosul, the most dangerous city in one of the most dangerous countries in the world. There was literally no other city he could have named that would have been more terrifying.

  I knew then that I needed to make myself invisible—and fast. I had no time to panic, to remember that I should have been hundreds of kilometers away, peacefully crossing from Ibrahim Khalil in Iraq to Habur in Turkey. Some horrible twist of fate had brought me to Mosul, and I needed to accept that and figure out how the hell I was going to get out of the Iraqi insurgency alive.

  My first thought was that the driver had abandoned me and would be returning with insurgents. This type of setup was not especially rare, and I wasn’t paranoid to expect the absolute worst: namely that I had put my life into the hands of a man who had just as quickly sold it to terrorists who would pay for the opportunity to torture and kill a Jew from the United States.

  I had two equally unpalatable options: I could look for a friendly face in one of the least hospitable environments in the world, or I could continue to trust the driver who had brought me there and then disappeared. Dizzy and nauseated from fear, I managed to think straight long enough to figure that running and hiding were mutually exclusive, and that if I ran, it would probably be much harder to hide once I got to wherever I was running to. So I hid.

  What followed were the longest forty-five minutes of my life.

  I walked back to the car and pulled the rusty handle. I curled up in the back to lie down so that nobody could see me from the outside. Unfortunately, the car was parked at a rather busy intersection in the outskirts of Mosul, and I was on display for whoever happened to pass by. The road was lined with shops selling everything from chewing gum to tires, and the dirt side streets were trafficked by a steady stream of consumers, pedestrians, and shopkeepers. Every so often, I would see someone peering directly into the car to look inside.

  As I sat there—an unarmed American on display in the middle of the Iraqi insurgency—my imagination ran wild. Every time I saw someone on a cell phone, I wondered if they were calling insurgents to tell them about the idiot American just waiting to be kidnapped. When people came to look into the car, I wondered if they would rob me or worse. Strangely, I found the prospect of having my wallet and passport stolen more terrifying than imminent bodily harm. The prospect of being stuck in Mosul without any means of escape was a nightmare whose ending I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

  Every time I made eye contact with one of the passersby, my heart stopped. So I closed my eyes, praying against all odds that I would somehow fall asleep, and maybe even wake up safe and sound in Turkey. But if my fear wouldn’t keep me awake, the temperature would. It must have been at least 140 degrees in the car, and I had no water. Overheated and dehydrated, I was slipping into a state of delirium beyond terror.

  I began to flashback on the past year and wonder whether all of this was really worth it. Here I was—crouched in the steamy backseat of a rusty car, hiding from enemies whom I wouldn’t recognize until it was too late—and for what?

  It then occurred to me—in the midst of all the self-pity and paranoia—that the fear I was experiencing probably represented only one-tenth of what Iraqi youth must feel on a daily basis. This realization alone was enough to keep me going; through the staring faces and the vigilant eyes, my suspicion began to subside. I had a momentary sense of calm, or at least something approaching calm.

  I had been in compromising situations before, with Shi’a extremists and Sunni Palestinian militants. The Sunni insurgents in Mosul, however, were of a different sort. In comparison with the extremists I had come into contact with in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian camps, those in Iraq were an entirely different breed. Being a researcher, a student, or any other identity would not protect me with these thugs. If I was caught, I would likely die in a brutal and horrific manner. This was my fear in Mosul. At the time I could not have envisioned how the situation would degenerate. I was there in August 2005, but just six months after my journey through northern Iraq, Sunni insurgents bombed the twelve-hundred-year-old Shi’ite holy Askariya shrine in Samarra. The attack on this symbol of Shi’a Islam led to terrible sectarian violence as the Shi’a sought reprisal and a series of back-and-forth attacks brought the country to the brink of civil war. The brutality of this slaughter was horrific and inhumane, with decapitations, senseless bombings, and even the use of drill bits to torture victims. It was a horror to come that would have at the time seemed unimaginable.

  In my time in the Middle East, I had learned that extremism exists on a continuum, that there is a broad spectrum of views, methods, and goals for these groups. While Hezbollah and Hamas employ brutal terrorist tactics, most notably suicide bombing, they view themselves as some form of a resistance movement. In Iraq, the insurgents reject the entire international system and use Iraq as their primary front without any clear objective. It would have been overly paranoid to imagine myself being taken hostage and decapitated by Palestinian militants; there was no reason not to fear this very real possibility in Mosul. I was in a playground for lawless insurgents, ideological hijackers motivated by little mor
e than rage and bloodlust.

  As it turns out, clumsy Americans are not the only ones who live in fear in this part of Iraq. Sunni youth in Iraq are for the first time in their lives experiencing life as a minority—without the protection of Saddam Hussein and his cadre of Sunni loyalists from Tikrit. While many Sunni youth secretly despised Saddam, they also took for granted the comfort and opportunities that they enjoyed relative to the Shi’a and Kurdish populations. Now, they were terrified to walk in the streets; their futures were suddenly cloudy, even foreboding. The insurgency was happening in their own backyard and the hijacking of Islam by their fellow Sunnis had made their social and political situation in the new Iraq precarious at best. I saw in them a growing helplessness, not unlike the tragic impotence I saw among Palestinian youth. They didn’t have the luxury that Kurdish youth have to write letters, print protests, and demonstrate. They live each day as it comes and have to focus on staying alive. Stability is all they have room to ponder; this was not a youth population that seemed empowered to play a role in shaping their future. They didn’t know what to do: If they could leave Iraq, many would. For the majority caught between rejecting the insurgency and ensuring their own safety, however, life in Mosul is a devil’s bargain.

  Before I knew it, I heard a knock on the passenger-side window. It was the driver, unable to get in the car. I had locked all of the doors. He smiled at me and nodded his head, gesturing for me to open the door. He appeared to be alone, so I obliged. I immediately saw that he had two large red jugs in his hands. They were filled with what appeared to be gasoline. I started screaming at him in English. “Where the hell did you go? You just leave me on the side of the street in Mosul? Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?” I yelled. He listened and nodded politely. He had no idea what I was saying. I stopped screaming. I asked him where he had been the past forty-five minutes and the absurdity of his answer almost made me laugh. He had left me abandoned in Mosul so that he could walk to buy black market gas for nine cents a gallon so that he would not have to pay the actual twelve-cents-a-gallon price. He had put my life in grave danger for what probably amounted to thirty-six cents. I had at least a hundred times that amount just in souvenir currency for family and friends. Despite my driver’s total lack of common sense, I couldn’t really press the issue. I’d already been in uncomfortable situations with drivers in Syria near the Iraq border, and I figured that I had no other choice but to make the best of my driving companion for a tour of the Iraqi insurgency.

  Cheap gasoline explained why he had disappeared, but I still didn’t understand why we’d ended up in Mosul when I hadn’t had to pass through this horrific place on my way into the country. His answer to my inquiry was either naïve or reckless, I wasn’t really sure. He had chosen the most direct route out of Iraq, totally disregarding the danger of driving an American through the heart of an insurgency. This detour to Mosul wasn’t an accident: It had always been his plan to cross into Syria through the very borders that insurgents were using as hideouts. The route he had planned made us susceptible to roadside bombs and ambushes; the border crossing he had chosen was not guaranteed to be open to Americans. I happened to have a multiple-entry visa for Syria, but my driver didn’t know that. Syria does not just issue visas on the spot and I seriously doubted that my driver would stand by my side as I found some way either to head back or to expedite the process. That’s not just a reflection on my driver; it would have been unreasonable to expect favors at such a dangerous border. Either this man had no sense of risk or he really needed to get to northeastern Syria in a hurry. His choice of route was risking not only my life, but his, as well. If insurgents or other hostile characters saw him driving an American—even a civilian unaffiliated with the armed occupation—they would have assumed he was working with the U.S. government.

  And even if our car was not spotted by insurgents and ambushed, just driving on the road in the Sunni part of Iraq is a suspenseful and terrifying experience. Roadside bombs are unsophisticated, cheap, and extremely prevalent. I had heard stories of bombs made from cell phones, plastic bags, masking tape, and gunpowder. I winced every time our car approached garbage on the street, while the driver blithely barreled along. Each slight bump set my heart pounding.

  The hour alone had been miserable, but the next several hours were unbelievably excruciating. Ironically, the only thing that made me feel even remotely safe was the fact that I was not in a convoy, fancy car, or Humvee; instead, I was in a white Toyota Camry, clearly on its last legs. What remained of the paint on the car hinted that it had once shone a bright white. The Toyota symbol, while still recognizable from the two-thirds of it that remained, dangled off the back of the car. The front windshield had a huge crack and the right side of the car had a bullet hole in it. The tires, while themselves intact, rested on a wheels that were of varying designs and colors.

  The inside of the car was in worse shape than the exterior. The seats had significant tears in them and the mechanics of the dashboard were visible, with wires shooting off in all directions. The glove compartment had no door, but a small handgun that had previously been in the driver’s possession fit perfectly inside. There were no speakers on the doors and there were random papers and documents thrown about the car.

  I found some very slight comfort in the thought that even if insurgents did spot the car, I would be able to hide from their sight, and they would probably not view the vehicle as suspicious: It would just be another piece of junk traveling up and down the road from Mosul to Rabea’a, our destination at the Syrian border.

  Still, the comfort was slight enough that I was doing my best to remain as hidden as possible. I had managed to fit myself into the small area between the backseat and the front seats, curling myself in a ball below the windows. While curled up in the back of the car, I took my computer case and placed it over my face and neck. If the car got shot through the windows, I would lose my hard drive instead of my life. I then took my passport and notebook and placed it over my chest. As a child, I had used sofa cushions and pillows to build forts; now, only a few years later, I was fashioning bulletproof vests out of books. Fear can make you do frivolous things when in need of reassurance.

  After about twenty minutes in this position, I started to move back up to the seat, but quickly crouched back down when my driver gestured that it might be a good idea to stay there. I guess he was aware of the danger we were in. Without any other options, I reluctantly placed faith in the fact that he must have known what he was doing.

  The drive seemed to take forever; to this day I really cannot recall how long we remained on the road from Mosul to Rabea’a. Despite his apparent recognition of the danger we were in, the driver stopped three or four times to say hello to people he knew along the way, mostly in local side shops; he even stopped to have teas. At one of the stops, he turned to me, still sandwiched between the front and back seats, and politely asked if I wanted anything.

  Throughout this entire hellish day, it had taken all the restraint I could muster not to strangle this man who seemed a bit too nonchalant at the risk he was taking with my life. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he found my fear entertaining, a little bonus beyond what I was paying him. His total disregard for both of our lives infuriated me, and my anger grew each time he pulled off the road to chat with a buddy. I decided that if I saw American troops, I would get out of the car and seek their assistance. By this point, being embedded in a war zone with troops in active combat seemed more appealing than being stuck in the backseat of a shitty Camry with a man who was totally uninterested in either my or his own safety.

  As angry as I was at the driver, I was angrier still at myself. All things being equal, I had gotten myself into this mess. After all I’d been through—all I’d seen and done and lived to tell about—I could lose my life because I’d fallen asleep on the way to Turkey.

  When we finally did come upon American troops, the car almost got shot. While sandwiched on the floor of th
e car, I saw a three-vehicle American convoy coming down the street. The trucks looked like gigantic pickup trucks with machine guns on the back, protected by three shields. As the convoy approached, I noticed the American soldiers turning the machine gun toward the car. There is a de facto law that has been established in the occupation that when the American troop convoys come down the road, cars must move off to the side and allow them to pass. The widespread use of suicide attacks by moving vehicles had forced the American troops to enforce the regulation by shooting to disable the engine of a car if it did not move for the convoy. My driver was slow to respond, and only moved off the side of the road at the last minute. Seeing how nervous he was, I realized that this had actually been a fairly close call.

  After more driving, we finally reached a long line of traffic. I was happy to reach the border, but I now had to deal with an entirely new set of fears.

  Once again, my driver left me in the car as he stepped out to talk to people. While he socialized, I hid; this was the charade that we had employed throughout this truly miserable day. As we got closer to the front of the traffic, I saw that there were several American troops manning the border. I can recall very few moments in my life when I felt this kind of relief and patriotism.

  I jumped out of the car and walked quickly and excitedly toward the Rabea’a border. I had forgotten that I looked ridiculous: I was wearing oversized and baggy gray Kurdish pants, homemade Kurdish Kalash shoes, a blue Banana Republic T-shirt, dark sunglasses, and a backward blue Etnies hat. I approached the first soldier I saw. He was dressed in the full army gear, wore a helmet, and held on to a large gun that was strapped to his shoulder. He was youthful, probably late twenties, and had a thick mustache.