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

by Jared Cohen

  “Hi, how are you? Sir, I have a bit of a problem—” I began.

  “Are you American?” he interrupted to ask.

  “Yes, sir, I am.”

  Shocked, worried, and, not least of all, curious, he exclaimed, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I fell asleep in Iraqi Kurdistan and woke up in Mosul.”

  “You drove from Mosul?” he asked, as if this was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard.

  “Yes, I did. Was that a risk? I mean, I know it’s a risk, but how dangerous is it?” I stammered.

  “Well, do you see me? I am standing here with a gun. Do you see the other soldiers around? They have guns. You are in a war zone. This is an insurgency,” he stopped, eyeing me again. “Seriously, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Can you help me get safely across this border?” I pleaded.

  He gestured me over to his superior, an older-looking man who stood roughly twenty feet closer to the border.

  Just as I was leaving, the first soldier asked me, “What state are you from?”

  “I’m from Connecticut. You?”

  “Texas,” he answered.

  Just before walking away, I looked at him and said, “Thank you for your help. I want you to know we all appreciate what you guys are doing here.”

  He looked at me as if he did not believe what I was saying. His response reflected the low morale of so many young American troops.

  “Yeah, right,” he said. “But thanks anyway.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I do have the utmost admiration and respect for our troops in Iraq, men and women often younger than myself risking their lives for their country and for the Iraqi people.

  I walked over to the other soldier and greeted him the same way. He asked for my passport, which I happily presented. He looked at me and said, “You’re American,” as if this was a surprise to him. “What are you doing in Iraq?”

  I explained to him, “I’ve been doing research on youth and how they think about democracy. I was supposed to go out through Kurdistan, but I fell asleep and woke up in Mosul.”

  Shocked, he looked at me.

  “Man, you are crazy! You really shouldn’t be here, I mean for your own safety. This is really crazy!”

  He handed me my passport and told me where to go to get it stamped. In the distance I could see the Syrian border post with pictures of the late Hafez al-Assad and President Bashar al-Assad. It became very clear how unsafe I felt in this part of Iraq when I started to fantasize about the safety I would feel in the neighboring Sunni villages, heavily populated with fundamentalists and assimilated insurgents.

  As I walked toward the immigration office, I saw my driver once again. He had caught up and reassured me that we were continuing on together to Qamishli. He, of course, just wanted to make sure that I was still paying him and not jumping into the arms of the American soldiers at his expense, but I told him I still planned to go with him. He seemed relieved and told me that he would be waiting with the car as soon as he got through immigration. I was very amiable; the comfort I felt from being in the midst of American troops made me instantly less bitter toward him. Strangely, I felt a sense of camaraderie with him, like we had made it through hell together.

  The soldiers at the immigration office were really excited to see a fellow American. They were genuinely curious about what I had been doing and, strangely, really liked hearing the story of how I had ended up in Mosul. The morale among this group seemed high, and even while they expressed frustrations over continuous deployments and a lack of recreation, they seemed to believe in the larger cause. I watched them energetically go about their border operations, which included conducting interrogations and maintaining order.

  One soldier, a large kid from Arkansas, was particularly eager to speak to me. His name was Dan and he was about my age. Dan grabbed a plastic chair for me and told me to wait in the shade while the Iraqi immigration officers processed my passport. For some reason, the Iraqi officer was particularly aggressive with me and even at one point pushed me out of his way with some force. Dan saw this happen and screamed at him, “Don’t touch him like that again!” I really felt good, like I was being protected. After the day I’d had, the sense of safety and comfort made me almost giddy.

  I shared a cigarette with the soldiers. I heard about their families and their various stories that had brought them to Iraq. They asked me a lot of questions about the status of sports teams, what new albums were out, and how people in the United States were viewing the situation in Iraq. It was a very special moment for me. I’d interacted with the military before, but mostly to talk policy with officers at the Pentagon. Here, on the Iraqi-Syrian border, I was interacting with my peers, enlisted soldiers who were carrying out a truly dangerous mission with great courage and mental strength. I admire them tremendously.

  After getting my passport stamped, I walked through the no-man’s-land toward Syria. I was not going to die in the insurgency! All of my fear had been left at the border. As I turned around and looked back at Iraq, I saw a gigantic cement structure that towered over the border. At the top arch of the structure, black capital letters spelled, WELCOME TO RABEA’A GATEWAY TO IRAQ. In the middle was a picture of Iraq, filled with the red, white, and green Iraqi flag. Like the flag, the picture had three stars in the white stripe, with the Arabic writing Allah Akbar, for “God is great.” As I glanced at this sign, I couldn’t help but look back positively on my time in Iraq. While my last twenty-four hours there had proven terrifying, I began to remember the resilient youth I had met, the young people who were putting aside their feelings about the United States government to play an active role in building a better life for themselves, free from the ruthless oppression they had suffered under Saddam Hussein.

  I was lucky to have escaped the war in Iraq unscathed. Rather than falling into the hands of insurgents, I now found myself again in northeastern Syria, sipping tea and eating kebab as my Kurdish friends smiled at me affectionately.

  EPILOGUE

  THE YOUTH PARTY

  After my misadventures in Mosul, I returned to Lebanon. Then, after a series of unreturned phone calls and ominous text messages, I realized that I’d now fallen out of favor with my Hezbollah contacts. My travels were finally beginning to take their toll on me. I was physically and emotionally spent. After trips to Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and all over Africa, I also owed it to my parents to spend some time with them in Connecticut and New York. It was time to go home.

  I was thrilled to reconnect with family and friends after two years abroad, but just as I’d done after arriving home from Iran, I started planning for my next trip not long after my return. I wanted to return to Lebanon: I hoped to thaw my relationship with Hezbollah and see if I could go deeper into the organization and perhaps even reach some of the leadership. I also knew how much fun Lebanon would be in the summer; I was excited for another round of parties.

  One friend described the weeks of late June 2006 as the “most amazing summer in the history of Beirut.” He told me, “Everybody is talking about it, you must come.” As I listened to friends tell me about the newest bars and beach parties, all I heard over and over again was “You have no idea what you are missing.”

  Optimism in the summer of 2006 was even greater than it had been the previous July. There hadn’t been a bombing since December 2005, when Gebran Tueini, the outspoken anti-Syrian editor-in-chief of An Nahar, was killed in a car bombing. Also contributing to the sense of hopefulness was the fact that there were negotiations taking place between Shi’as, Christians, and Sunnis within the government. Beginning in January 2006, these negotiations were even addressing the issue of how to disarm Hezbollah. While no conclusions had been reached, many Lebanese were encouraged that the country’s rival powers were at least talking about how to better the country. Finally, tourism was at an all-time high. Reservations in hotels were fully booked for the whole summer, new buildings were springing up, new
recreational sites were opening, and tourism revenue was four times higher than in the previous summer. Families who had been part of the diaspora were coming back to Lebanon to visit and thinking about moving back permanently.

  Even when a conflict between Hamas and Israel erupted at the end of June, most Lebanese hardly blinked. They had grown accustomed to violence next door in Gaza and the West Bank, and this new skirmish was not a threat to their borders. An average Lebanese might catch a glimpse of what was going on by watching the news in the morning, but by day they would be at the beach and by night they would be at the bars and clubs.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, Hezbollah entered the conflict. Since 2000, the organization had claimed that it was not interested in destroying Israel, but was instead focused on protecting Lebanon’s sovereignty and winning back Shaba Farms near the Golan Heights. But in July 2006, Hezbollah militants entered Israel, killing three Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers and kidnapping an additional two. The attack by Hezbollah was a sudden and unexpected departure from what many believed the organization had become. There was no doubt that historically, Hezbollah has been responsible for some of the worst terrorist attacks against the United States and Israel; there was also no way of being certain that its self-imposed halt to high-profile terrorist attacks would be anything but temporary. Still, Hezbollah had been out of the kidnapping business and had seemingly moderated its behavior substantially since it had claimed victory in ousting Israel from Lebanon in 2000.

  On July 12, Israel reentered Lebanon for the first time since it had left in 2000. The beginnings of a ground operation led to the capture of two more IDF soldiers by Hezbollah. The following day, the IDF bombed the airport in Beirut, killing forty-four Lebanese civilians and leading to widespread fear among Lebanese that they were once again trapped in a war zone. Hezbollah responded by launching Katyusha rockets into northern Israel, killing two Israelis and wounding more than thirty-five. The attacks continued over the next week as Israel continued the ground and air strikes and Hezbollah launched thousands of rockets aimlessly into Israel.

  As the international community struggled to find a solution to the rapidly escalating conflict, Hezbollah continued to launch hundreds of rockets each day into the Israeli city of Haifa, while the IDF followed its air strikes with a ground invasion by more than ten thousand troops. In response, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed to turn south Lebanon into a graveyard of Israeli troops. By mid-August, the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel had completely destroyed much of the country. As bombs dropped and rockets flew, the “war children” of Lebanon had once again fled to the mountains to watch their beautiful country being reduced to the rubble they remembered from their childhood. Only, this time it was different: They’d had a taste of the good life and knew what was being taken away from them. In the words of one of my Lebanese friends, “Lebanon is a country that almost was, but will never be, because it has bad neighbors.”

  As I received phone calls from Beirut, I could hear the planes and the bombs in the background. I could hear the fear in the voices of my friends. “Jared, they are destroying our country,” they told me. My friends were not referring specifically to Israel or Hezbollah; they referred to actors that didn’t represent them. Some said they hated Israel, while others blamed Hezbollah. I heard some blame America and I listened to others blame everybody. “We have no way out,” I was told after the airport was bombed and the road to Damascus was destroyed. For almost two weeks straight, I sat on the couch of my apartment in New York, one eye on the news on television and the other on my laptop, where I was using MSN Messenger and Skype to communicate with dozens of my Lebanese friends. The Lebanon I saw on television was not the Lebanon I knew; it was the Lebanon of the past, the war-torn country that my friends had shown me photos of, had described for me in detail, and had hoped would never resurface. When I was in Lebanon, my friends would always remind me that nothing was as peaceful as it seemed. They said violence could come again, but I didn’t believe them; I thought they were captives to the paranoid scapegoating of their childhood. Besides, with all the partying we did, it was hard to imagine the country could return to war.

  As I watched Lebanon fall apart, I was reminded of one of the first things I’d been told when I arrived in Beirut a year earlier. Upon finding out that I was American, someone said to me that “on 9/11 we prayed for you and our hearts were with the people of America.” I remember being touched by the warm embrace of a people who demonstrated such compassion for what they knew had been a difficult time for the United States.

  The post-9/11 years have not been easy for Middle Eastern youth. To most of the rest of the world, the Middle East seems caught in a perpetual cycle of violence, sectarian conflict, and fanaticism. On TV, we watch both Shi’a and Sunni insurgencies mounting in Iraq; mujahideen fighters trying to revive Taliban-style rule in Afghanistan; and Hezbollah and the IDF fighting a war in Lebanon. In the newspapers, we read about the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in an offensive light, sparking massive riots in Europe; the president of Iran calling for the destruction of Israel; and terrorists in Britain conspiring to blow up ten commercial airplanes with liquid explosives. The images and rhetoric we see on the news lead us to believe that the world is on an inevitable path to catastrophe, even apocalypse.

  And that’s wrong.

  My journeys have taken me from wild underground parties in the Islamic Republic of Iran to the military headquarters of some of the most dangerous Palestinian camps in all of Lebanon to the emotionally shattered villages of Syria and finally to the war-torn streets of Iraq. As an American Jew traveling in the Middle East during this age of terror, I should have been unwelcome, I should have felt unsafe, and it should have been impossible for me to engage on any level with people who I’d been told hated my country and my religion. But I found that the easy, monolithic characterization of “us versus them” fails to take into account the humanity and the individuality of all of the people who make up “us” and “them.” And the “them” I met—the young men and women of the Middle East—should make all of us very hopeful for the future.

  The war in Lebanon, the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the growing threat of terrorist attacks are by no means insignificant. But these events have not—and will not—change the fundamental nature of youth culture in the Middle East. And that’s why I believe that despite the almost daily setbacks we see on television and read about in newspapers, there is a better future ahead of us; I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

  I am optimistic about the future because of the people I met: Sharif, Fouad, and Asharaf, the three members of Hezbollah who told me they hated the Israeli and American governments but had no problem with Jewish or American people. These young Hezbollah boys showed me that even they—young people linked to a known terrorist organization—seem to know the differences between religions, governments, and people; the unnamed young taxi driver who didn’t charge me because I was American; the Iranian university students who told me they had wept for me on September 11; the young couple enjoying each other’s company in the bushes, always one step ahead of the morals police; Gita and Leila, who wore elaborately pink and blue hejabs while denouncing the Iranian regime behind their menus; Omid, who had prevented me from taking photos of anti-American propaganda in Esfahan out of fear that I might show it to people in America and give them the wrong idea about Iran; Cirrus and his friends, who took me to underground parties in Iran where alcohol was made in bathtubs and Western music was blasting; Nezam, my trusted hotel receptionist in Iran who simply wanted a way out of his country; Mariam and Nassim, who showed me how boys and girls pass their phone numbers to random love interests on Fereshteh Street in Iran; the feisty girl in Shiraz who, once shown the cost of the nuclear program, realized that she would prefer the ouster of the clerics to all the nuclear weapons in the world; the girls from southern Iran with their meticulously applied makeup, telling the Basij forces to get out of the
ir faces; the hard-liners in Esfahan, who described the skyscrapers in New York as so amazing that “they must be with the hand of Allah”; the Iranian hipster who pointed me in the direction of the synagogue; the Jews who worshipped freely on the Sabbath in one of Iran’s eleven synagogues; Lebanese Christians like Ziad, Walid, and Naylah, who reminded me that, despite sectarian divides, the Beirut evening temporarily unites Christians, Muslims, and Druze as Lebanese who love to party; Lebanese Sunni like Hibah, who told me that during the Cedar Revolution she stood before Muslims and Christians and realized for the first time that she was Lebanese; the Hezbollah youth I would interview in the afternoon and run into at the club at night; Ayman, who wanted to take me into Ayn al-Hilwah so that I could see for myself that there was more to the Palestinian youth than meets the eye; the Palestinian militants, who told me they wanted pens, not guns; Haifa and Maya, who took me on a tour of the conservative town of Homs, comfortably wearing Western clothing and flaunting their own interpretation of modesty in the face of glaring Sunni fundamentalists; Mazen, who spent hours driving me around on his moped in an effort to make sure I would not feel lost or unsafe in the predominantly Sunni region of Syria; the soccer-playing boys of Hama, who gave me a candid political assessment of Syria; the shopkeeper in Palmyra who knew I would not change my religious beliefs, but still enjoyed the chance to teach me about the Quran; the Bedouin nomads, who had their satellite television in the Palmyra Desert with 963 channels; the Sunni youth who sneered at my taxi driver’s decal of Osama bin Laden; and the Iraqi Kurdish youth who lived in a region that seems to be an oasis of stability amid the chaos of war in other parts of their country.

  None of this is what I expected to find. With each debunked myth, with each overturned stereotype, I began to see that widely broadcast images of violent, angry, and fanatical Muslims are hardly representative of the majority of the Middle East. In fact, youth, the majority demographic in the region, share more similarities with their American peers than most of the world realizes.