“Kamal!” he cried, running to me, his face twisted in fear.
“Here, Mohammed! Come here!” I stretched out my arms to my friend, and he ran up to me and stopped. Then his shirt exploded. Some great force lifted him up and back, nearly folding him in half. His eyes snapped back and his mouth flew open, but he did not scream. Mohammed fell backward at the speed of the shrapnel and bounced once off the dirt.
“Mohammed!” I screamed. “I promised!”
In that moment, terror released its grip. My legs worked again, and I bent over my friend, hoisting him up over my shoulder, the way we had learned in camp to carry our wounded.
Mohammed. I’ve got to save Mohammed.
Shells exploded around me, sending up dirt volcanoes. Struggling under Mohammed’s weight, I stumbled through the firestorm back in the direction of the tunnel.
Suddenly, the shelling stopped. Now only bullets whistled past. Behind me, I heard the trammel of boots.
Israeli foot troops. Chasing us!
Ahead of me, a boy blew apart as a round pierced the TNT in his pack, turning him into a human bomb. Chunks of his body rained down around me. Mohammed’s legs bounced against my chest. His torso hung down my back, soaking my Bedouin disguise with blood.
A crackle of gunfire. Pffft! Pffft! Pffft! Israeli bullets meant for me pierced Mohammed’s body. Fresh terror peeled my eyes open wide as I searched frantically for the tunnel entrance. But I could not find it. My heart pounded in my ears. The boots were louder now. I could hear the soldiers calling out to each other in Hebrew.
I gave up on the tunnel and ran toward some mountains I knew to be on the Syrian side. Then I saw two rockets blaze over me from the west, toward Israel. The Syrians were engaging! The rifle fire behind me stopped, and I could hear the Israeli boots running in the other direction.
“Mohammed, hold on,” I whispered to my friend as I stumbled through the desert scrub. “I will take you home to your mother.”
Mohammed did not answer.
The instant I set foot in Syria, I spun my friend off my back and laid him on the ground. He felt as flat and limp as a doll made of rags. His face was grey, his dish-dash a shredded, scarlet mess.
“Mohammed, wake up!” I yelled into his face, my own tears streaming. “Wake up! I promised Salma!”
Mohammed only lay there, the whites of his eyes pointed up at the Syrian sky.
I thought that if I talked to Mohammed, he would somehow be jarred from his sleep. He would stand up and brush off his clothes and we would march home to tell the harrowing tale of how he had almost been killed by the Jews.
“Mohammed, speak to me!” I yelled into his face. “Wake up! I promised!”
The echo of rockets and machine guns subsided until the only thing I could hear was my own wails. Dimly, I became aware of Syrian soldiers gathering around me, reaching down to pull me away.
“He’s dead,” one of them said. “You cannot bring him back.”
“No! No!” I screamed, fighting off their hands.
He could not be dead. My worst nightmare could not be true: That the friend I was supposed to save had saved me instead, shielding my body with his own as I fled like a coward. I thought that maybe that was how hell would be: a black chaos that echoed with screams and a beast feeding on children who could not run fast enough.
Our band of fedayeen made the bloody trip home, and it was dark when we arrived back in Beirut. The news had traveled faster than we had, and women lined the streets, their screams of grief echoing off the buildings.
Mohammed’s body rode in a cart, along with other children who had been killed but not blown apart. I walked beside this cart all the way to Mohammed’s house. His mother stood on the street, waiting for me.
She looked down at me, the dark night a frame around her head, the moonlight picking out tears on her cheeks. “You promised,” she said.
My stomach rolled with shame, but I did not look away. “Yes, I promised.”
“He is in a better place,” she said. “He is before the throne of Allah.”
Then she put her fingers in her mouth and began screaming. Not a scream of grief, but of celebration. That her boy Mohammed had died a hero’s death, a martyr’s death, the death of al-shaheed. Her son was in paradise. Little by little, other mothers joined her screaming until the streets echoed with a chorus of keening, celebrating grief.
None of the mothers knew that we “brave” soldiers had dissolved into little boys, crying for our mothers. They did not know that Qaffin ran for his life, leaving the children, slow and many carrying heavy packs, to be mowed down by the bloodthirsty Jews. Mohammed’s mother did not know that I had stood locked in place, peeing myself while her boy took the shrapnel.
No one knew of my cowardice. They saw me as a hero, rescuing my wounded friend, risking my own life to carry him back to his own country.
But I knew.
Kamal, the warrior prodigy, the future of Islam, had not even had the courage to pull a gun from my knapsack and shoot one bullet back. I loathed myself. Shame tore at my soul. I thought of hell again, the darkness, the screams. I did not know why the beast of the desert had taken my friend and left me. Maybe his belly was full.
12
For kilometers along the Mediterranean shore, the cliffs of Beirut kiss the sapphire sea. Before Golan, I went there often, sitting atop the cliffs looking out at my blue friend, my refuge, my freedom. After Golan, I sat up on those rocks many times thinking, Why didn’t I die? Why did I live when Mohammed did not?
I gazed out at the sea where my father had taught me to swim, the sea that embraced me when my father would not. It would take only a running leap to balance the scales again.
This cliff is high enough to kill me, I thought. What would stop me from throwing myself off?
But I knew that would be a sin against Allah. Also, the imams had been filling my ears with a different song.
“Allah saved you!” they said to me in the mosque and in the camps. “You are chosen! He is saving you for a specific time to do glorious things!”
Slowly, the anguish of losing Mohammed hardened into anger, and the seed of hatred planted in me now bloomed into a dark vine, its flowers the color of blood. Over the next year, I went on to higher and more glorious training, learning weapons and tactics that would help me fight against specific enemies—the Russians, Germans, Israelis, and Americans. I yearned to fight again, half my heart committed to proving myself, the other half still hoping to die, as I should have there on the Syrian border.
Over and over, my mind replayed the moment when the shrapnel cut down Mohammed. His mouth snapping open, the burst of blood from his chest, the rag-doll way his body hit the ground. I could not put the image out of my brain. I could not escape the fantasy of flinging myself off the cliffs that ran between the city and the foamy rocks. Would not Allah’s plans succeed more perfectly without me?
Spring came, turning Beirut into a swirl of enchanting scents. The high sweetness of orange and lemon blossoms. The smooth cream of jasmine. Sharp notes of gardenia—my favorite because it was my mother’s favorite and reminded me of her. Sarri Habbal had gotten me a new job, this one at a cadeau, or gift shop. Sarri was a gigolo who wore tight pants, silky shirts (unbuttoned to show his hairy chest), and enough cologne to suffocate a tribe.
When we worked on the same shift, girls would often drop by the store to visit.
“Mind the shop,” he would say to me with a wink. Then he and the girl of the day would disappear into the basement, returning in about an hour. Sarri would then slip the girl a trinket from the store and send her on her way. In this way and others, Sarri was robbing Abdel, the shop owner, blind.
He had hinted at all this before getting me the job there. “If you tell Abdel anything,” he told me one day at Sabra, “there will be a day when you do not return from the battlefield.”
I kept my mouth shut, but I was not afraid of Sarri. I knew he was more interested in pleasure than revenge
. Besides, he would not dare touch a hair on my head because of Abu Yousef.
Abu Yousef had been understanding of my grief, even tender, after the failed mission into Israel. I had grown to love him like a father—and if I am admitting the truth, equal to or surpassing my feelings for my real father. I respected and adored Abu Yousef so much that if he had asked me to sacrifice myself in battle, I would have done it instantly.
Even so, I was shocked one day that spring when he called me at the store. He rarely conducted business on the telephone, believing—correctly—that the telephone wires strung across Beirut leaked information like water from a broken bucket.
“There is an emergency meeting,” he said. “Everyone must come. No exceptions. Pass it on.”
He meant Sarri, whose name he would not mention. I told Sarri then ran straight from the store to Abu Ibrahim’s where I changed into my fatigues. Abu Ibrahim paid for a taxi to take me and four other boys across town to Sabra. Usually the taxis will not drive that way, but Abu Ibrahim paid the driver extra. Because of the driver, we did not discuss what Abu Yousef’s “emergency meeting” could be about. But this had never happened before, and I was burning to find out.
Inside Sabra, I could see that Abu Yousef had made calls all over the city. Dozens and dozens of fedayeen streamed toward the far side of the camp. But Abu Yousef had told me to come instead to his office, which was tucked discreetly into a squat concrete building that did not look like it contained anything important. Passing the guards, who knew that I was Abu Yousef’s special charge, I wound through a corridor to a small, plain office with pictures of martyred fedayeen on the wall.
“Yah ibny!” Abu Yousef came around from behind the desk and bent to kiss me on both cheeks. In his right hand, he held a crimson beret and a white scarf, both brand new. “We have a special visitor today. I want you to wear these.”
With that, he put the beret on my head, then looped the scarf around my neck, tucking it into my collar aviator style. My uniform was desert camouflage with flecks of red and green. I was thrilled with these new additions and thought they would make me look a cut above the other boys, like a major or even a colonel.
Abu Yousef fussed with the scarf for a moment like a mother hen, and I breathed in the pleasing scent of his cologne. “We are going to hear a special speaker,” he said. “You are going to be very surprised.”
Who could it be for Abu Yousef to call so many men here in the middle of the week?
13
An underground tunnel lit with garish bulbs connected Abu Yousef’s office building with other parts of Sabra. He and I descended a short stairwell to enter it, then tramped along the dirt floor until we emerged outside a camouflage-painted hangar. The hangar was fortified outside with sandbags and, I knew, inside with steel beams and concrete. Hundreds of fedayeen were already crowded inside, seated in wide rows facing one of the long walls where a collection of wooden cargo pallets formed a rude platform. Behind the platform stood six men in a loose port-arms stance, their AK–47 muzzles pointed at the floor. They wore complete fatigue uniforms with full keffiyah covering their faces. I had never seen them before.
The doors at both ends of the hangar had been thrown open wide, and dust motes danced in the streaming sunlight that played over the murmuring crowd. Like Moses parting the Red Sea, Abu Yousef parted the throng, soldiers leaning left and right to let us pass. As it became clear to me that my mentor was leading me right up to the front row, my heart was just about to explode with pride. I could see that even some of our fiercest fighters were not as privileged as I. We picked our way up to the row directly across from the pallets. Four or five other boys were already seated there, and Abu Yousef motioned for them to make a spot for me dead center. I noticed right away that they too wore their camouflage. But I was secretly delighted that, because of my new scarf and beret, I was more sharply turned out.
I squeezed in and took a seat on the hangar’s cool dirt floor just in time to see the rank of soldiers behind the platform snap to attention and honor Abu Yousef with a unified salute. He returned the gesture and then walked around behind the platform. His back was to me, but I could see from the soldiers’ relaxed smiles that Abu Yousef knew them all quite well. Still, they clearly deferred to him, and a fresh layer of respect for Abu Yousef formed in my breast. For the first time, I wondered where my mentor had come from before taking me under his wing. Was he more important than I even knew?
About ten meters to the left of the platform, a door opened. My breath caught in my chest as I expected the important visitor to reveal himself. A half dozen men filed in, scanned the crowd, then filed out again, leaving two men posted on either side of the door. I did not look away. Now a man wearing khaki fatigues entered, his head completely covered in a black abbayah, the Moroccan headpiece that covers the face from eyes to chin, then covers the head with a hood.
The boy next to me elbowed my side. “There he is!” he whispered fiercely. “Who is it?”
“Shhh!” I hissed, not wanting to behave in any way that might dishonor Abu Yousef in front of his important guest.
Flanked by four rough-looking men, the mysterious visitor walked toward the platform, prompting the soldiers standing behind it to snap to attention and raise their weapons, eyes dangerous, barrels pointed toward the crowd. I felt at that moment that if any one of us had moved toward the hooded guest, those men would have cut him down.
The guest climbed the platform and stood still as one of his bodyguards stepped forward and removed the abbayah. The air left the room as the assembled fedayeen sucked it all in in a single gasp.
The man beneath the hood was Yasser Arafat.
14
The hangar exploded into ringing cheers that echoed off the metal walls, the noise so loud I could not hear my own voice as I screamed at the top of my lungs.
Joy! Astonishment! Delight! Reverence! I can scarcely describe the elixir of emotions that charged through my body. It was not at all like a rock star had shown up at Sabra that day. It was as if a god had appeared.
Every one of my senses lit up as though I had been transported suddenly into the presence of the Prophet himself. The boys to my left and right were equally giddy, shouting and hooting and dancing about, unable to contain their zeal.
Arafat wore a khaki shirt, thick, black-rimmed glasses and a keffiyeh, though it was not of the checkered pattern that would later become his trademark. He had a stubble beard and a thick moustache that rode above his lips, which seemed nearly as thick. In the roaring din, the Leader smiled and nodded, while the men aligned behind him continued scanning the hangar for assassins.
Abu Yousef stepped up on the platform and raised his hands to hush us. “Brothers of the movement, I present to you Yasser Arafat, qa’ad swoara al Palestinia.”
The leader of the Palestinian movement.
The hangar exploded again. This was not forced applause. No one was under threat of not cheering enough, as I later learned was the case in the Soviet Union. No, this was pure ecstasy.
A Palestinian anthem now blared from a bullhorn speaker mounted somewhere in the rafters. After what seemed like five full minutes of screaming, Arafat raised both arms, nodding graciously, and the fedayeen settled to a low murmur, then silence. I sat back down directly across from the platform, not fifteen feet away.
Then the great Leader began to speak. “Jerusalem is our target,” Arafat said solemnly. “Allah has given us that land. It belongs to us. The Jews took it with the help of the English. We must take it back, through the power of Allah.”
Many think the PLO was a secular group. It was not. Arafat then read to us from the Koran, although I do not remember from which sura. He also spoke of the Palestinian movement, the justice of the cause, and the deplorable conditions in which his people were forced to live. It would be through soldiers like us, he said, brave and committed fighters, that his people would be liberated and restored to the Palestinian homeland now occupied by the filthy Jews.
My heart leapt in my chest. I stole wild glances at the boys to my left and my right to see if I was dreaming, that they might elbow me awake. But those boys were staring goggle-eyed at Arafat, who now stepped down off the platform and, in four steps, planted his boots directly in front of me and reached down with his right hand.
I looked up into Arafat’s face and saw that he was smiling. His thick glasses magnified his eyes so that they seemed huge, floating just below the lenses. I put my hand in his and he pulled me to my feet, turned me to face the crowded hangar, tucking me under his right arm. I could smell his sweat, the product of the warm spring day.
“It is young men like Kamal who will be our great liberators!” he declared grandly.
My head spun. Yasser Arafat knows my name!
Then Arafat turned, put one hand on each of my shoulders and kissed my forehead, his breath bearing tales of garlic and onion. The crowd screamed and clapped. Arafat released me and I, dazed and soaring with joy, sat back down, the boys around me slapping me on the back.
If Yasser Arafat said I would be a great liberator, maybe I was not a coward after all. Maybe Mohammed’s death was not my fault. The moment was a turning point, a rebirth. For months, I had wanted to drown myself or crawl into a hole and die. But now my zeal returned. My spirit for jihad was renewed.
It would be many years before I understood that, using only a red beret and white scarf, Abu Yousef had set me up.
Southwestern United States
2007
After I began speaking out against radical Islam, a number of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies reached out to me. They wanted to hear about the Islamist mindset and tactics from the viewpoint of someone who had fought on that side of the terror war. The FBI, in particular, wanted to hear about communication tactics. For example, agents had noticed that participants in certain Internet chat rooms seemed to quote certain sura on a regular basis. Was this devotional in nature or some kind of code?
The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption Page 12