The second phase of the fifteen-year civil war had ended only the year before, and as I had expected, the jewel city of my childhood still lay in ruins. Burned out, bullet-scarred buildings. Sidewalks heaped with rubble. The blackened shells of cars. Syrian army patrols lurked on every corner, providing “security.” As my driver picked his way to my neighborhood, anticipation percolated in my belly. What would my parents look like? My sisters and brothers? How would my father receive me? The car dropped me at my parents’ building, and I climbed the stairs.
“Yah ibny!” My mother stood at the door, tears streaming from her eyes.
I swept her into my arms. “Mama! I missed you so much!” My brothers and sisters streamed in from the living room and clustered around us.
My mother’s face had aged, but she was slimmer than before and seemed vibrant, full of life. I held her for a long time, and her familiar gardenia scent whisked me back to boyhood. I made my way into the crowded entry, from brother to brother, sister to sister—laughter, hugs, a joyous homecoming.
Finally, I reached my father. “Welcome home, son,” he said.
His appearance stunned me. His brilliant black hair had gone a dirty white, and his moustache was thin and yellow. Where one of his arms had once been bigger than both of my legs, now the power had fled his body, leaving behind frail limbs and mottled hands that clutched and worried at a string of Muslim prayer beads.
That evening passed in a flurry of food and catching up on old times. Mama had cooked yaknah, my favorite, and served it on a huge platter with stacks of pita. We sat around the table on tesats, now crowded shoulder to shoulder because we were all grown. Fouad worked as an engineer for a company that installed commercial kitchen equipment. The company operated out of an underground garage, since its three locations in the city had been destroyed in the war. Ibrahim, who had grown a huge beard down to his chest, owned an air-conditioning and refrigeration shop. Omer had become a renowned chef and was opening Planet Hollywood cafés all over the Middle East and Europe. My youngest brother, Samir, worked as a rich family’s chauffeur. My sisters Amira and Sanaa were still married and busy having more children.
I shared about my career in the hospitality industry, how I had started as a bartender and worked my way into management. But I told my tale as one who shares his diary only after ripping out the incriminating pages. I explained my travels in Europe and the Middle East, but omitted Fatima, recruitment, and my fleecing of the sheikhs. I told of my settling in America, but left out my activities in jihad. I related the story of my accident, but kept dead quiet about my conversion to Christianity.
Throughout the chatter, I caught my father stealing glances at me. Where he had embraced me at the door, he now seemed cool and remote, sitting in his high place at the table, watching and smoking a cigarette. Finally, he spoke. “Why did you decide to go to America and never come back?”
“It was the war, Papa. Death. Oppression. It was no way to live,” I said. I flashed back to the ride in from the airport and added, “It is still like that here. You can smell it in the air.”
My father regarded me with hooded eyes. “If America is so great and you are doing so well, why did you not send any money?”
2
The next day, I went with my father to visit Emad’s grave. We took a serviz to the cemetery, and I watched through the window as my old world flickered past. Women in black abbayah hurried from shop to shop, heads down, their coats pulled tight around them. I did not see klatches of old men smoking or children playing in the streets. Was it the chill wind that kept them inside or the palpable hatred I could feel in the streets?
The cemetery was a sprawling, unkempt collection of marble headstones that rambled over the hills uncomfortably close to Sabra. A concrete half-wall topped with spears of black iron hemmed in the dead. When the serviz dropped us there, I hurried through the wrought iron gates, praying I would not run into Abu Ibrahim or, worse, Abu Yousef. That chapter of my life was as dead as the occupants here. I wanted to keep it that way.
A sharp wind sang through the tall pines standing guard over the headstones, which huddled in family clusters. In life, Lebanese people gathered around kitchen tables. In death, they regathered here. The war had accelerated that process, and as we wound our way through the cemetery, I saw many fresh graves.
Finally, we came to Emad’s, and when I saw his name etched in stone, black grief swept over me again, knocking me to my knees. I crawled to his headstone and clung to it, my tears tracing tracks down its front. In that moment, my grief swelled to encompass all things: a childhood lost, Mohammed and Yahya. A murderous faith, the blood on my hands. Half a life lived for the sake of death. Now my brother, half his life unlived, lying cold in the grave. Sobs tore from my lips, and in my heart I cried out to God for mercy and comfort.
Behind me, I heard the flick of a match. Lifting my head, I turned to see my father cupping a cigarette against the wind. When it was lit, he took a long draw and exhaled, regarding me with dry eyes as the smoke skated off into the trees. He did not say a word, but the look on his face spoke loudly: “It is all your fault.”
I knew then that some things do not change. I knew it again the next day when I went for a walk with my mother on the corniche, a high concrete walkway overlooking the Mediterranean. It was a gray day, and I trailed my hand along the blue metal railing that separated us from the splashing sea.
“You were always my favorite,” my mother said, smiling up at me over her hijab. “Many, many times over many years, I prayed for you, that Allah would keep you safe.”
I put my arm around her shoulder, bent, and kissed her forehead. “Thank you, Mama. I prayed for you, too. I still pray for you.”
“Why don’t you come home, my son? Why don’t you move back to Lebanon, make a life here?”
“I cannot, Mama. I have a life in America now. I have a wife.”
My mother stopped walking and turned to me, her eyes suddenly dark. “Your wife is an infidel! Do not give her your seed. She will bear you a child that is impure.”
Just then, two young girls in abbayah strolled past us on the corniche, and my mother suddenly softened, linked her arm through mine and began walking again. “See? There are plenty of girls here who would love to marry you. Why should you stay married to that infidel woman when there are so many virgins to serve you and give you good Muslim children?”
At that moment, my heart broke for my mother. Islam would always cause her to sort human beings into opposing categories: virgins and whores, clean and unclean, worthy of heaven and worthy of death. Islam would always keep my mother shackled, a slave to an ancient hatred.
Southwestern United States
1991–2004
1
I spent the next ten years looking over my shoulder while hiding in plain sight. No one in my new life, as I still considered it, knew about my old one. Not even my wife.
As the computer industry took hold in the early 1990s, I made a career transition from the hospitality industry to information technology. By 2001, I had climbed the corporate ladder to become IT department manager for an international telecom, overseeing the company’s nerve center from an underground facility in the Southwest that we called the War Room. To gain access to the War Room required badging at laser-powered security boxes three times.
Beyond the final security checkpoint was a sprawling rectangular space divided into cubicles, with four enormous monitors hanging from the ceiling. Using them, we tracked the company’s worldwide network, each monitor a blinking maze of nodes, ladders, servers, and load.
I was always one of the first people in each morning, usually there by 5 A.M. or earlier. Other diehards like my friend and coworker Christy Bonham trickled in with me to relieve the night crew. One morning in September 2001, Christy was sitting in her cubicle munching on breakfast, her tiny ten-inch television tuned into a local morning talk show. The room was quiet; not many people in for the day shift yet, but I had let most of
the overnight skeleton crew go home.
Suddenly, I heard a loud gasp. “Oh my God!”
It was Christy. She sounded so stricken, so terrified, that I jumped up and rushed to her cubicle. Was it something with her kids?
When I rounded the gray fabric partition, I saw her staring at the tiny television screen. One tower of the World Trade Center was burning. A local news anchor was saying, “Again, an American Airlines passenger jet has crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center—”
An alarm sounded in my head, oddly like the air raid sirens I had heard in Lebanon.
“Those poor people!” Christy was saying, sounding near tears. “This has got to be the worst airplane accident I’ve ever heard of!”
I could not tell her what I instinctively knew: this was no accident.
Christy reached up and changed channels. The World Trade Center was burning there, too. She flipped to another channel and another. All the broadcast stations carried the footage.
I glanced up at our telecom monitors. Server load had soared dramatically and was still climbing. My mind flashed to the calendar. September.
Jordan, 1970. Vienna, 1683. Islamic defeats. Black Septembers.
I dashed to my desk and called Victoria. She had seen the news.
“Go to the store right now,” I told her. “Buy water, groceries, flashlights, and a radio,” I told her.
“What? Why?”
“This thing is not normal. Something is happening—” I could not tell her how I knew.
“Kamal, it’s an accident. It’s in New York City, two thousand miles away.”
I tried to remain patient. “Baby, something is happening. The attack is on.”
“Attack? What attack?”
“Victoria, I can’t explain. It’s some crazy people—”
“I think you might be the crazy one,” she said, laughing gently.
“Victoria,” I said, pouring as much urgency into my voice as I could, “I do not want to argue with you about this. Just gather what I said. I’m getting Tamra and coming home.”
I heard Christy behind me: “Oh my God!”
I whirled and ran back to her cubicle. A second jet had hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. This time the footage was live.
Mumbling something to Christy about Tamra, I grabbed my keys and within three minutes was in my car speeding toward my daughter’s school. I flipped on the radio and listened as harried announcers improvised, delivering fresh news as it streamed off the wire: “The Federal Aviation Administration has grounded all flights into or out of New York Air Space…the Air Force has launched F-15s…possible terrorist attack.”
As I barreled down the freeway, the blood in my veins turned to liquid fear.
The second strike! When will they launch the second strike?
When we planned attacks, we often created a diversion before the main event. Before we stole the Syrian rockets, for example, we planted bombs in Lebanon to lure Hafez al-Assad’s secret service away from home.
What will be the second strike?
It took me twenty minutes to reach Tamra’s school. I screamed into the parking lot, checked her out of class, and roared away again, her eight-year-old eyes wide at the look on my face.
Reports poured over the radio as I sped home. “Possible multiple hijackings…all U.S. airspace shut down.” Ten minutes later, as I pulled into my driveway: “…a fire at the Pentagon…unconfirmed reports that another jet may have hit the Pentagon.”
My stomach rolled in terror. Is that it? The second strike? Is it over?
As my family passed the day glued to CNN, we learned it was not. The Twin Towers would collapse. United Flight 93 would crash into a Pennsylvania field. The death toll would be 2,999, including rescue personnel and 19 young Middle Eastern men who had infiltrated America to destroy her.
Like me.
As my entire nation plunged into a pit of mourning wider and deeper than anything in her history, I plunged into an ocean of guilt more terrifying than the Bay of Haifa. Suddenly, I wished I had died there. Maybe the legend of the butterfly’s wing was true: one missed beat could change history. If I had not lived to invade America, if I had not helped light the fuse, fan the flame, stir up jihad in the cities, perhaps Mohammed Atta and his eighteen accomplices would not have found America such fertile ground. Perhaps they would have had to build the Islamist network I built with my jihadist brothers, instead of going straight to flight school to learn how to pilot planes.
2
The whole country grieved, but my brand of grief shocked Victoria. Although no amount of mourning could seem out of proportion to such a tragedy, she still could not quite get over how much the September 11 attacks consumed my thinking in the weeks and months that followed. She chalked it up to a sensitive spirit and my ties to the Middle East. But as my spirit screamed inside me like a boiling cauldron with the lid on too tight, I could not tell her why.
I wanted to call the FBI, the CIA, even the White House, and tell them what I knew. Where to look for sleeper cells. How to spot a network. The conferences, the literature, the video boot camps. The money, the weapons, the training.
You are growing terrorists at home! I wanted to shout. In your universities, your ghettos, your prisons!
But I had kept quiet for so long, lulled into a false peace, like everyone else, by my comfortable American life. Now I had a wife, a child, a career. In the hot period following the September 11 attacks, I was afraid to step forward, terrified I would be stripped of my citizenship and thrown into prison. Or worse, packed onto the first plane bound for the Middle East.
I did not want to lose my family, but I also did not want to lose my country, my home. The tension between love and duty tore at me daily. At one point, I actually filled out a civil service application, a stab at getting hired by federal law enforcement as a translator, a protocol officer, anything, so that I could share my knowledge, turn my former evil into good.
When America invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 to hunt down the Taliban, I cheered from the sidelines. While the talking news heads recalling the Soviet war of the 1980s mooed about the dangers of cave warfare and the wily mujahadeen, I laughed out loud. In the 1980s Afghanistan was a backward world of fragmented tribes that, when they were not killing Soviets, were robbing and killing each other. Had it not been for American assistance to Afghanistan, the Soviets would have destroyed the village-based mujahadeen, cut off the mountain supply routes, and left the remaining fighters to starve to death in their caves. Without the Americans, the mujahadeen and the Taliban were nothing.
Iraq was another matter. Still, when America invaded, I thought it was the right move. In league with other Middle Eastern leaders, Saddam had plotted for decades against America. To establish democracy there would drive a stake into the heart of a growing Islamist fanaticism that would end only one way: with more attacks on America. But as our casualties in Iraq mounted in 2004, and the media, then the public, began turning against the war, I grew frustrated.
When it comes to many things, Americans are mature in their thinking. But when it comes to war, many Americans see only the game that is being played in front of them, the battles that involve their soldiers. They don’t understand the interconnections of the jihadist threat.
In 2002 alone, there were more than fifty jihadist attacks around the world. Most of them were in Israel. One of them was in the United States, when an Egyptian gunman opened fire in the Los Angeles airport, killing two Israelis. To the American mind, the airport attack was a blip. Here and gone. Forgotten. The other forty-nine attacks had nothing to do with them at all.
Wrong. To the Islamist, Israel is the hated bastard child and America is its evil mother, offering her breast. When jihadists bomb a train in Spain, an embassy in Pakistan, or a market in Israel, they are not just earning virgins. They have an end game in mind: Umma, one world under Islam. The jihadists’ goal is to pull the West into a war not against a country, but agains
t Islam. They hope to inflame Muslim moderates around the world with the battle cry that America, the Great Satan, is bent on destroying all Muslims. In many quarters, they have succeeded. When Danish cartoonists lampooned Muhammad, for example, Muslims rioted all over the world.
In May 2003, al-Qaeda bombers killed 26 people and injured 160 others at the American expatriate housing in Riyadh. In October 2003, a Palestinian bomber killed three Americans in a diplomatic convoy in the Gaza Strip. In August 2004, James Elshafay, a nineteen-year-old American high school dropout, planned to bomb New York’s Penn Station during the Republican National Convention. He was recruited by Shahawar Matin Siraj, a twenty-two-year-old Pakistani national, who had been in the United States illegally for six years. A radical Muslim. A person like me.
In 2004, I considered the advance of jihad in the world. Europe had fallen. Canada was a eunuch. Only America was keeping the light of freedom burning for the entire world.
One afternoon late that year, I called my wife into our living room and asked her to take a seat on the couch. A war raged inside me, again the clash between heart and duty. I was terrified of losing my family, my home, my freedom. Of forfeiting this new life as payment for my old one. But I knew I could remain silent no longer.
My face crumbling, I sat down on the couch near my wife, then laid my head in her lap.
“Kamal, what’s wrong?” she said.
Slowly, I turned over on my back and lay looking up at her, silent tears sliding down my cheeks. “Victoria,” I said, “I have something to tell you.”
Colorado Springs
2008
1
People like you must be killed.
The words of the young Palestinian at the Air Force Academy conference electrified me. Suddenly I realized why he had switched the conversation to Arabic. I was not afraid, but stunned. I was used to this kind of threat, this kind of anger. Over the course of years, I had been threatened by actual assassins rather than students with reckless mouths. Still, I was surprised that this man had the brazenness to say this thing in this place.
The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption Page 29