Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  When he encountered followers of Juheiman al-Utaibi, a Saudi radical who in 1979 had led the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and was later executed by Saudi authorities, Sheikh Jawad explained, “I found their ideas were what I was looking for.” Sheikh Jawad had served in the Jordanian special forces, and he applied the skills he learned when he joined a militant group called Muwahidun, which meant Unitarians, or Monotheists. But in 1985 eight of the members were arrested. Sheikh Jawad was spared arrest because he feigned mental retardation. He was disappointed with his comrades in arms upon their release. “They were afraid,” he said. “Their ideas about jihad changed in jail, so they refused to work with me.” Disgusted with his fellow Jordanians, Sheikh Jawad was determined to leave. In 1989 he went to Yemen with another Jordanian, and together with seventeen Yemenis they made the journey to Pakistan. He had previously tried to go to Afghanistan but failed. In Pakistan he stayed for two nights in Peshawar’s Beit al-Shuhada (home of the martyrs) guest house before entering Afghanistan’s Sada Camp, where he received training in Soviet bloc weapons and was sent to the Jalalabad front. “I refused to be with Afghans,” he explained. “They had beards, but they were communists or used drugs.” He added, “I don’t like Afghans except for the Taliban.” Sheikh Jawad fought in four battles before being injured and transferred to a hospital. Osama bin Laden, known to friends like Sheikh Jawad as Abu Abdallah, spotted him carrying a heavy mortar across a river. “He liked me and said, ‘Sign this guy up,’” said Sheikh Jawad. “He was impressed with my strength. Abu Abdallah was a brother, a jihadi. He was very humble. He helped the jihad with money.”

  Sheikh Jawad returned to Jordan, and then “a friend of mine asked me to come back to make operations on the other side of the border,” meaning Israel, so “we smuggled weapons into Palestine.” During the Gulf War he trucked food aid from Jordan into Baghdad. At the time many Afghan veterans gathered in Jordan, preparing to enter Iraq to defend it from American occupation, which would not come for another fourteen years. Instead, together with a doctor called Samih Zeidan, Sheikh Jawad established Jeish Muhammad (Army of Muhammad), and he imposed a strict training regimen on his recruits. Sheikh Jawad admitted to carrying out operations against infidels: attacking a British target, attempting to attack U.S. marines, “killing a priest,” and “exploding a Jew.” He established cells of fighters he called “families,” each of which consisted of five fighters who did not know the identities of any other families. Sheikh Jawad claimed that Jeish Muhammad had cells around the Arab world. Most were veterans of the Afghan jihad. In 1991 a disgruntled member of Jeish Muhammad confessed the names of the organization’s members to the Jordanian intelligence. In 1992 members established a new organization called the Jordanian Afghanis, which bombed a movie theater in the city of Zarqa.

  Sheikh Jawad disliked living in Jordan and viewed Jordanians as unreliable. “I was jailed thirteen times,” he said, “nine times because Jordanians named me, even when they gave their word that they wouldn’t.” Likewise, he was suspicious of fellow Palestinians in Jordan. “This generation of Palestinians,” he explained, “their fathers fled Palestine, so they can’t be trusted.” Sheikh Jawad was now a car dealer, but he missed the jihad. “I wish I was in Afghanistan now like I wish I was in paradise,” he told me. Likewise, he hoped to go to Iraq but worried that the Jordanians would turn him in. “If I reach the borders they will tell the Americans or the rafidha, [but] I wish I could go.”

  “Iraq has a different taste. The water, the dates, the yogurt. It is the country of the caliphate. I am addicted to Iraq, addicted to jihad.”

  Outside, the opulent western Amman homes are unpainted, the cinder blocks still showing, rebar protruding from unfinished rooftops. Hastily constructed square houses are piled one atop the other haphazardly along the hills, an architectural patchwork like in a South American barrio, with narrow alleys covered by laundry hanging between rooftops. Empty lots become trash lots. Thin metal minarets jut up from the cacophony, their mosques mere unadorned squares like all the homes but with a speaker attached to the metal tower. In a maze of narrow treeless streets in Rusaifa, south of Amman, shops cover the heads of female dummies in the windows; on the streets some women wear the burqa. Muddy cars drive through roads built in wadis (dry riverbeds) and trash collects on cliff sides. In the distance the yellow and red hills and dunes of the desert look cold against the gray winter sky. Like a Jewish settler in the West Bank, Muhamad Wasfi built his home on a deserted moonscape. It too appeared unfinished yet old, the yard covered with garbage, shrubs, a tricycle, and a toy gun.

  Abu Muntasar, as he is called, wore fake Nike training pants and a matching blue sweatshirt. He had a strong thick body, with a belly that showed he was not as active as he used to be. His thick beard was unkempt, but his mustache was groomed short like a Salafi’s, and his hair was close-cropped. He had a false front tooth. Jordan’s winters are bitter, and we sat close to a gas heater in his guest room. Though Abu Muntasar was born in the West Bank in 1963, his father worked for the Jordanian Army. “I still remember the day I left Palestine,” he said, “with all the pieces of the Palestinian people. The Jews were raping and killing, so people were scared for their honor and left for Jordan.” His family moved first to Amman and then to Zarqa, northwest of the capital, where many military families were based. Abu Muntasar served for two years in the Jordanian military before earning a degree in business management and working as a civil servant. “At that time I generally began learning Islamic thought,” he explained. He admired the radical Islamic Group of Egypt and hoped to establish a similar Jordanian movement. “As Palestinian people we want to find a solution for our question,” he told me. “Although I was young, I saw no other solution for our problems other than Islam, so I wasn’t affected by secular Palestinian movements. I wanted to do something for Islam and Muslims and help establish the Muslim state and make Palestine the capital of our new caliphate.” I asked him if he thought this was possible. “I believe it without any doubt,” he said. “This has been proven by the Prophet Muhammad in his words.”

  He viewed Jordan’s Islamic movements as contained or co-opted by the government. Like many Salafis, he was autodidactic, reading the works of Abdallah Azzam and the radical Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel Rahman currently imprisoned in America for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He read their books and listened to tapes of their sermons, admiring them for going to Afghanistan. In 1989 he went to Pakistan and then Afghanistan “to see the reality of Muslims and their movements, of the Islamic nation and jihad.” He dreamed of starting a jihad in Sham (the lands of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine) and liberating his homeland. “I was lucky,” he said, because he got to meet his hero Rahman in the Saudi-run Ansur guest house. The sheikh lectured Abu Muntasar and others about jihad: its justification, its history, and its future. “It was the first and last time that I saw the sheikh, but for me it is a rich history,” he recalled with nostalgia. Before going to the Jalalabad front, he was trained in the Sada and Salahedin camps, and fought under the leadership of an Egyptian called Abu Uthman. He also fought with Afghan leader Abdul Rasul Sayyaf but complained that “Sayyaf disappointed many people in the final years of the jihad by taking the side of the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. He should have taken the other side.”

  In 1990 Abu Muntasar reached an agreement with jihad officials in Afghanistan that would allow him to bring his wife and children and work as a teacher with the sons of mujahideen, while continuing to fight during his vacations. Iraq invaded Kuwait upon his return to Jordan, “and my ideas changed,” he said. “The war was here.” Although a huge international coalition punished Saddam for violating international law, Israel’s defiance of United Nations rulings were ignored, he said. “It was a critical point for any Muslim who loves his religion and nation,” he said. Together with a Jordanian doctor called Muhammad al-Rifai, who was a leader of Jordan’s Afghan Arabs, he “established a jihad fighting mo
vement based on spreading tawhid and jihad, and we directed our energies against Israel.” Led by Rifai, his movement was called the Organized Movement of Islamic Call and Jihad. The main goal of the organization, which he claimed had thousands of members and supporters, was to establish a caliphate and then to destroy Israel. Abu Muntasar, the organization’s speaker, spread its ideas in mosques and schools, although he had no formal religious education. “Islamic thought is something personal,” he said. “I taught myself. I was a leader and had to learn more and teach in people’s homes and mosques, even funeral houses.” Following the Gulf War, the Jordanian government cracked down on Islamic movements, and Abu Muntasar was jailed with many of his associates, since their group was affiliated with the Jeish Muhammad. Abu Muntasar had opposed operations in Jordan. “We knew it would be useless, and we had a much more important goal,” he said. In prison he was beaten and tortured. “Torture is how they got information,” he said. “Torture is the best way to get information.” (I joked that perhaps I should torture him, then, to get more answers.) Following their release from prison, Rifai returned to Afghanistan and then sought asylum in England, while Abu Muntasar worked as a part-time imam in mosques and roved the country to teach and lecture.

  Abu Muntasar described the 1990s as his trial-and-error period. He opposed attacking the Jordanian government, explaining that “the near enemy exists to protect the far enemy, but if you attack the near enemy, then you alienate the population. They will say the dead man is a member of this or that tribe, he prays with you, it will get people to hate you. But if you attack the far enemy, you are also attacking the near enemy, but the regime cannot say anything to you because people will hate them. If you kill a Jew or Americans, people will like you.” Abu Muntasar was arrested once more for his speeches, and later for his activities with Zarqawi. “What I am concerned with now is continuing the Islamic call and establishing an Islamic way of life and waiting for the correct jihad. The next battlefield is Sham, and we must prepare the people of Sham for this. What happened in Iraq and before in Afghanistan has extension. The U.S. wants to get inside the capital of Islam, which is Sham. This entrance will be through Syria. Syria will be the slaughterhouse of Americans and their supporters, so they are welcome to get inside Syria and be butchered.”

  Abu Saad called me one night and picked me up from my hotel in Amman. In the front passenger seat sat thirty-seven-year-old Abu Muhamad. Though he was seated in the front and I in the back, lighting my notebook with my mobile phone in order to take notes, I could see from how his head touched the car’s roof and his long legs pressed against the dashboard that Abu Muhamad was a giant man. He had a dark sima above his prominent brow, and though I could see his thick lips, his face was shrouded by a dark ishmag with an eqal. He refused to tell me whether he was originally Palestinian, explaining that nationalism was against Islam.

  Soon after the fall of Baghdad, Abu Muhamad had made his way to Baquba, a town east of Baghdad near the Iranian border. “I was thirsty for jihad,” he explained. “I felt I had a duty to go to Iraq. It’s a duty of any Muslim if he can.” He had previously lived in Iraq for five years before, and so had established relationships with “good people on the right side,” and he knew the country’s geography and dialect, so he passed for a local. Abu Muhamad had been married in Iraq in 1989, but when he returned to fight the Americans he had not expected to see his family again. Though at first he and his friends were unorganized, they soon met fighters from western Iraq and became more involved in the jihad. Abu Muhamad had been a sniper during his Jordanian military service. The Iraqis had not needed much training. “Do you know an Iraqi who doesn’t know how to fight?” he asked me. Abu Muhamad, who had known Zarqawi before the war, ended up in a group of five or six fighters belonging to Zarqawi’s movement but composed mainly of Iraqis. The group was commanded by a former Iraqi pilot. “God’s support came and sent us brothers from Ansar al-Sunna who trained us in street fighting,” he explained. “Jihad will spread around the world. The Americans are trying to attack Syria, and we are expecting them to attack.”

  He refused to discuss most of the operations he had taken part in but admitted they had involved shootings and bombs and explained that most suicide bombers were not Iraqi. Jihad was an obligation for Muslims, he told me. “It is not about Iraq. The higher goal is to establish an Islamic state.” Referring to Osama bin Laden, he told me, “Sheikh Abu Abdallah said, ‘The foreigners and infidels and their interests are everywhere, so anywhere you can hit them you will hurt them.’”

  He complained that Jordan was protecting Israel. “If this regime gave the youth freedom they would eat Israel,” he said. “They wouldn’t even leave their bones. But regimes are trying to protect Israel.” Abu Muhamad supported attacks against Iraq’s Shiite civilians because he considered them rafidha. “The infidel sects are one, if they are Jews or Shiites.” He explained that Ibn Taimiya, the thirteenth-century scholar loved by Salafis, had said that Shiites “were worse than Jews or Christians. Shiites hate Islam and hate Sunnis.”

  Abu Muhamad’s days began early, although he and his fellow fighters rarely left the house during daylight, executing most operations at night. During the day, “one of the brothers would lecture, or we prepared for operations.” Before his departure for Iraq he had been arrested, accused of being a mujahid. “They called us takfiris,” he complained. “The man who says, ‘Don’t drink alcohol, don’t dance, but pray instead’—they call him a terrorist.” Although Sheikh Jawad had spoken a rich Arabic, referring to the Koran, Abu Muhamad’s speech was heavily colloquial. He called Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak a “pimp” for going to pay condolences to Tony Blair following the July 7 London bombings.

  Abu Muhamad had not been in Iraq for a year, but he longed to return. “Iraq has a different taste,” he said. “The water, the dates, the yogurt. It is the country of the caliphate. I am addicted to Iraq, addicted to jihad.”

  Yet no one was more addicted to jihad than the “Sheikh of the Slaughterers,” Ahmad Fadhil Nazal al-Khalaylah, more commonly known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He hailed from Zarqa, which had been the capital of radical Islam in Jordan since the 1960s and had also produced most of the Jordanian jihadis fighting in Iraq. Zarqa’s population of nearly one million is made up mostly of Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 and a second wave of refugees who came in 1967. Abdallah Azzam had also settled there.

  Zarqawi, who took his city as his namesake, had been a wild young man, with no interest in religion. A high school dropout, he had a reputation for getting tattoos, drinking alcohol, getting into fights, and ending up in jail. Like many disaffected Muslim youth, he was moved to fight in Afghanistan by stories of mujahideen heroism there. But by the time he arrived as a twenty-three-year-old, the Russians had withdrawn, so he took part in the civil war. His journey to Afghanistan was arranged by Azzam’s Office of Mujahideen Services, then run by Azzam’s follower Sheikh Abdel Majid al-Majali, or Abu Qutaiba. Azzam’s son Hudheifa told me that in 1989 he picked up Zarqawi from the airport in Peshawar and took him to the Beit al-Shuhada guest house. “Zarqawi was a very simple person, silent, he didn’t talk. As a witness I can say that he was very well trained in military skills, especially in making bombs. In English you say ‘braveheart,’ but he had a dead heart—he was never scared. Bin Laden wanted Zarqawi to join Al Qaeda, but he didn’t like Al Qaeda’s ideology, so he left for Khost. I saw him in Gardez and Khost; if he was alone against a thousand soldiers he would not retreat. He was not a leader at the time, just an ordinary person and a good fighter.”

  Sheikh Jawad, the imposing former jihadi, had a similar view of his friend Zarqawi, whom he called Abu Musab. “He used to come to my house,” he said. “We went to Afghanistan together. Abu Musab was a normal man, afraid of God, a very natural man, didn’t have a lot of knowledge.” Sheikh Jawad told me that Zarqawi gave two of his sisters as wives to Afghans in order to strengthen his relationship with his hosts. “Afghans took care of him,
and he gained experience,” he said. Zarqawi was placed in charge of Jordanians arriving in Afghanistan and later led a group called Jund al-Sham (Soldiers of Sham).

  In Pakistan Zarqawi met Isam Taher al-Oteibi al-Burqawi, known as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. Maqdisi was a self-taught Palestinian cleric living in Kuwait. Like many Palestinians who relocated to Jordan from Kuwait, he had belonged to an important Kuwaiti Salafi organization called Jamiyat al-Turath al-Islami (The Society of Islamic Heritage), led by the Egyptian cleric Sheikh Abdel Rahman al-Khaleq. Khaleq had come to Kuwait from Egypt in the 1960s, a period when many Egyptian Islamists moved to the Gulf to teach in order to escape government persecution. This persecution persisted until Egyptian clerics like Omar Abdel Rahman, who led the Islamic Group, declared the state itself to be the enemy. This sort of radical Islam was a product of Egyptian prisons, and when these Egyptians were encouraged to take their struggle to Afghanistan they clashed with Abdallah Azzam, who emphasized the importance of fighting defensive jihads. Egyptians such as Abdel Rahman and his followers sought to fight Arab regimes first. Their followers were the takfiri par excellence, sometimes viewing all of society as the enemy and demonstrating a willingness to ruthlessly kill civilians. Maqdisi was influenced by this school of thought and brought it back home with him.

  Hudheifa Azzam met Maqdisi in Pakistan and was similarly unimpressed. Like Zarqawi, he said, “Maqdisi is also an ordinary person,” adding that at first Maqdisi had condemned his father as an infidel, but after Azzam was assassinated he apologized and said he had been mistaken. Upon arriving in Jordan in 1991, Maqdisi led Jordan’s Salafi movement, composed of Jordanian and Palestinian Salafis who had fought or trained in Afghanistan. Maqdisi called his organization Tawhid (Monotheism), but he later changed the name to Bayat al-Imam (Oath of Loyalty to the Leader). He traveled around Jordan with his book Milat Ibrahim (The Creed of Abraham), which was the most important source for Jordanian Jihadis. The book, also available on Maqdisi’s website, discusses some of the main duties the followers of Ibrahim have, such as demonstrating that they are innocent of any infidelity and improper worship of God and declaring infidels to be infidels. Just as infidels are infidels with God, the followers of Ibrahim have to be infidels with the gods and laws of the infidels. Likewise, they have to demonstrate hatred and enmity for the infidels until they return to Allah and renounce their previous infidelity. The followers of Ibrahim also have to renounce tyrants and impious or un-Islamic governments, call them infidels, and call all the people who “worship” them infidels as well. These tyrants include stone idols, the sun, the moon, trees, graves (a reference to the Sufi and Shiite practice of visiting the graves of saints and imams), and laws made by men. It is the duty of the sect of Ibrahim to expose the infidelity of all these forms of worship and idolatry and manifest their hatred and enmity to them as well as showing how silly these things were. Infidels, tyrants, and oppressors all deserve hate and public condemnation.