Season of Martyrdom

by Jamal Naji

  That sheikh was familiar to me. I had seen him before.

  I started to worry. I felt that sheikh, who wore a white kufiyyeh headscarf with black agal cord and let his beard grow freely, was not just a passerby I happened to run into by accident. Something inside me pushed me to remember who he was. Where had I seen him? When? And why did I feel the necessity to remember him?

  After that encounter I felt afraid. If that was those sheikhs’ way of responding to a woman like myself, who wore a scarf over her hair and dressed in modest clothing, and asked about her son the mujahid, then what would they do if they were to discover my secret?

  Abu Hudhayfah

  A few weeks after settling into our base north of Deir al-Zor, our group leader was transferred and Sharhabil was promoted to commander of the Suqur al-Duru’ group in the camp. I thought it was a well-deserved promotion. Commander Al-Thuqafy had recommended him to two members of the high command after Sharhabil destroyed an armored vehicle during our assault on an advanced position of the Syrian regime’s troops west of Sahl al-Ghab.

  Another matter cropped up a few weeks after we moved to Syria. The medic Darrar al-Ghoury joined up with us, along with a band of mujahideen who came to assist their brothers after the doors of jihad in Syria were opened.

  I took a liking to that medic; he was dear to my heart and to Sharhabil’s heart, too. It reached the point where we formed a three-way bond of mutual love and understanding.

  Darrar told me all about his village in the Jordan Valley. He said it was just a few kilometers from the Jordan River, within walking distance. I marveled at this: Seeing as the Jewish soldiers were within range of rifle fire, canons, rockets, and even slingshots, why not open the doors to jihad from there, considering it would be so easy?

  “Isn’t there someone carrying out attacks on the Jewish soldiers west of the river?” I asked.

  “That’s difficult, Abu Hudhayfah,” he said. “Because the Jordanian authorities won’t allow people near it.”

  “Since when?” I asked. “And in which corner of the earth has it ever been allowed for us to carry out jihad, Darrar? Jihad is taken by force. It is forced upon the ruling authorities and the people. If a hand’s span of Muslim ground is occupied by the enemy, then jihad becomes our religious duty.”

  Before I could finish that last statement, Commander Al-Thuqafi’s car, a Toyota SUV we captured from laymen with the Free Army during one of our battles with them, entered the compound.

  Commander Al-Thuqafi, who had been driving the car himself, got out from the driver’s side, and then Sharhabil descended from the other door on the passenger side of the car.

  In recent days I noticed Al-Thuqafi had Sharhabil in the car with him on three occasions. When I asked him about this new development, he merely said, “Jihadi matters, Abu Hudhayfah.”

  Sari Abu Amineh

  I wasn’t expecting the heightened security that had been placed all about the Basha’s home without my knowledge.

  It came as a surprise to me, but I didn’t dare ask the Basha about it at all. I knew where to draw the line when it came to matters of his that he did not want to tell me about. Rather than asking him any questions, I gave my vote of confidence for taking this precautionary step, and added, “It’s necessary and the timing is good.”

  Earlier, I had carried out the Basha’s instructions and gone with a man with an olive complexion, tall stature, a handle-bar mustache and rough hands named Abu Khalaf. I found out he was a former military officer who had retired a few years earlier.

  We went in a small truck to an open and deserted area west of Wadi al-Sayr, and there he taught me how to use a short pistol. It was a 9 mm Star model. I was beset with conflicting emotions while shooting bullets at a metal target that took me thirty-seven tries to finally hit.

  That was not all. He also explained about developing a “security sense” and the various stages of it, and about signs of danger and their potentialities. He talked about how to anticipate attacks before they happened, and about the traits of combatants and assailants and their speech patterns. Before giving me the pistol and its leather holster, he taught me how to hang it under my armpit, how to draw it and how to engage it easily and quickly. Then he took me back to the Basha’s house.

  I never thought I’d become one of those people who carried guns. After all, I was a man who did work that required thinking and management skills, which were far removed from violence. That was how it should be.

  However, as long as I’d come close to the hyenas, I might as well have my hatchet with me, as they say.

  Rasha eventually noticed the pistol, and made her astonishment and horror over what was happening to me very clear. I didn’t know what else to tell her except that guns had become a required part of the job these days.

  “That must mean you’re going to war at work,” she said.

  “Exactly,” I said with annoyance. Then I added, “Life itself is a kind of war.”

  Once again I called Darrar. He was my only access to information at the time. He told me that Walid had gone for jihad in Syria and no place else. I was relieved for a while; at least he hadn’t come to Amman as I had feared.

  Then he told me that their leadership in Afghanistan had opened the jihad market in Syria. He used the phrase “jihad market,” which was the first time I’d ever heard that expression.

  He also told me that he had signed himself up to go there, and he promised I would be the first to know what happened to him when he arrived.

  I rubbed my hands together and called the Basha in order to tell him the good news. But he was distressed and couldn’t speak. I wondered what was going on with the Basha.

  Samah Shahadeh

  My father came to our house.

  He didn’t come alone. He was accompanied by two black Jeeps – one in front of his car and the other behind. Each one had three armed security guards inside.

  Why was he keeping all that security?

  I sat with him in the garden, next to the houri fountain, while his bodyguards scrutinized our security guards positioned up on the roof and in and outside the garden. I saw them pointing at more than one location inside the house and outside it, discussing matters amongst themselves.

  “If a person has more than a one percent chance his life is in danger,” he said, “then what is better? To ignore this possibility, or prepare for it?” Then he added, “What scares me is that one percent.”

  “What has brought this on?” I asked.

  He said in a very mechanical tone devoid of emotion, “Fawaz might die at any moment. They have made a threat on him. I believe the threats of those people.”

  “What people?” I asked, angrily.

  “The ones who want to kill him, Samah,” he answered.

  It seemed to me that even my father could not understand. I didn’t get anything out of him, despite all my schemes and attempts to take advantage of his sound judgment.

  But I felt certain he was hiding something from me. Even the way he talked about Fawaz being targeted didn’t match how one might expect someone to talk about such a thing.

  “OK,” I said. “I understand Fawaz is being threatened and therefore is taking necessary precautions, but why are you going overboard with precautions for yourself?”

  Instead of answering, he asked, “Where is Fawaz?”

  “He left an hour ago,” I said. “Didn’t you tell him you were coming?”

  “No,” he answered. Then, while looking at his guards who had now come closer to us, he said, “I have an appointment I must go to now.”

  Before getting up to leave, he looked at my face and shook his head, saying, “I thought you were a lot smarter than you are.”

  Then he got up and walked over to his driver and his group of bodyguards.

  Before he got too far away, I asked, “Why did you say that?”
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  He turned around and just winked at me, one of those fatherly winks he cast my way ever since I was a child, whenever I failed to grasp the implications of what he said. But this time it was different. He was slower than I had been accustomed to.

  His eyelids were droopy.

  Sari Abu Amineh

  I went to the Basha’s office.

  He was relaxing on an upholstered chair with two armrests and footrests. His appearance showed clear signs of the onset of old age, especially when I noticed the bags under his eyes and the protruding veins on the yellow patches of skin on his legs which were raised up on the footrests, and the sparse white hairs growing on his knuckles.

  He listened to me with little concern and then said, while shaking his knees, “This means that Uroub’s prophecy will come true.”

  “I really don’t know, Basha,” I said. “Only God knows why the world changed this way ever since we saw that fortune-teller.”

  “Where is the picture of Walid?” he asked.

  I showed it to him on my cell phone. He looked at it and then reached into one of his desk drawers. He opened it and took out a photograph, handed it to me, and said, “This is him at age twenty. I got hold of it my own way.”

  “That’s him,” I said hastily, “with his long hair, but without a beard.”

  “Take a good look at the picture,” he said.

  I looked more carefully. All the features resembled the Basha: the brown eyes, the thick eyebrows, the hooked nose.

  “Don’t you think I resemble him?”

  I was taken aback. “Isn’t that a picture of Walid?” I asked.

  “It’s a picture of me when I was his age,” he said.

  Oh God! I felt like such a failure for not having recognized the Basha’s test.

  “Forgive me, Basha,” I said. “Things just aren’t as they used to be. People and events have all become one big surprise. I feel like I’m living in a strange and incomprehensible era.” Then I added, “If you decide we should bring him here instead of getting rid of him, I will arrange it.”

  He sighed and said, “It’s too late.”

  Darrar al-Ghoury

  I understood from the last phone call I received from Sari that he had sent a messenger to my family in Mashari’. He gave them 500 dinars and told them I had sent it.

  It seems that that sly fox realized they wouldn’t question how a mujahid fighting for the sake of God could send money to his family while he was in the midst of battle. Considering how desperately they ran after even a single dinar, I could only imagine what my father would do when handed 500 dinars all at once.

  Sari told me – also – that time was running out. Then he asked me, “Haven’t you had the opportunity to carry out what we agreed on yet?”

  I told him that the mujahideen hadn’t given me the chance to get Sharhabil alone, and plus he had been leaving the camp quite a bit.

  He was silent at first and then he said, in a tone that wavered between anxious and angry, “Where? Where does he go?”

  “No one knows,” I said. “Not even his closest friends.”

  He was silent again. Then he said, “But he comes back to your camp in the end, doesn’t he?”

  “Absolutely,” I answered.

  As if making a threat Sari said, “You had better finish with the matter quickly.”

  Despite the threats contained in that phone call, it strengthened my resolve and pushed me to do what I was sent to do.

  Commander Al-Thuqafy, along with three groups of fighters and their commanders, had embarked upon a violent confrontation with Syrian regime forces who had succeeded in taking two of our hideouts in south Deir al-Zor a few days earlier.

  The sun had disappeared behind the sharp hills and the only people left in the tents and trenches of the camp were fifteen wounded men I was treating and trying to comfort. Sharhabil had returned with his jihadi battalion from another combat mission that consisted of eight hours of attacking and retreating.

  The members of the battalion went straight to their tents to sleep without having anything to eat first. They were exhausted.

  Sharhabil had a superficial wound on his side, so I treated it with iodine and bandaged it up. He found a spot for himself and fell asleep on a mat of indeterminate color.

  I heard him snoring a few minutes later, despite the sounds of distant gunfire and explosions.

  I covered him with a blanket and looked closely at his face as best I could by the faint twinkle of starlight.

  He had surrendered completely into a peaceful slumber. His sweat smelled like that of a tiger having returned from a perilous hunt. There had been some salt crystals in his hair and beard that I brushed off when I was treating his wound.

  I thought: Sharhabil’s death would mean a life and a future for me, and keeping him alive might mean my being found out and put to death.

  I had only one solution before me: to do away with him by injecting him with an overdose of drugs that would kill him. It would be easy for him and easy for me, and when Al-Thuqafy and the other mujahideen came back, they would think he died from his wound.

  Glory to You, my Creator. You have dominion and power over everything.

  What was I to do?

  This was the first time I felt that I – after Almighty God – was to decide whether a man sleeping right there in front of me would live or die. It was a feeling that sparked the mind, heated the body, wrenched the heart and conjured bitter weeping over the difficult choices one faced in this mortal life.

  Without meaning to, I cleared my throat and Sharhabil woke up. He reached to feel his wound.

  I shook my head in dismay and sighed.

  I wished I could understand why that cursed Sari wanted to get rid of Sharhabil. No doubt there was a big secret lurking beneath it all that only he and God Almighty knew.

  Sharhabil asked for a cup of water, so I gave him a little sip with my own hands. He asked me if Commander Al-Thuqafy had returned yet, so I asked him to pray for his courageous victory.

  He prayed for him and for the path of the mujahideen to be victorious. Then he got up to relieve himself.

  I thought about asking him if he knew of someone in Amman named Sari, but I changed my mind, because a direct question might cause alarm. It would be better to try a different approach.

  When he came back, I started talking about my folks in Mashari’ and about Amman and the people’s lack of religion there. I mentioned the many shops that sold alcohol and all the unveiled women, and the corruption. I told him about a man from Amman who married the daughter of a citrus fruit grocer two days before I left Mashari’. He had a big wedding and invited dignitaries from Amman and from the Jordan Valley.

  I kept quiet for a little while and then to test his reaction on hearing the name I said, “I remember his name was Sari. Yes, I think it was Sari.”

  There was no surprise reaction from Sharhabil. He went back to the mat and fell back asleep.

  I had a long night. I took a walk a short distance away from him. Then I heard the sound of an explosion that shook the ground, causing Sharhabil to wake up and start reciting the shahada in a loud voice.

  How amazing is man, whose inner secrets are known only to the Lord of Creation. In spite of what I had intended to do to Sharhabil, I felt as though a heavy burden had been lifted off my chest when he was startled from his sleep at that merciful moment.

  Abu Hudhayfah

  It was a pitch-dark night and I was feeling pessimistic for some reason.

  We lit a fire and gathered around it.

  A few minutes later, Commander Al-Thuqafy stood up and took Sharhabil by the hand. Sharhabil got up and they headed to his tent without saying a word.

  An hour later I got a call from my wife’s brother Saleh telling me she had suffered a stroke.

  He said to me, using
my real name – Hatem – that it would be best for me to see her before God took His precious gift from her body.

  Of course I knew it was merely a trick that Saleh – who I didn’t trust for a second – was resorting to in an attempt to dissuade me from carrying out jihad for the sake of God, and lure me back to my village in Asir.

  “She has God with her, Saleh. He is of great mercy,” I said. “But I cannot come and do not want to come, either.”

  “If you wish to return,” he said, “I can make all the arrangements for you to enter the country, with the government’s knowledge, and without your getting hurt. Your country is your ‘priority,’ Hatem.”

  “Jihad for the sake of God has the highest priority, more than any country,” I said. “Leave the governments to themselves, Saleh, and go back to your religion. Maybe God will enlighten your heart and guide you onto the straight path.”

  “May God guide you, Hatem,” he replied, “and put you in your right mind. What shall I tell your wife if she comes out of her coma?”

  “To pray to her Lord from dawn to dusk. Perhaps He will see her troubles and heal her.”

  Sharhabil rejoined us. I didn’t ask about what was going on between him and Commander Al-Thuqafy, for on previous similar occasions I had asked and gotten no answer.

  I called my wife in order to confirm what her brother had told me about her, and he answered the phone instead of her. He said she hadn’t regained consciousness yet and finished by saying, “You’d better come back quickly so you can see her before she parts from this life, God forbid.”

  “Stop lying, Saleh. Aren’t you ever going to change? Haven’t you come to your senses and learned to be truthful?”

  “Listen, Hatem,” he said. “May God give you long life. It’s true that a man’s lifespan is in God’s hands, but the doctors are saying she will not live more than a few days. If you hear news of her death in a day or so, then don’t blame me. The messenger’s duty is to convey the message.”