The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (9 page)

Often, Abdul Rahman took me aside for individual instruction. I felt singled out, special. And it was Abdul Rahman who taught me that hatred itself is important.

“Allah examines the heart of the true believer,” he told me once, his eyes blazing over the pages of an open Koran balanced on a
kursi
. “In order to be pleasing to Allah, we must hate our enemies with our whole heart.”

We hated the Jews, of course, and that was the reason for our hatred of America. Besides despising her loud, gaudy women and loose ways of living, we knew that if it were not for America, Israel would not exist. In relation to this topic, the imams spoke often about the Palestinians and about what the Jews, in league with the Americans, were doing to them. Over time, I would learn that the Palestinian “issue” was a carrot.
The truth was that most Muslims saw the Palestinians as a scrubby little minority group, a burden on the rest of us. But their cause gave the Muslim fascists a reason to bark at America.

I did not know that then. Instead, I drank in all this teaching like a sun-scorched desert wanderer who, finding water, does not pause for a sip, but flings his whole body in, letting the healing moisture soak into every inch of his skin. For me the teaching of the Muslim Brotherhood and, even more so, their protection and acceptance quenched the thirst caused by my family’s rejection.

I had become part of something important. I belonged. These men had vision, passion, power. Perhaps most importantly of all, they seemed to care about me in a way that my father did not.

One day about three months after I first found refuge at the mosque, a Palestinian man named Abu Jihad came to visit. It was on a Sunday morning, and I had gathered in a circle by the kerosene heater with Abdul Rahman, some boys a bit older than me, and a man from my neighborhood who owned a flower shop. Gray-haired with a thick, matching moustache, Abu Jihad sat on a
tesat
next to Abdul Rahman and across from me, his back to the heater. He was one of the smallest men I had ever seen, as small as a woman. But when he spoke, it was with learnedness and authority.

Through the high windows, shafts of bright morning sun speared the dim light of the inner court. I do not remember all of what we talked about that day, but I recall that Abu Jihad was fuming about the continuing dominance of Christians in the Lebanese government.

“We are in the majority now,” he said, jabbing his small index finger around the circle at us. “We, the Sunni. And yet the Maronite Christians still run the country. It has been so since the 1920s. Even though there are more of us, they still make the laws and veto the laws we want to make. Now they imprison my people inside squalid camps like Sabra-Shatila while they enjoy the profits from the fat, rich, infidel tourists who love to spend their money in Beirut!”

When I was growing up, Beirut was known as the “Paris of the Middle East.” Not only did tourists flock there, but, my father told us, powerful politicians from all over the world flew in for secret meetings in an area called the Hamra District. The streets of the Hamra were filled
with fine restaurants and cabarets, and like New York City today, with people from every nation: Swedes, Egyptians, Danes, Americans, Nigerians, Greeks. Everyone rubbed shoulders on the boulevards, and all were fashionably dressed.

But Sabra-Shatila, though also in Beirut, seemed a world away. About ten years before I was born, Lebanon became one of the destinations for the 750,000 Palestinians displaced after the 1947–1948 Arab-Israeli War extended the boundaries of the new Israeli state. Sabra was a poor neighborhood near Shatila, one of several Palestinian refugee camps established by the United Nations. Over the years, though, the boundaries of the neighborhood and the camp melted into one another so that the two became a single sprawling ghetto, a bedraggled collection of shacks and unfinished apartment buildings lining dirty, potholed streets. Piles of scrap metal and wood framing lay heaped on the sidewalks with no public services available to haul them away. Power lines tangled crazily along the roadways as though someone had flung spools of wire at the wooden utility poles, let them unroll in wild loops, and left them where they landed.

Sabra-Shatila and other Palestinian camps had been part of Lebanon all my life. Like most Palestinians, Abu Jihad resented the Lebanese government’s leaving the camps to deteriorate while the rest of the city flourished. But I later realized he was also a propagandist who used the Palestinian issue to stir up rank-and-file Muslims.

“The Maronites are becoming more corrupt,” he now told us. “They will never give up control, and they will never let the Sunni observe the true law,
Sharia.
Sooner or later they will come and arrest us in our homes.”

Abu Jihad paused and peered around the circle, pausing to make eye contact with each of us. The kerosene heater ticked, as if timing his silence. Then he said: “You must learn how to fight, how to use weapons, how to defend yourselves.”

“And where are we supposed to do that?” the flower shop man said skeptically. “I have children to feed, a business to keep. I cannot run off to some desert camp to play
fedayeen
.”

Abu Jihad smiled patiently. “You do not have to go anywhere, my friend. Because you are Sunni, Fatah will train you here, inside Sabra.”

Sabra?
I knew that part of Fatah, Arafat’s armed force, operated from deep inside Sabra, where even the Lebanese police feared to tread. But I did not know they were training new soldiers. The very thought thrilled me. But I was sure Abu Jihad did not mean they would train someone as young as me.

At that moment, Abdul Rahman looked across the circle at me. “Kamal,” he said, eyes twinkling. “Would you like to go, too?”

At speaking engagements in Michigan, California, and elsewhere, protesters from groups like the Muslim Student Association began showing up to accuse Zak, Walid, and me of preaching a message of “intolerance” and “hate.” I liked Walid’s response to these attacks. When the 3 Ex-Terrorists, as we became known, appeared at the University of California Irvine in May 2007, Walid told the audience, “Do I promote hate speech? Sure. I hate terrorism.”

In another confrontation that August, this time on a sunny public sidewalk outside a Seattle mosque, a Muslim man squared off against me, nearly nose to nose: “How dare you speak against Allah and the Prophet?” he sputtered, eyes flashing. “We are converting twenty to twenty-five thousand Americans every year to Islam. We will seed your women, educate and convert your children, and have this nation! By the grace of Allah, we have nothing but time!”

A statement worth studying for those who wonder about the recent explosion in this country of the “religion of peace.”

The Seattle man’s remark about converting children came during the same week that news agencies reported the arrest of a fifteen-year-old boy in the northern Gaza Strip. I was crisscrossing the country again and read the story on the Internet while waiting for a flight in Atlanta. The boy had approached Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) troops carrying
two improvised explosive devices. The soldiers overpowered the boy, arrested him, and carted him off to be interrogated.
⁶

“The thwarting of this attack illustrates how teenagers in the Gaza Strip are involved in terror activities and are sent by terror groups to carry out operations, including ones from which they may not return alive,” an IDF officer told an Israeli reporter. “The recruitment to terror groups does not start at age eighteen.”
⁷

Indeed it does not. And it never has.

Yasser Arafat’s use and training of child soldiers is well-documented. During the First Intifada—a 1987 Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and East Jerusalem—Palestinian troops included elementary schoolchildren.
⁸
During the Lebanese civil war, I saw the PLO send out boys as young as ten and twelve armed with rocket-propelled grenades. The Israelis came to call them “the RPG kids.” In the 1970s, Arafat established all-child camps where elementary schoolchildren learned to shoot rifles and navigate obstacle courses. My own unit sometimes used young boys during urban assault operations; they were small and agile, perfect for climbing into buildings through small, high windows to plant bombs.

Arafat trained child soldiers for thirty years. In 2000, when American boys headed to summer camp to learn kayaking and archery, America got a glimpse at what Palestinian boys did: They attended one or more of ninety different two-and three-week camps to learn the arts of kidnapping, ambushing, and murder.
New York Times
reporter John Burns attended such a camp in the town of Nablus, run by Arafat’s psychological warfare team:

I remember the same training. But with real blood.

1

The assault camp lay deep inside Sabra, secreted in the southwest corner near a wooded area where the sewers drained. Huge metal gates guarded the entrance, reminding me of the high gates at school. But where I had feared school, now I felt in my chest only a thrill of anticipation.

Abu Jihad had collected quite a large group for training, people I had never met before. I thought they must have come from his mosque, which was near the home of my grandmother, Fatima, in the fancier part of Beirut. The group was mainly a mix of young men and teenagers; there were also a couple of thirtyish men, like the one who owned the flower shop, and a couple of boys around my age, seven. I wondered if they too had lied to their mothers and said they were only going to mosque.

Outside the camp gates, two
fedayeen
stood guard with AK–47s. But when they saw Abu Jihad, they swung the gates open wide, revealing the biggest playground I had ever seen: walls with climbing ropes, hand-over-hand jungle gyms, mud holes with ropes overhead for swinging, climbing ropes suspended between two poles. I saw an obstacle course and also a barbed wire net staked about a half-meter off the ground. I imagined the
fedayeen
would crawl under it, commando style, and hoped I would get the chance.

The whole picture sent a charge through me. I could not have spoken this at the time, but I sensed a moment, an opportunity to leave behind my powerlessness, worthlessness, and fear and become someone who would make a difference in the world.

A group of about a dozen men walked up to us.

Warriors
, I thought, instantly awestruck. I had heard about these people. They were fearless, not like me, a coward in the streets. A tall man with a curly bush of hair spoke first to Abu Jihad. “
Ma sha’a Allah, jinood Allah
,” he said.

Allah willing, His army.

As Abu Jihad talked with this man, I gazed around at the others with open admiration. Although they wore pieces of military uniforms—olive T-shirts or dirty white ones, fatigue pants, army boots—these men did not look clean and orderly like American GIs. Instead, they wore massive beards they had not shaved in many weeks. Their odor was stout and pungent. Some carried AK–47s strapped across their backs. All wore knives on their hips. These men drank poison and ate fire, I was sure. They looked as fierce as if they had cut their way up from hell.

The warriors stood facing us, unsmiling. The man who had spoken to Abu Jihad was roped in muscle, fit as a jaguar. He now addressed us all. “This is not a place to come and play!” he said. “If that is what you think, you can turn around and go back home. By the end of this day, we will know how many of you are warriors and how many are only men.”

Suddenly he pointed down at me. My breath caught and his finger seemed to cut through my soul. His eyes blazed down into mine. “Child, do you want to be a warrior?”

I stared back up into his eyes and instantly yearned to impress him. I raised my hand and smacked my own chest. “I
am
a warrior!”

He threw back his head and laughed with pleasure. “That is good!” he said, glancing at the other warriors who allowed small smiles to escape. “We have a true zealot here!”

In a smooth motion, he slung his assault rifle off his back and knelt down, presenting the gun as if holding an offering. “But you know, you cannot be a warrior unless you know how to use your weapon.”

He laid the rifle in my arms. I did not know it at that moment, but it was an AK–47. My heart pounded with the weight of it, my eyes roving over the parts that any boy knows—the muzzle, stock, and trigger. I could smell the steel, its bold scent blue and oily, invading my senses. I knew this smell from my father’s shop, a masculine scent as familiar as family.

“Kneel down,” the warrior said. With the others looking on, he placed the butt of the rifle against my shoulder and guided my hand to the magazine. Like a magnet, my finger moved to the trigger. Gently, the warrior blocked my finger with his own. “No, no. First you must learn to make it safe for yourself.”

Kneeling behind me, he spoke softly into my ear, showing me how to safe the weapon as gently as a father might show a son how to mend a bicycle tire or hammer a nail. Around us, the other boys pressed in. I could sense each of them wishing it was him the warrior had chosen.

“This is single-shot and this is automatic,” the warrior said quietly, flicking a small lever. “Are you listening carefully?”

Guiding my arms, he gently turned the muzzle toward an array of man-shaped targets lined up in front of the woods. Then, as though we were dancers, he put his hand over mine, slid my finger back to the trigger, and pulled.

The sound was sheer power searing through my body, each shot a tiny flame in my heart. The percussion of the piston; shell casings rattling out onto the ground as the rifle chewed through an entire magazine of bullets. In my ears, the weapon’s roar was like fresh air in a smoky room, a lighthouse to a lost ship, a healing drug to a patient who had not known he was dying. An alarm sounded in my heart, and at that moment, my childhood slipped through my hands into the rifle’s hot steel.

Everything I knew had changed.

2

The large crowd of men and boys who had arrived with Abu Jihad that first day thinned quickly. After the novelty wore off, many lost their enthusiasm and desire. Others found themselves in the press of ordinary life, school, or work. But I had found my calling.

I no longer had to walk to Sabra after work. A
fida’i,
a single soldier in the
fedayeen
, named Sarri Habbal sometimes picked me up in his dirty red Mercedes. Other times, Abdul Rahman slipped me enough money to take the
serviz
and sometimes even a taxi. In a few weeks’ time, I completed several phases of training. Some days, I sat in lecture-style classes learning weapons fundamentals. Other days, I reported with the remaining trainees to the target range, where we live-fired 7mm and 9mm pistols and various Soviet-made Kalashnikov rifles.

In our camp was a leader named Abu Yousef who seemed to take a special interest in me. Though I was only seven, I had inherited my father’s lean blacksmith’s frame. I was much taller than other boys my age, and as tall as some much older. My size combined with my fiery, unquestioning faith may have been what drew Abu Yousef to me.

He appeared to be in his thirties. A thick cap of jet hair curled over his head and he had skin of a color we called
esmar
—not white, not black, but the color of Turkish coffee touched with cream. He wore a full moustache, and his thick dark eyelashes framed the most intense eyes I had ever seen. Abu Yousef wore stars and a crown on the shoulders of his fatigues. When he gave orders to the
fedayeen
fighters at Sabra, I noticed that he spoke in a low, calm voice that seemed threaded with steel. He had only to speak once and the thing was done.

Abu Yousef hated the Jews so intensely that it physically pained him. Whenever he mentioned them, he also mentioned the Christians. “They are deceivers, Kamal,” he said to me one day after evening prayers at the mosque. “These people, the Jews and the Christians, will kill us someday if we don’t kill them first.”

I thought about Eli and Marie, my Christian friends. I did not want
to kill them. But had not Abu Yousef and the Brotherhood loved me unconditionally? Did they not talk to me about important things, grownup things, while all my family did was take my money and send me back out to work and be beaten again? In the
fedayeen,
I had found vision and clarity and purity of love, a growing certainty of what was right and what was wrong and to whom I belonged. And so I believed Abu Yousef. I believed him absolutely.

After a couple of months, he began treating me as a leader of the “young brothers,” the boy recruits, and seemed to trust me. When he stopped to take a smoke, he often asked me to follow him into the large, flat-roofed hangar at Sabra. Sometimes, he quizzed me on what I had seen and heard around the camps. Other times, he thought aloud about Arafat, the Palestinian struggle, and what was going on in the larger world.

Abu Yousef told me he had met Arafat in Egypt some years before, even before he founded Fatah. The son of a Cairo textile merchant, Arafat was a university graduate, a civil engineering major with an idealistic streak. In the mid-1950s, he connected with two Palestinians, both members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Arafat the Egyptian quickly adopted the Palestinian cause as his own and by the late 1950s had founded Fatah, a group dedicated to liberating Palestine from the Zionists through armed struggle. I was young and could not follow the thread of Arafat’s relationship with Abu Yousef. But I gathered that Arafat trusted him enough to place him in a high-ranking position with
al-Asifah,
the armed Fatah element to which I now belonged.

Still, Abu Yousef had a trusted circle of his own. More than once, I heard him call Arafat a fool with dumb luck. Only three years before, Arafat had moved Fatah from Egypt to Syria after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat refused to allow Arafat to launch attacks against Israel from within his borders. The Syrians, it turned out, had no such qualms.

“He made the move to feed his ego,” Abu Yousef said one day to a small knot of men in the hangar. “To show the Arab leaders he did not need their help. But he is a fool. The Syrians are vipers. I would not trust one of them to clean my boots.”

It was dangerous talk, I would learn. People who spoke against Arafat had a way of turning up dead. But Abu Yousef knew I would keep my mouth shut.

“He likes you very much,” a
fedayeen
fighter told me one day. “You remind him of his brother.”

This
fida’i
told me Abu Yousef’s brother had been killed. I do not know how or even whether this was true, but Abu Yousef continued to befriend and mentor me. One day, he told me about an article that appeared in a Christian newspaper in Beirut. The article repeated a mocking claim that had been circulating in Tel Aviv: our
fedayeen
and the Lebanese army were so weak that if the Israelis sent a hundred women on bicycles to fight us, they would defeat both Lebanon
and
Syria.

Abu Yousef took a long pull on his cigarette and gazed at me, eyes twinkling. “What do you think of that, Kamal?”

I drew myself up tall and puffed out my chest. “That is not true!” I said. “They are women. We are
men
. There are more of us and we have Allah!”

Abu Yousef chuckled. “You will make the difference someday, Kamal. You are loyal. Whomever you serve, you will make him successful.”

3

At first, I did not know any of the younger boys in training. But I soon made friends with a boy named Yahya (John, in English) who was in my training group. He was not from my neighborhood, but I knew who his family was and where he went to school. Another kid had recruited him and brought him to the camp. Yahya and I had become fast friends through many weeks of training together. Our hearts were alike, each searching for something we were too young to name. In Fatah, we had
found a cause to rally to and an enemy to rise against. We had also found a common code. And even though the code’s beating heart was violent death, we considered it a code of honor.

One night at twilight, the
fedayeen
staged invasion training. The course, made of barbed wire stretched like a net about a half-meter off the bare ground, simulated a booby-trapped enemy perimeter. At intervals, our trainers had buried a series of flat, round stones that were about the size of Israeli land mines. Our test was to belly crawl beneath the wire, probing the dirt with the points of our knives to check for these false mines along the way. To simulate the danger of the explosives, our trainers would fire live ammo over our heads. I was a little nervous about that part; it would be the first time anyone had shot at me. But so far, the training had seemed more like camp or a game. I had not yet grasped the high price of a real bullet.

By the time the exercise began, most of the light had already leaked down over the horizon. I stood with Yahya and a couple dozen other boys and men at the mouth of the wire. We wore khaki pants, white T-shirts, and green canvas boots.

Fedayeen
warriors stood alongside the course, aiming AK–47s over our heads. One man wielded a Russian DShK (pronounced “Dushka”), an anti-aircraft gun. I glanced at the big weapon, then lined up behind Yahya to enter the course.

“Ready!” cried the
feda’i
holding the DShK. I looked straight ahead and took a deep breath.

“Go!”

Yahya dove under the wire and I fell in behind him, pulling myself forward with my elbows, the bottoms of Yahya’s boots in my face as I dragged my belly across the rocky ground. Bullets snapped overhead and above the rifles’ rattle, our trainers’ voices boomed. “
Ya-ela! Ya-ela, enshi!
”

Hurry! Go faster!

The DShK roared, drowning out the rifles. Red and green tracers zinged just above the wire. I kept my head down and crawled forward madly. The gravelly hard pack chewed into my elbows and knees, and I was right on Yahya’s tail, willing him to move, move,
move
! I sensed the
train of others behind me. Without warning, a sharp pain lanced into my back. I thought I had been shot, just below the right shoulder blade. But it was only a bite from the barbed wire that caged us in.

The din of the weapons increased as the
fedayeen
shot more rounds. This was both nightmare and dream. I wanted to quit, and I wanted to win. I wanted to cry, and I wanted to bellow in triumph.

A stray round bit into the ground beside me, kicking dust into my face. For the first time, I slowed down, real fear spiking my heart like needles. Yahya now scrabbled along ahead of me by about the length of two men, stopping at intervals to poke the earth with the point of his knife.

Suddenly I saw Yahya stop.

I do not know why Yahya did what he did next. I saw the back of his head rise up over the bottoms of his boots. I froze in disbelief as Yahya seemed to be crawling
up
. Up a small incline, a rise in the dirt. Then Yahya’s head exploded in a gritty mist of blood and bone.