Nir Rosen - Aftermath

In November 1989 a car bomb killed Azzam and two of his sons. In the car that followed Azzam’s doomed vehicle sat his eighteen-year-old son, Hudheifa, who had been fighting since 1985. In December 2005 I met Hudheifa in a cafe in Amman. Dressed in light blue jeans, wearing a leather jacket and red polo shirt, speaking excellent English, still fit and smiling often, he did not look like an expert in international jihad. Hudheifa, who was light-skinned like his father, with a neatly clipped and groomed beard, ordered a hot chocolate and recounted his tale. When Azzam brought his family to Pakistan, he settled them first in Islamabad, where he taught part-time. He set up the Office of Mujahideen Services in Peshawar in 1983, opening guest houses for mujahideen and training camps in 1984. Hudheifa began his training at the age of thirteen in the Sada (echo) Camp in Peshawar, and in 1985 he trained in Afghanistan’s Khaldan and Yaqubi camps. He fought his first battle alongside his father and brothers in Jaji that year. The all-Arab unit included Saudis, Moroccans, and Algerians. When he was not fighting, Hudheifa studied at the Mahad al-Ansar (Supporters’ Institute), a school his father had established for the children of Arab mujahideen. Rivals of Azzam condemned him for his friendship with Afghan jihad leader Ahmad Shah Massoud and for his relative moderation. “Al Qaeda separated from Abdallah Azzam,” said Hudheifa. “They wanted to fight against the whole world. Our school specialized in defensive jihad: Palestine, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Chechnya.”

Hudheifa fought from 1985 until 1992. He befriended Massoud in 1985 and fought alongside the famed hero, taking Kabul with him in 1992. He then went to continue his studies at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, but for the next six years he and some Arab colleagues tried to bring the warring parties in Afghanistan together, shuttling back and forth between Massoud’s Northern Alliance and the Taliban’s Mullah Omar (he blamed the failure to reach peace on the intervention of Pakistani intelligence). “We were the Arab mujahideen respected by everyone,” he told me.

From 1994 to 1995 Hudheifa was in Bosnia, working to funnel money and supplies to the nascent country’s beleaguered Muslims, and fighting on their behalf as well. He tried to enter Chechnya, but the Russians had blocked the road and he was forced to turn back. Hudheifa was arrested in the airport when he returned to Jordan in 1996, and again in 1997. He was also arrested in Pakistan, as governments that had supported the jihad began fearing the blowback. In 2000 the Jordanians returned his passport to him, and he was allowed to live freely, selling cars and nuts, importing and exporting, and receiving a license to work as a mobile phone distributor (on his personal multimedia mobile phone Hudheifa showed me films he had saved of Iraqi resistance attacks against the American military). He completed his master’s degree in Islamic studies and the Arabic language. When I met him he was working on a PhD in Arabic literature from the classical Andalusian period.

Three days after America’s war in Iraq started, Hudheifa and other followers of Azzam crossed into that country, basing themselves in Falluja. “We were trying to convince Muslim scholars to begin the resistance,” he explained. “They had no plan. They were sleeping. For one month they did not agree. They said, ‘Go back to your country.’ We were more than thirty or forty Arabs, without weapons. We went from mosque to mosque, from school to school. People said. ‘The U.S. brought us democracy.’ They believed the lies of Bush, that he will bring democracy and freedom.” Everything changed on April 28, he said, when American soldiers killed seventeen people at a demonstration and twelve more at a subsequent one. Soon after that, rumors spread of four American soldiers raping a seventeen-year-old girl, with pictures distributed on the Internet. “This story was the main cause of starting the resistance in Falluja,” Hudheifa explained. “The rape made them reconsider, but there was still no action. I was watching from far only with a smile. In the beginning they said, ‘Go make jihad in your country.’ After the rape they said, ‘Okay, we want to start now or tomorrow we will find our mothers or daughters or sisters raped.’ This story exploded the resistance in Falluja. Then they called us for a meeting and said, ‘You were right.’ We had told them from the first day the Iraqi army abandoned weapons to take them, but they said, ‘This is stealing, haram [forbidden], looting. You could buy an RPG for three U.S. dollars in those days. The Americans changed the ideology of the people with their oppression. They could have been the best power in the world.”

Hudheifa spent four months in Iraq imparting his knowledge to the indigenous resistance. His background gave him immediate currency. “I am the son of Abdallah Azzam,” he said, “so everybody wanted to listen, and I have experience in three or four jihads in different countries, and a lot of the Iraqi resistance had no plan. We gave them our experience so they could start from where we stopped, so they don’t start from zero. Jihad is an obligation as a Muslim. If you can’t support jihad with fighting, you can support with ideas or teaching. So we tried and we still do. Followers of Abdallah Azzam helped plan the resistance in all of Iraq, and we had hoped for a united resistance with Shiites. We were aiming to bring unity between Sunnis and Shiites with resistance on both sides, but the Shiite leadership was against us and Zarqawi spoiled it, making it fail.” The Iraqi resistance requested his father’s books, he told me, and beginning in June 2003 they became widely available in Falluja and Ramadi.

He explained that his father “talks about the crimes of Saddam and what real jihad is.” His father had also opposed Saddam, he told me, trying to make it clear that Azzam’s followers opposed the Baathists as well and were not fighting in support of the former regime. “My father was kicked out of the University of Jordan for opposing Saddam’s war against Iran, and he was sentenced to death in Iraq for his work against Saddam. We are not with Saddam or the Baathists. We want to support the Muslim population.”

Things were more difficult now, he explained. “After September 11 all money-transfer systems changed, but they can’t stop financial support for the resistance.” Wealthy businessmen from outside Iraq still sent money. “We have Iraqis who were in the Office of Services and are now in Iraq,” he told me. But still, the good old days of jihad were in Afghanistan. Back then, “We used to go safely and securely, get a plane from anywhere to Pakistan and find vehicles from different organizations who sent us to rest houses, who took us to safe training camps and then safely to Afghanistan. Now if you want to go to Iraq, there are thousands of dangers facing you. Going into Iraq is very dangerous.”

Hudheifa was fiercely opposed to terrorists like Zarqawi, who, he said, gave jihad a bad name. “We say to people who give funds, ‘Don’t give to Zarqawi. Give to Iraqis, give to the Association of Muslim Scholars. They are the right way. Our school supports them.’”

Hudheifa viewed his support for the Iraqi resistance as consistent with his support for other indigenous Muslim movements fighting in self-defense. “Iraq is a defensive jihad,” he said. “Troops from abroad came to a Muslim country.” Hudheifa told me he was proud of his work in Iraq. “Praise God, we were successful. Everything is going much better. Much better than we were planning. It won’t take like Afghanistan, nine years, to kick the U.S. out. It will be much faster. If I find a way to go into Iraq, I would go. I told the government. But we must know our aims and goals. Just exploding cars is not enough. We need a plan for the future. When the Americans leave, we will look for the next place.”