Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Abu Anas and his comrades did not belong to any of the factions. “We have some differences with Jund al-Sham,” one told me. “They are a little ignorant. They think with their hearts and not their minds. You need principles, not emotion. Usbat al-Ansar is more open, more educated. They have military expertise.”

Abu Salih had tattoos, meaning he had not always been devout. He said he had fought in Falluja in the fall of 2004, staying for about fifty days and taking part in four successful operations against the Americans. “The Americans were cowards,” he told me. There had been between 250 and 300 men in his group, he said. I asked why he had chosen Iraq and not tried to liberate Palestine. “It’s impossible to go fight in Palestine,” said Abu Anas. “The Arabs closed the borders—Jordan, Syria. Here if they open the way to fight Israel, many people would go fight.” Hizballah, he said, prevented them from fighting Israel.

I asked the men what they thought of Hizballah, since they supported groups in Iraq that targeted Shiites. “We differ in our beliefs, but we agree on fighting Israel,” one said. “Israel is the enemy. We can settle our differences later.” Many Lebanese Sunnis resented Hizballah for provoking the last war. “Sunnis who disapprove of Hizballah’s war do so because they are allied with America,” one of the men told me. They reminded me that a group of Palestinians from the camp who had fought with Zarqawi in Iraq had launched missiles at Israel and that in his final statement, Zarqawi had declared that “we fight in Iraq, but our eyes are on our home in Jerusalem.”

Abu Salih met Zarqawi once. I asked him what he was like. “He was a lion,” Abu Ghassan interjected. Zarqawi had been very nice to “the brothers” and had cooked for them, Abu Salih explained. It was night when they met in Falluja’s Askari neighborhood, and it was very dark. “The earth was burned,” he said. “Planes were bombing, but we had cold water, appetizers, grilled chicken.” Up to fifty men from the camp had gone to fight in Iraq.

“Usbat al-Ansar is a travel agency and YMCA for jihad,” explained Bernard Rougier, an expert on Lebanon’s Salafis and author of the book Everyday Jihad , “but they are a jihadi group, they must act, so the way of solving the contradiction of being in Lebanon but not fighting Israel or anybody else is by sending jihadists to Iraq and secretly helping other jihadist groups.”

I returned a few times to visit Abu Ghassan. Foreigners entering the camp must get permission from Sidon’s local military intelligence commander. As I sat in his office I overheard his phone calls. One sheikh called him about releasing a Jund al-Sham suspect from prison. The commander opened the man’s file and read the accusations. The man was an extremist: he had helped dispatch fighters to Iraq, was suspected of involvement in explosions, and was inciting against Shiites. With the commander’s permission slip I was able to get past the soldiers guarding the gate and drive past the Fatah checkpoint to meet Abu Ghassan. He wore camouflage pants and a knit cap. He led me through more alleys, down rough-hewn stairs, and past a metal door into his apartment. His infant daughter was sleeping in a baby seat.

Abu Ghassan was thirty-one years old and quick to smile, but, like Abu Salih, he always reverted to a hard suspicious gaze when I wasn’t looking him in the eye. He had six children, the oldest of which was thirteen. He had a nine-millimeter Glock pistol on his belt. Its price in the camp was two thousand dollars, and it had made its way to Lebanon when some “brothers” returned from Iraq with large quantities of weapons. It was the same pistol the Americans had given to the Iraqi police; I had seen it used by Shiite militias and sold on the black market in Baghdad. An August 2007 report from the American Government Accountability Office stated that 190,000 weapons the Americans had given to Iraqis were unaccounted for. Here was one of them. On a desk was a new Toshiba laptop connected to the Internet. Abu Ghassan told me he worked in a cafe in the camp. “You must have sold a lot of coffee to pay for a two-thousand-dollar pistol and the laptop,” I said. He grinned and agreed with me.

He was first trained as a teenager outside the camp by Fatah, before the civil war ended in 1991. In 1995 he came under the sway of Islamic movements, influenced by religious leaders and the recently formed Usbat al-Ansar, listening to mosque sermons and attending lessons held after prayer. Some of the mosques, such as the Shuhada Mosque, also had their own clubs for physical training. The Oslo accords had been signed, and Palestinian refugees felt abandoned—they worried that the PLO was surrendering. Wars were being fought in Bosnia and Chechnya. The first generation of mujahideen—those who had fought in Afghanistan—sought new battlegrounds, and a new generation was galvanized. “I saw Muslims around the world oppressed by secularists,” he told me. Now the Lebanese army wanted him on charges of terrorism, “in broad terms for killing and explosions,” he said, claiming the charges were false.

He had attempted to sneak into Iraq through Syria to fight six times, but each time the Syrians were patrolling the border. In May the Syrians had killed several jihadists attempting to cross. Crossing the border from Syria had become much more difficult since the second battle of Falluja, he said. “I wanted to go to Iraq to liberate Muslim lands, to fight with the Sunnis. The road was open to Iraq. Palestine was closed.” He resented Hizballah for controlling the border with Israel and preventing other groups from conducting attacks. “After Hizballah liberated the south, they became a buffer,” he said. “They say they want to liberate Palestine, but on the ground they do nothing, they just wait for orders from Syria or Iran.” Unlike many Lebanese Sunnis, he did not feel threatened by Hizballah. “As Palestinians we feel threatened by America and Israel,” he said.

“Brothers” in the camp had established a network leading to Iraq. “Young Muslims, enthusiastic, with their own organization, they communicated through the Internet. One guy went and opened the way for others.” A guide would lead the volunteers across the border. Some guides did it for money and others because they believed in the cause.

Abu Ghassan first decided to go to Iraq when Zarqawi renamed his organization Al Qaeda, in December 2004. “Before Abu Musab [Zarqawi] appeared, nobody knew how to get people to Iraq,” he said. “I want to go fight with Al Qaeda, with the Islamic State of Iraq. The priority for me is to fight America and its allies, and if the Iraqi government opposes me I will fight them too. The Iraqi government is an apostate government.” Abu Ghassan had requested to go as a suicide bomber. “Practically speaking,” he said, “suicide operations are the best method to kill the enemy. In principle you try as hard as you can to avoid civilians, but sometimes you cannot.” He did not believe that Sunnis were targeting civilians, and instead blamed Iran, the Mahdi Army, and Israel. “Zarqawi asked Muqtada to fight the occupier, and Muqtada refused,” he said. “We target the Shiites in the government and the militias. The Mahdi Army kills mujahideen and lets the Americans arrest them. Christians have been neutral, not with the occupier, so they have been spared. Shiites are not apostates; their leaders are. Clerics have agreed that the Shiite clerics are infidels, the people are deviants. Hizballah is a Shiite apostate party. The Shiites hate Sunnis.”

Another time when I visited Abu Ghassan in his home, Abu Anas was there. They were looking at Google Earth on the laptop while listening to a CD of Salafi chanting called Commanders of the Jihad . They showed me another CD, a tribute to Salih Ablawi, known as Abu Jaafar, who had died with Zarqawi in Iraq. He was from Ayn al-Hilweh too, and Abu Ghassan had a collection of his speeches and pictures from Iraq on his laptop. A large picture of Abu Jaafar was on a banner above one of the main streets in the camp.