Photos:
Courtesy Combating Terrorism Center at West Point
What drove so many Libyans to
volunteer as suicide bombers for the war in Iraq? A visit to their
hometown—the dead-end city of Darnah.
A Legacy of Resistance: The
hundreds of insurgent documents that were captured in the raid at
Sinjar included personnel files on 52 recruits from Darnah; 10 of them
included the enlistee's photo.
Even before he vanished, Abd
al-Salam bin-Ali was an easy young man to miss. Pale, lanky and blind
in one eye, the unobtrusive 20-year-old didn't leave much of an
impression in Darnah, his hometown in eastern Libya. In school he had
studied to become a veterinarian, but after graduation he couldn't
find a job. "The economic situation was terrible," recalls his older
brother, Abd al-Hamid. "He was looking for work every day." Sometimes
Abd al-Salam would set up a folding table in Darnah's Old City and
hawk cheap perfumes.
Unmarried, with few
prospects, he still lived with his mother. At home, for distraction,
he would sprawl in front of the family television and watch "Lion of
the Desert," the 1981 epic of Libyan resistance fighters starring
Anthony Quinn. Abd al-Salam had seen it over and over. As the war in
Iraq dragged on, he also tuned in to Al-Jazeera. Nobody in the family
had supported the American invasion, but Abd al-Salam was particularly
affected by the bloody images he saw on the Arabic cable news channel.
He sometimes teased his mother that he wanted to run away to fight the
Americans. Before she could protest too much, he always backed down.
"No, no, no—don't worry, Mom," he would say with a laugh. "I'll get
married instead." His older brother wasn't so confident. "I was sure
he would go," Abd al-Hamid recalls. "He was always talking about it."
Abd al-Salam was also growing more devout. According to his brother,
he spent most of his time at the mosque.
Then one day in late
September 2006, Abd al-Salam simply disappeared. "Where is he?" his
anxious mother asked when he didn't show up for dinner. His brother
reassured her that Abd al-Salam had gone to Benghazi, perhaps to buy
perfumes, but Abd al-Hamid didn't believe his own story. The younger
boy had probably hitched a ride to Cairo, and then flown on to
Damascus. He later crossed the border into Iraq with $100 cash in his
pocket, and joined a cadre of insurgents led by a coordinator he knew
as "Hamad." Shortly after Abd al-Salam disappeared, the telephone rang
in Darnah. "I'm in Ramadi," the voice on the other end said. "I'm in
Iraq."
Late last year American
soldiers raided an insurgent headquarters in the northern Iraqi town
of Sinjar. Inside they found a document—perhaps an application form
that Abd al-Salam had filled out on his way into the country—on the
letterhead of the "Mujahedin Shura Council." The document listed
little beyond Abd al-Salam's birthday, his brother's phone number and
his hometown. Yet as they analyzed the papers, American investigators
were struck by one thing. Of the 606 militants cataloged in the Sinjar
records, almost 19 percent had come to Iraq from Libya. Previous
intelligence estimates had always held that the bulk of Iraq's foreign
fighters come from Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the largest number of
militants in the Sinjar records—244 of them—were Saudi nationals. But
in per capita terms, Libyans represented a much higher percentage.
Perhaps the most startling detail: of 112 Libyan fighters named in the
papers, an astoundingly large number—52—had come from a single town of
50,000 people along the Mediterranean coast, called Darnah.
Earlier this month I traveled
to Darnah to try to figure out why it was contributing such a large
portion of its young men to fight the Americans in Iraq. A stunning
natural landscape surrounds the town, nestled in the shadow of rust-colored
limestone bluffs that overlook the sparkling Mediterranean. Yet the
city's corniche is lined with a dreary procession of crumbling
concrete tenements coated in a patina of chipped pastel paint. Libya's
economy is dominated by the oil and gas sector, which accounts for 90
percent of the country's revenues, but little of that wealth has ever
trickled down to Libya's eastern province. Government officials in
Tripoli acknowledge in private conversations that the east has long
been neglected. The discrepancy is a truth too obvious for Darnah
residents to deny, even given the hazards of speaking openly in
Muammar Kaddafi's police state. "What have we gotten from this
government?" asks Abd al-Hamid bin-Ali. One telling detail in the
Sinjar documents: of the Libyans who listed their "work" in Iraq, more
than 85 percent volunteered for suicide missions—a significantly
larger fraction than any other country but Morocco.
Still, economic desperation
alone doesn't fully explain the readiness of Darnah's young men to
join the insurgents in Iraq. There are tens of millions of
impoverished Muslims in the world, but only a handful—perhaps a few
hundred at any given time—travel to Iraq to fight. There is little
consensus about what ultimately motivates them, what changes someone
from a disgruntled viewer of cable news into a suicide killer. "That's
the big mystery," says Brian Fishman, a West Point counterterrorism
expert who has extensively analyzed the Sinjar records. "The dynamics
are very, very local." There are some common denominators. In their
interviews with NEWSWEEK, family members of the local recruits spoke
of young men with bleak lives in search of redemption. Far from being
universally motivated by one global ideology, the jihadist recruits
often seem to have been driven by personal factors like psychological
trauma, sibling rivalry and sexual longing.
Darnah's militants do have
one other thing in common: an almost obsessive devotion to their
town's place in history. Greek and Roman ruins, the detritus of
occupations in the ancient past, dot the wheat and barley fields along
Libya's coastal plain. The United States left its own lasting mark on
the town's collective memory during the Barbary Wars of the early
1800s. Darnah became a key battlefield in America's first overseas
military expedition, when 500 American Marines and local mercenaries
marched across the desert from Egypt to assault the town. (The ensuing
Battle of Darnah inspired the "shores of Tripoli" line in the current
Marine Hymn.)
But it was another country a
century later that seared the ideal of armed resistance into the
town's psyche. In 1911, Italy landed warships in Darnah's port, the
beginning of a ruthless colonial presence that would last through the
Mussolini era until the Axis powers were defeated in World War II.
Local resistance to the occupation was strongest in the rocky hills
near Darnah, but even there it was ultimately crushed. From its dust,
a homegrown tradition of Islamic martyrdom emerged.
The local mythology is so
pervasive that it guides even the town's most senior officials. On my
second day in Darnah, I stopped by the office of Saddik Afdel, the
co-chairman of the town's People's Committee—the Libyan equivalent of
a mayor. A gentle sea breeze wafted in from an open window behind
Afdel's desk. At first he denied that his town was sending a
significant number of its young men to Iraq. "We don't know exactly
the number," he told me. "Here in Darnah, not more than 10." I showed
him the stack of documents, some of which include small photos of the
fighters, and the chairman grew quiet. "We have no idea about that,"
he began, speaking through an interpreter. "They have no reason to
go." He took a drag on his cigarette. "Look, this is a huge number,"
he eventually conceded. "If this number is true, it's very bad. It's
bad for politics. But it's not bad for Muslims to do their duty.
America said that this war is for freedom. And it's not. What we see
on Al-Jazeera is not what we've been told by the Americans. I can't
stop them from going. What we've been taught by the Qur'an is jihad."
When I asked about the town's history of rebellious militants, Afdel
couldn't suppress a grin. "Those are the people who used to stand up
and fight for their land," he told me. "We have to remember them."
II. To the Shores of Tripoli
most Americans today think of
the Barbary Pirates only as a stray detail from a long-ago history
exam. But to the Founding Fathers they were the scourge of the seas.
The former North American colonies, newly liberated, needed the
Mediterranean's shipping lanes to export their tobacco, sugar and
other commodities to the Middle East. Having given up the protection
of the British Empire's powerful fleet, American ships were falling
victim to pirates from modern-day Morocco, Algeria and Libya.
Kidnappings were frequent. Fair-skinned women were particularly prized
captives, and were added to North African harems. The cycle of
kidnappings and ransoms took a harsh toll on the young American
nation.
The politicians argued about
whether to confront or appease the enemy until President Thomas
Jefferson finally ordered American warships into battle in 1801.
Things began badly: the USS Philadelphia and its crew were captured;
the frigate was anchored in Tripoli's harbor as a trophy, and
Jefferson intensified American attacks. Stephen Decatur, in 1804 a
relatively unknown U.S. naval officer, led a now legendary nighttime
mission to assault the Philadelphia in the harbor, burning it into the
sea. From the east, Gen. William Eaton marched his forces overland
across the desert from Alexandria, Egypt, to Darnah in 1805. As
described in Michael Oren's history "Power, Faith, and Fantasy," Eaton
rode to the gate of Darnah's Old City and demanded the town's
surrender. The local governor replied: "My head or yours." Eaton took
the city.
Today there are relics and
reminders of the battle all over town. One of the first things a
visitor sees on the road into Darnah is a set of four giant yellow
concrete numerals advertising the 1805 Resort. One popular eatery on
the corniche is the Philadelphia Fast Food restaurant. Libyan schools
teach the capture of the Philadelphia as a great national victory,
although there was no independent nation of Libya at the time; it was
a semiautonomous regency of the Ottoman Empire. Fathi Abd al-Moula,
who teaches history to 10-year-olds in a small town outside Darnah,
says he draws simple pictures of the Philadelphia for his classes. His
students are too young to remember names like Eaton and Decatur, he
explains, but they are old enough to see the battles as a source of
national pride. "Libya was the first country to take on America," says
Essam al-Hamal, who works at another Philadelphia Fast Food restaurant
in Tripoli, where a mast said to be from the American ship is
displayed to this day atop the Red Fortress. Libyans refer to the
conflict as "the First Libyan-American War."
Nowhere is Darnah's past more present than in the basement
headquarters of a local club known as the Hyena Society. It was my
first stop upon arrival in Darnah. The group's 200-or-so members
include a slightly incongruous collection of aging history buffs,
along with a number of younger adventure seekers. The clubhouse is
filled with historical artifacts and curios, including stuffed cobras,
Ottoman-era carbines and Bedouin tents. The society's president,
Muhammad al-Hinid, a wiry and eccentric 76-year-old who wears aviator
sunglasses indoors, walked me past an enormous model of the USS Argus,
one of the supply ships that met and resupplied Eaton's Army on the
march to Darnah. The Barbary Wars are important to Darnah's history,
Hinid told me. Still, he added, the Italian occupation left deeper
scars on the town. "The Italian war is much more important," Hinid
said.
Even by the ugly standards of
early-20th-century colonial powers, Italy's domination of its southern
neighbor was mind-numbingly brutal. According to one Libyan census,
the native population dropped from 1.2 million in 1912 to 825,000 in
1933. "The bulk of the population drop was the direct result of
Italian policy," says Ronald Bruce St. John, a widely respected
scholar of Libya who says Italy's tools of oppression included
concentration camps, deliberate starvation and "mass execution that
bordered on genocide." Reading exercises for children in Libyan
schools included phrases like "I am happy to be subject to the Italian
government" and "The Duce loves children very much, even Arab
children."
A strong local resistance
emerged, primarily in the rocky hills of eastern Libya. The hero of
the insurgency was a charismatic, white-robed Muslim holy warrior
named Omar al-Mukhtar. The Lion of the Desert was a disciple of the
Senussis, a secretive and deeply conservative order of Islamic
ascetics. The order's founder had traveled extensively in Saudi
Arabia, where he mingled with members of the puritanical Wahhabi sect
in the mid-1880s. By Omar al-Mukhtar's day, the Senussis had honed a
strict, yet almost evangelical, variety of Islam that spread quickly
through eastern Libya, gaining adherents partly by offering social
services like schools and access to wells. For 20 years, Mukhtar
harassed the Italian forces with his small band of guerrillas, but the
Italians finally captured him in 1931, as they infiltrated and
destroyed the Senussi networks.
Today the cult of Omar al-Mukhtar
is visible everywhere in Darnah: on posters, billboards, stickers on
car windshields. His face may be more ubiquitous even than Kaddafi's.
Bootleg copies of "Lion of the Desert" are brisk sellers in local
souks. At the Hyena Society, Hinid showed me a portrait of Mukhtar. He
said he painted it on the night of Saddam Hussein's execution. Hinid
had watched the hanging on Al-Jazeera. The sad eyes in his painting of
Mukhtar, Hinid explained, are actually Saddam's. It isn't difficult to
see how the Iraqi dictator might provide Darnah residents with a
modern-day stand-in for their martyred hero. "We all love [Saddam]
here," Hinid told me.
III. 'Everything But The
Girl'
Both Saddam and Mukhtar are
revered figures at the Hassan Mosque, a spare, white- washed structure
with green pastel trim in the center of Darnah's Old City. A poster of
Omar al-Mukhtar, faded and tattered, is affixed to the front door.
Anuri al-Hasadi, the mosque's muezzin, was just arriving for afternoon
prayers when I stopped by. Dressed in a gray pin-striped dishdasha and
sporting a walrus mustache, the 60-year-old had the air of a Dickens
character. We sat down on folding chairs in the mosque's lobby, and I
asked the muezzin what he thought of the Iraq War. He tried to brush
off the question, reluctant to wade into politics—but then he erupted.
"Oil! Oil!" he cried. "America needs oil. It's America's fault. You
think they came here to buy fruit? They came for the oil!" He declined
to say at first whether he thought it was OK for Libyans to travel to
Iraq to fight. At last he said he did not approve. The assertion was a
little hard to believe after his "oil" outburst. I asked about one of
his relatives, an 18-year-old named Ashraf al-Hasadi. According to the
Sinjar documents, the young man left Darnah last year for Iraq. The
muezzin denied knowing the boy. Then somewhat under his breath, he
said softly in Arabic: "He was just a kid."
Ashraf al-Hasadi worked just
around the corner from the Hassan Mosque, at his family's spice shop
on the Old City's bustling main artery. Tall and clean-shaven, but a
little chubby, the youngest of four brothers was also "the quietest of
the family," said his brother Bakr, who was working the cash register
at the shop when I stopped by. Big sacks of candy, dates and a spice
known as baharat were stacked on shelves behind him. Bakr looked a
little wary when I first arrived, but he invited me inside and offered
a cup of tea. I asked him to tell me what he could about Ashraf.
Bakr explained that he had
lately been urging his brother to get married. At 18 years old, Ashraf
was still a bachelor, and young to wed. Because a wedding ceremony is
expensive and Darnah is relatively poor, most men in town don't end up
marrying until at least their late 20s. Still, the spice shop provided
the Hasadis with a steady income, and Ashraf was considerably better
positioned than most of his friends. After his mother died in 2006, it
was up to his brothers to set him up. Ashraf already had a job, a car
and an apartment—all the prerequisites. Even so, his brothers worried
that the young man was a little tightly wound, sensitive and severe at
the same time. He recoiled at the images of Iraq that he saw on Al-Jazeera.
"He never watched movies," Bakr recalled. "It was only the news."
After work, Ashraf liked to whip his black Hyundai around the tight
warrens of Darnah's Old City. To his brothers' dismay, he showed
little interest in marriage. "He had everything," his brother
Abdelkhader said with a laugh, "except for the girl."
Instead, Ashraf was spending
more and more time at the mosque. Darnah is a religious town; several
times a day, the shops in the Old City's main street roll down and
lock their front doors as the mosques fill for prayers. Even so,
Ashraf became "too religious," says his brother Sufian—"seriously
religious. He lived at the mosque." One day in the summer of 2007,
Ashraf went to see his brothers and told them he was leaving on a trip
with a friend. The others didn't make much of the conversation, they
said. Then, about a week later, the phone rang. Ashraf got quickly to
the point: he was in Iraq. "And that was the last phone call he made
to his family," brother Sufian says. The Hasadis fear the worst, but
say they don't know for sure whether their brother is dead or alive. I
asked them whether they thought Ashraf would ever come home. "God
knows," Bakr said. "A lot of them go and come back. Some stay six
months, some two years." Then there are the ones who volunteer for
suicide missions.
The Hasadi family's
flourishing businesses—they own a chain of the spice and candy shops
on the same street—make them something of an oddity in run-down Darnah.
Their story is just one example of how difficult it is to generalize
about the motivations of foreign fighters. Still, there is no doubt
that economic misery and its social consequences have scarred Darnah's
young people. Many of Tripoli's prostitutes have come to the city from
eastern Libya; in some cases they are their families' sole
breadwinners. Tripolitan men joke—crudely but revealingly—that they
patronize prostitutes from the eastern half of the country as a form
of wealth redistribution. For young men in Darnah, unemployment means
almost certain bachelorhood—a dismal state in a society as sexually
conservative as Darnah's. In a male-dominated community, the
predicament of prolonged celibacy also carries an acute social stigma.
That fate may be just what
28-year-old Abdelhakim Okaly feared when he slipped out of Darnah to
Iraq last spring. When I called Abdelhakim's father, Mustafa, earlier
this month, the elder Okaly at first refused to talk, and then quietly
asked if I could tell him where Abdelhakim was. We made an appointment
to meet in a parking lot behind a nearby mosque. When Mustafa pulled
up, he looped his beat-up station wagon in a wide circle around my
car, and then invited me to his house. The Okaly residence, a
hardscrabble concrete apartment block abutting the seashore, was
significantly more modest than others I had visited in Darnah. As
Mustafa's wiry 20-year-old son Awad brought in a tray of cookies and
guava juice, the father's eyes began to fill with tears. Later he told
me that when he had first spotted me—an obvious outsider—he thought
perhaps I had brought back his son.
Mustafa explained he had long
feared that Abdelhakim would try to leave for Iraq. Like nearly
everyone I talked to in Darnah, his son was deeply affected by the
carnage he saw on Al-Jazeera and CNN. The Abu Ghraib scandal angered
Abdelhakim, but "what broke his heart was Fallujah," Mustafa said,
referring to the crackdown on the restive, mostly Sunni city in the
fall of 2004. "Do you agree with this?" Abdelhakim asked his father.
"I'm going." Mustafa went so far as to drive down to the local
emigration office and ask it to withhold Abdelhakim's permission to
travel. But the young man, who had once worked as a cabdriver in
Darnah, somehow managed to sneak out of town.
When I asked whether
Abdelhakim was married, everyone in the room laughed. "The older one's
not even married yet," a brother said with a chuckle. Then their
father chimed in. "Well, Abdelhakim's still getting no salary," he
grumbled, in something of a scolding manner. "How will he get married
now?" And then, almost as if he was trying to convince himself: "He's
a grown-up, he'll do what he wants to do." As we talked, the father
almost seemed to be trying to teach his other sons a lesson. He said
he was particularly concerned about the younger boy, Awad, the one who
had brought in the juice. "This one's got no passport," the father
said, throwing a glance at Awad. "But he'd like to go." Then he
widened his eyes. "One's enough," he concluded.
Awad, who was sitting on the
floor in a corner of the room, insisted that he wasn't going anywhere.
But then he went on: "If you did want to go, you would keep it a
secret. If I was planning to go, I wouldn't tell anybody." It was easy
to see why Awad's father was keeping an eye on his youngest son, who
displayed a mischievous wit. When I asked whether his brother
Abdelhakim had any previous military training, Awad replied, "No
training at all. He didn't even have muscles." When I asked Awad what
his brother looked like, Mustafa Okaly's youngest child stared at me
and then shot back: "He looked like you."
The Okalys said they haven't
heard from Abdelhakim for more than a year, nor have they received a
call telling them that he has been killed. Before I left, Mustafa made
me an offer. He must have seen me as something of a conduit to a
distant American world he had little access to. The desperate father
leaned in close and insisted, a little conspiratorially, that he would
give me a camel if I could find some way to bring his son home.
IV. 'It's Only Me Now'
The answer to "Why Darnah?"
is found, then, in an explosive mix of desperation, pride and
religious fervor. These factors, present individually in many parts of
the Islamic world, are found collectively here, on the shores of
northern Libya. The town's crisis is a serious headache for Libya's
diplomats. Libya was supposed to be one of the few triumphs in the
Bush administration's War on Terror. In the 1980s and '90s, Muammar
Kaddafi was the face of state-sponsored terrorism, denounced by Ronald
Reagan as the "Mad Dog of the Middle East." His regime was accused of
involvement in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270
people, as well as the 1986 bombing in a Berlin discothèque that
killed two American servicemen. America retaliated by bombing Tripoli.
Yet in 2003, desperate to free Libya from economic sanctions,
Kaddafi's government agreed to halt its WMD programs. Three years
later the State Department finally removed Libya from its list of
terrorist states. The White House trumpeted the news as proof that the
invasion of Iraq was scaring America's enemies all over the Mideast.
Despite the Sinjar
revelations, few U.S. officials believe that Kaddafi is sending
fighters to Iraq. A wave of jihadists returning to Libya from Iraq
with new skills would be at least as big a nightmare for him as it is
for Americans. The territory around Darnah has long been a locus of
Islamist opposition to Kaddafi's regime. In the mid-1990s his security
services cracked down hard on militants in Darnah, calling in
helicopter gunships to suppress local rebels calling themselves the
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). The town seems calm enough now,
but there are still plenty of checkpoints manned by uniformed police.
When asked about the LIFG, most residents fall silent—even those who
are happy to endorse sending local recruits to Iraq.
The Sinjar documents indicate
that the Iraq insurgents had several local coordinators working in
Darnah. There are few clues to how the young men were recruited, but
after they signed up they were often sent to Iraq in small groups
rather than singly. The Darnah pipeline passed through Egypt and
Syria, where local coordinators arranged to have the enlistees
smuggled across the border into Iraq. But the most recent records date
only to last August, and it's an open question whether the pipeline is
still flowing. Some analysts say the local Islamists disagree among
themselves about whether the real jihad is in Iraq or at home in
Libya.
But the old network may be
renewing its strength. Late last month a prominent member of the
regime's domestic spy agency was assassinated in Darnah, according to
a Western diplomat in Tripoli. The diplomat says the murdered Libyan
was a notoriously cruel interrogator and had made many enemies, so he
wasn't necessarily killed by Islamists. "He was widely known and
disliked because he was such an a––hole," says the diplomat.
Kaddafi seems to recognize
that he has problems in Darnah. As oil prices have risen, the regime
has tried to improve life in eastern Libya. On the main road into
Darnah, the government has begun constructing some 2,000 apartments
intended to house roughly 13,000 local residents by the end of 2009.
The units, known as the Valley Apartments, are so far largely
unoccupied, but the plan is to provide free housing to young families
and singles. But earlier this year Kaddafi announced that he wanted to
experiment with privatizing social services, a sharp departure from
his socialist roots. "What he's advocating is something akin to
radical libertarianism," says a Western diplomat in Tripoli, asking
not to be identified discussing the regime's plans. The short-term
result is likely to be hard times for many Libyans, even with oil
above $100 a barrel.
In the wake of the Sinjar
revelations, U.S. officials have put gentle pressure on Libya. In
November a delegation led by Gen. Dell Daily, a senior
counterterrorism specialist currently assigned to the State
Department, traveled to Tripoli to meet with senior Libyan officials.
Told of the documents, the Libyans at first denied the phenomenon, but
eventually acknowledged the problem after the Americans presented the
evidence. American officials say they're mostly pleased with the
cooperation they've gotten from Libyan authorities, and are encouraged
by more recent figures out of Iraq that seem to indicate that the flow
of fighters may have slowed in recent months. In the meantime, other
American analysts are searching for innovative ways to stem the flow,
regardless of what the Libyans choose to do. Fishman says the
insurgents often hire common smugglers who care only about profit to
move fighters into Iraq. The West Point specialist says it would be
smart to try co-opting those smugglers rather than fighting them.
"Frankly, we should be trying to buy some of them," says Fishman.
At home in Darnah, Abd al-Hamid
bin-Ali says he doesn't know exactly how his brother managed to join
up with the insurgents. Abd al-Salam rarely used the Internet, he
says, and didn't have any connections with LIFG militants. Shortly
after Abd al-Salam's first call home, the young recruit called again
from Ramadi to say he was on his way to an "operation." When the phone
rang four days later, Abd al-Hamid didn't recognize the voice on the
other end of the line. "Abd al-Salam is a martyr," the caller said.
Abd al-Hamid says he has come
to terms with the loss of his brother. "When he was killed, I was
really very happy," he says, frowning and wringing his hands. "In my
opinion he was right to go. He was right to go. We see people getting
killed for nothing. I used to think about going myself." Now Abd al-Hamid
is the family's sole support. "I can't go now," he says quietly. "It's
only me now." He glances up at an oversize portrait of his younger
brother the martyr, hanging in the living room. Abd al-Salam's one
blind eye stares back. The awkward younger brother has finally found
his own place in his drab hometown: in a gold frame, behind a pane of
glass, nailed to the wall.
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