The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (14 page)

1

By the time I was eight, I had become a free agent. At home, as long as I handed over some money to my mother and father, I came and went as I pleased. After working with Sarri at the gift shop I got a different job, this time working for a catalog-order clothing distributor. I was a counter boy, serving Beirut retailers who came in, browsed the catalogs, and ordered garments made in sweatshops by Armenian laborers who worked dirt cheap. I worked there for about a year, then became an office boy for an import-export dealer, making coffee, running errands, and carrying documents back and forth between the office and the various embassies.

All that time, I kept a delicious secret: I was living a double life. During the day, I was Kamal Saleem, just a boy working in a regular job. At night, I was training to kill people. By then, everyone was talking about James Bond, how he would pretend to be someone else, then take out a bad guy with a poison ink pen or a karate chop. Because relatively few people—only those at the mosque, at the camps, and in my neighborhood cell—knew my secret identity, I felt the kinship of spies.

At Sabra, each week seemed to reveal to me a new element of
jihad
. Imagine a school-age boy, disassembling antipersonnel mines, removing the RDX plastic explosive, and using it to build a new bomb by adding primer and a wristwatch. That was me. At the time, C–4 plastic
explosives were fairly new and, we found, more stable and easier to transport than TNT. The
fedayeen
taught me how to place C–4 in a building for maximum destruction (blowing up structural support columns worked well) and how to rig an automobile’s fuel system with C–4 in order to turn the whole vehicle into a bomb.

I recruited other boys to our cause, going often to Abu Ibrahim’s house to teach them how to take apart an AK–47 and put it back together again.

“If you want to shoot real ammo, you have to come to Sabra,” I told them. They came by the dozens.

Several times, the
fedayeen
ferried me and a group of other boys into Syria to train young soldiers there. Adults could have done the job, but it was smarter and stealthier to drop us children off at a
souk
and let us blend into the background until local
fedayeen
could pick us up and drive us to a mountain training camp. Once the training was over, they would drive us back to the
souk
where we would again melt into the scenery until we rendezvoused with our own people, who then spirited us home.

For me, it was a boy’s dream—like the American Boy Scouts, but with guns. We learned weapons instead of knots, pledged violence instead of service. But in the summer of 1967, the Muslim world sustained a blow that shook my faith to the very core. A water dispute, territorial tensions, and cross-border clashes had long simmered between Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria. That June, they erupted into war.

After watching Egypt, Syria, and Jordan assemble massive armies along their borders, Israel’s tiny military launched a preemptive strike against the mighty Egyptian air force. In response, Jordan attacked Jerusalem and Netanya, another Israeli city. Soon Syria joined in the anti-Zionist assault.

At Sabra, we cheered when we heard on the radio about the colossal firepower arrayed against the Jews. The Egyptian air force was 450 fighter planes strong, more than twice the size of the Israeli air force. The Egyptian army fielded 100,000 soldiers, 950 tanks, and 1,000 artillery pieces. Combined, the Syrians and Jordanians fielded more than
125,000 men, 300 tanks, and 12 artillery battalions. One hundred Iraqi tanks rumbled into Jordan to face off against the Jews.

Our
fedayeen
were on standby, ready to join the fight, as we knew our brothers in Jordan already had. But no one from Beirut was sent. Two, three, four days passed as Muslim and Israeli forces clashed in Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula, and in wicked dogfights over Egypt. In the hangar, we huddled around a radio and shouted at the news of overwhelming victories: Muslim fighters were killing thousands of Jewish soldiers! We were pushing them back! Jerusalem was about to fall!

It was all propaganda.

On the final day of what became known as the Six-Day War, I was at home when I heard from my Christian neighbors that Israel had defeated the fearsome armies of Islam. We had lost East Jerusalem and the West Bank. We had lost the Gaza Strip. We had even lost the Golan Heights.

Sabra was in mourning, as were many in Beirut. The streets in my neighborhood teemed with shell-shocked Sunnis. How could this have happened? How could the Jews, a tiny nation of infidel dogs, have defeated all the armies of Allah?

Three weeks after the war, Israeli Defense Forces General Yitzhak Rabin explained his theory of the victory in an address at Hebrew University:

But our Christian neighbors, the parents of my friend Marie, had a different explanation: divine intervention.

“We are hearing of miracles!” I heard Marie’s mother exclaim. “One Israeli tank took out ten Syrian tanks! Egyptian fighter planes fell from the sky as if struck down by angels. Certainly, the Jews were fighting on the side of God!”

I did not understand how this could be so. How could Allah abandon us this way? I remember that my mother was baking pastries in the kitchen when I went to ask her, “Why has Allah lifted up the Jews and not the Muslims?”

“Allah would never do such a thing,” she replied sharply, wiping a spot of flour from her face. “America must have helped the Jews. America must have been hidden, lying in wait, and ambushed our soldiers. It is the only explanation.”

It was not until many years later that I realized my mother did not know what to say, and so she simply made something up. But at the time, I accepted her explanation. It gave me one more reason to hate America.

2

Following the Six-Day War, Yasser Arafat shuttled between Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Despite Israel’s success against the national Muslim armies, groups like Fatah and the PLO were growing stronger. In 1968, we celebrated at Sabra when our brothers held their own against an Israeli attack on Fatah headquarters in the Jordanian village of Karameh. The stories came back that Arafat himself had dashed back and forth across the battlefield, rallying the
fedayeen
to hold their ground. Only 28 Israelis died versus 150
fedayeen.
But we considered it a great victory because the Israeli troops who had vanquished Syria and Egypt had failed against us.

The same year, when I was about ten years old, I lucked into a job selling clothing in a European boutique. I had been prowling the Hamra
on a tourist-packed summer day, looking for an arcade where I could waste some money, when the boutique owner, a Frenchwoman who was harried and desperate for help with a huge afternoon rush, hired me right off the sidewalk. After that, I spent two years flattering lady tourists and rich Maronite women, helping them pick out sexy outfits to wear for their men.

Throughout these years, the Palestinian refugee camps scattered around Beirut grew more and more like glorified dumps. Raw sewage drained into some areas. In another place, a slaughterhouse was erected nearby and the stench of blood hung over the camp in a sickening cloud. In response, we focused on recruiting Palestinians who had lived in Lebanon for a long time. We tried to radicalize them, inspire them to stand up and fight not only for their cause, but for Allah. For Islam.

“The Christians live like kings,” I heard the adult
fedayeen
say. “The Palestinians live like their servants. The refugees are our Muslim brothers. We must support them against the infidels.”

Our second recruiting target was Sunni Muslims. We went into the mosques and preached a message of solidarity, encouraging the Lebanese Sunnis to align with the Fatah and the PLO. We did not recruit the Shia, whom we considered perverse.

But as adolescence bloomed inside me, I started to worry that I was somewhat perverse as well. From afar, I watched the infidel’s life and wanted it for myself. I was sprouting up physically, growing tall and broad in the shoulders. At age thirteen, I was nearly six feet tall. My hair had grown into dark waves, but my skin was light and my eyes were blue like the sea. I began noticing girls noticing me. The infidel boys dated girls—openly kissing them even while riding the bus. I wanted to try that. I wanted to be like Bond and have a beautiful redhead in a Jackie Kennedy dress, and the minute she sees me she just faints.

But every time I saw a pretty girl, I melted like chocolate. Inside, I was just about to explode. When I was twelve, my father had taken me for a walk to talk about these things. I was happy to have time with him, but it felt to me like a mandatory checkmark on his parenting chart: a quick trip with me around the neighborhood to get the sex talk monkey off his back.

Now I found my confusion growing. I had learned in Islam that women were sinful and had to be covered up. If that was so, why did I want them so badly?

Maybe Abu Yousef would know.

I found him in the hangar at Sabra smoking a cigarette, as usual. When I told him my dilemma, he tucked his Marlboro into one corner of his mouth and pulled a pen and paper from the breast pocket of his fatigues. Squinting around a curl of smoke, he jotted something on the paper and handed it to me. I read an address that I knew to be downtown. A notorious address:
Souk al-Shramit.
Market of the whores.

“Many of our warriors go there to take care of their needs,” Abu Yousef said, exhaling a plume of smoke. “These are tested women. They are young and beautiful, and they are clean. Not like the secondhand whores from Syria and Egypt. And don’t worry about the money. Fatah takes care of the bill. The women will take care of you.”

And they did.

3

In 1969, Yasser Arafat became chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The following year, in May, a Palestinian cell crossed from Lebanon into the Israeli farming village of Avivim, where they ambushed a school bus, killing twelve people, nine of them children. Back at Sabra, I am now ashamed to say, we celebrated this mission as though Allah had given us some great victory.

That is the truth of
jihad
: It is a war in which no territory need be taken, no strategic objective seized. To shed the blood of the infidels—even children—is reason enough to party in the streets.

That same year, backed by the Soviet Union and Syria, Arafat decided to launch raids on Israel from inside Jordan. But Hussein ibn-Talal, the Jordanian king, ordered a full-scale assault on the PLO, and his army crushed Arafat’s forces. It was a stunning blow, one that caused
Arafat to move his headquarters to Lebanon. There, even though he had been defeated, we welcomed him like a liberator.

I was at Sabra on the day a huge column of Russian trucks brought hundreds of rifle-slung
fedayeen
into Beirut all at once. It was like a parade, a festival. Crowds of Palestinians lined the roads that crisscrossed the camp. Women hooted—that yodeling sound of celebration. Men cheered and held up pictures of the Leader.

They have only pictures,
I remember thinking.
I have been praised by the Leader himself!

The trucks rumbled by bristling with weapons: DShKs, Katyurshas, rocket launchers. Little children darted up and down in front of the crowd, some of them waving toy guns.

Abu Yousef was not so excited. I stood beside him in the front row of the crowd and when I looked up, his mouth was smiling but his eyes were not.

“Our lives will never be the same again,” he said.

He later explained more. The Palestinians from Jordan considered themselves the “real” Palestinians. Now they would come and take over the camps, wrestling the command structure away from the Lebanese and other Sunnis who had made common cause with them. The rules would change. Alliances would change.

“Now, Kamal, you must be careful to whom you talk and what you tell them,” Abu Yousef said. “We will have new commanders, men we do not know. Be careful.”

4

In March of 1978, a Palestinian woman named Dalal Mughrabi led the slaughter of Israeli children. She and a
fedayeen
unit from Fatah slipped into Israel on Zodiac boats, landing on a beach north of Tel Aviv. Carrying explosives and automatic weapons, the twelve-fighter unit hit the Coastal Road and hijacked a bus full of families on a day outing. Dur
ing a clash with an Israeli Army force led by Ehud Barak, who later became Prime Minister of Israel, Mughrabi and the
fedayeen
began shooting passengers as they tried to escape. When she realized her unit could not defeat Barak’s forces, Mughrabi blew up the bus, killing thirty-five civilians, thirteen of them children.

Historians have said the attack marked the first time women were recognized as full-fledged Palestinian militants, and they are right. But women had trained with Fatah and the PLO long before that.

I trained with women at Sabra. There were not many of them, and they were not there as a matter of equality or for any recognition of revolutionary fellowship with men. It was only that Arafat, Abu Yousef, and others had deduced that by using women, they could fool the Jews. Of course, the Israelis had long known that their enemies were using Muslim children as pack mules and assassins. And as the Americans had in Vietnam, the Israelis learned they had to kill or be killed.