The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (18 page)

1

On December 6, 1975, I was at home in Beirut eating a lunch of pita and tomatoes when my brother burst in the front door, his face stretched into panic. “You are not going to believe what is happening downtown! The Gemayel party is shooting people! They set up checkpoints on the streets and they’re checking IDs. If you are a Muslim, they kill you on the spot!”

I jumped up from the floor. It was the Christians. They called themselves Phalangists. We called them the Gemayel Party after Pierre Abdel Gemayel, the leader of
Kataeb
, a political body supported mainly by Maronite Christians. In 1958, the year I was born, Gemayal emerged as a new leader and later was elected to the Lebanese national assembly. It took him only a decade to build
Kataeb
, the party the Sunni and Palestinians hated most, into a major force in government.

Which was why Abu Yousef had recalled me from Libya. Tensions were mounting between the Lebanese government and the PLO. Arafat wanted as many guns in Beirut as possible.

As we saw it, Gemayel’s sins against Muslims were legion. Long an agitator among the far-right Christian separatists, Gemayel opposed the
Nasseriyeen
—fighters loyal to former Egyptian president and PLO cofounder Gamal Abdel Nasser—and other Muslim-led attempts to gain more representation in the Lebanese government. Gemayel also
supported a policy that was poison to the PLO and the Lebanese Sunni—allowing foreign troops to operate on our land. He did not want an Arab Lebanon—which, of course, meant a Muslim Lebanon. Instead, he wanted a European Lebanon with close ties to France and the West. This would guarantee the supremacy of both the Christian faith and Christian power in government. Gemayel also despised the Palestinian refugees. But in 1969, under international pressure, he signed the Cairo Agreement of 1969, which allowed Arafat and the PLO to set up their headquarters in Lebanon.

Now, in my parents’ house, Fouad’s voice notched higher. “The Nasseriyeen and al-Morabitun are doing it too! Killing civilians—making their own checkpoints and shooting Christians!”

I had never seen Fouad in such a state, both impotent and frantic with rage.

Abu Ibrahim,
I thought.
I must go to Abu Ibrahim.

I dashed past Fouad and out the door.

“Where are you going?” he yelled after me. “Do not go out there!”

I ignored him and ran out into the street. I had not been outside longer than a minute when I heard faint wailing and the distant crackle of gunshots. I turned the corner at the end of my long block and nearly collided with other men spilling out of doorways onto the sidewalks, some of them carrying guns. Our numbers grew rapidly as if we were forming some kind of human rapids, all rushing toward downtown.

The gunshots grew louder, as did the wailing, which now sorted itself into individual women’s voices crying out names, keening with grief. It was only a few blocks to Abu Ibrahim’s house, but by the time I had gone there, the whole neighborhood seemed to tremble and quake as if some great, dark beast was stomping through the sewers underneath our feet. Turning another corner, I saw women dotting the sidewalk, beating their chests, screaming toward the heavens. Men darted between them, sprinting toward some common destination.

I turned another corner. In the middle of the next block was a fabric store and next to it a tailor’s shop. On the sidewalk outside the fabric shop, the owner, a man named Anis, knelt on the concrete, vomiting.

I pulled up short, aghast.
What is going on?

“Kamal!”

I whirled away from Anis, scanning the crowd to see who had called my name.

“Kamal, where are you going!”

A familiar face burst into view—Adnan, my neighbor, his huge dark eyes lit like wildfire beneath an explosion of curly hair. Glancing down, I saw that he was holding a dagger.

I looked back at Anis. Violent spasms of nausea still wracked his body and he seemed oblivious to the scores of people who ran past him as though he were a large rock in the middle of a stream.

Abruptly, Anis threw his head back and split the sky with a scream. One word, again and again:

“Why!”

“Why!”

“Why!”

“The Christians killed his brother Mahmoud,” Adnan told me. “I have already been downtown. I saw Mahmoud lying dead in a taxi with a bullet hole in his head.”

My heart broke. I had known Mahmoud since childhood.

Adnan took off running, and I followed him. I wanted to see this outrage for myself before reporting to Abu Ibrahim. We darted between grieving women and older men who stood like statues, shell-shocked.

Between breaths, Adnan spilled out little bits of news.

“The Christians shot everyone in the taxi. Two women, three men. They told the driver…to bring the corpses back here so that we could see what they had done!” His throat seemed to close around the last sentence, squeezing it in the high pitch of outrage and disbelief. “The Nasseriyeen are establishing a checkpoint where the taxi is. I am going to help them. These
sharmouta
will pay for what they are doing to our people!”

Now my own anger burned. I fervently hoped Abu Ibrahim would give me a large weapon and permission to kill. We ran through the thickening crowd, rounded another corner, and arrived at a major intersection that looked as if it had simply exploded. The crossroads was a seething mass of people. Horns and women wailed. Men faced off nose to nose, shouting, arms wheeling and pointing. Robed imams ran from group to group; some seemed to plead for peace, some for vio
lence. And in among the chaos, I saw knots of armed men who looked to belong to several factions. I did not yet see any PLO.

Someone had already set up a checkpoint, parking two cars in the intersection to form a narrow passage through which any vehicle that arrived would have to pass. Adnan grabbed my wrist and dragged me through the swarming crowd to a taxi parked on a curb. Looking inside the old four-door Mercedes 180, my heart nearly stopped. There were five bodies inside, two women in the front seat, eyes and mouths frozen open, large crimson patches blooming on the sides of their
hijabs
. In the back, three men, also shot in the head. I knew two of them—Mahmoud and another man. I had stood up for him one day in an argument with a neighbor. Now, in the taxi, the entire left side of his face was bathed in blood.

They were good men,
I thought,
and they had killed them like dogs.

Anger enveloped me like fire. I turned to tell Adnan that I wanted to avenge them, but he was gone.

Two kinds of people crowded the intersection that day—Muslims who wanted peace and Muslims who wanted vengeance. Those who wanted peace outnumbered those thirsty for blood many times over. But the radicals had guns in their hands. I knew many, many people on both sides of the argument. People from my neighborhood. That is what is difficult to understand about Beirut, about Lebanon in general. It is a small place. Everyone knows everyone, or at least someone from their family or tribe. Now this atrocity had pitted many of us against each other, not only Christian against Muslim, but Muslim against Muslim, pro-Palestinian against pro-Lebanese, pro-normal life against pro-radical change.

In an instant, I felt all those clashes within me and realized that I was among those lighting the fuse of unrest, shaking the world of these grieving women I saw around me, whose children were now in danger. A glimmer of guilt flickered in my heart. But the spark did not catch, and the moment passed.

Our cause is great,
I reminded myself.
The children will be better off when the Lebanese military has been split and the followers of Allah rule our nation.

Near the corner where the checkpoint vehicles stood, I saw a man I
recognized locked in an argument with another man, a
fida’i
brandishing an AK–47. The man I knew was important in the community, though I cannot now remember why. In his fifties, he wore a goatee and thick moustache. From my spot by the taxi, I could hear him shouting pleas into the armed man’s face.

“You are only pouring more fuel on the fire!” he said. “That is what they want from us! Let us not give them what they want!”

The
fida’i
let go the muzzle of his assault rifle, drew back his arm and slapped the other man across the face. Instantly, several other men wanting peace produced knives, but the
fida’i
and his comrades leveled rifles at their heads.

An imam elbowed his way forward. “You are
all
Muslims!” he cried, his arms raised as though trying to calm a storm. “It does not matter to what faction you belong! You must love your brother!”

All this happened in seconds. As such confrontations rippled through the crowd, panic rose in my chest and I glanced around wildly. This intersection was like dynamite with the fuse already lit.

Where is the PLO?

I caught sight of Adnan again. He was in the middle of the intersection at the checkpoint, dragging a man from a black sedan. Two
fedayeen
held the man, and Adnan blasted his face with his fists, cutting into his flesh with brass knuckles. Blood gushed from the wounds, but Adnan hit him again and again. Then one of the radicals lunged forward with a dagger and plunged it into the man’s side. When he withdrew its jagged edge, part of the man’s intestines came with it, glistening like a snake in the sun.

Horror gripped me. I thought of my neighbor in the taxi. I thought of Yahya at the training camp and Mohammed in Golan. In a moment of weakness, I wondered if my life would always be filled with blood and death. Again, though, I closed off my heart, like an emotional tourniquet.

I looked a final time at the death scene inside the taxi, then sprinted for Abu Ibrahim’s, just two blocks away. When he admitted me, he was holding a green military radio, and I heard Abu Yousef’s voice scratching into the air.

“This situation will work to our advantage,” my mentor was saying.

At that moment, I did not know the scope of what was happening. I did not know that a thousand people would die that day, all of them slaughtered for their faith. I did not know that the two sides—radical Christians and radical Muslims—had just pushed the button that would detonate a fifteen-year civil war.

2

The day of the dueling massacres became known in Lebanon as Black Saturday. The incident triggered a full alert at Sabra. We anticipated everything: retaliation by the Phalangists, an invasion of the Palestinian camps by the Lebanese army, even an air attack from Israel. We emptied the camp and set up a perimeter around Sabra with anti-aircraft gun emplacements and rockets. No attack came, but after Black Saturday,
fedayeen
in Beirut clustered into angry hives of warring factions with constantly shifting alliances and outright treachery.

When relief shipments came in to bless the country, the factions seized control of them. The only way to get a share was to be wired into a faction. If you did not belong to a group—the PLO, the Nasseriyeen, Fatah, al-Morabitun—your family did not eat. It was a form of manipulation, a way to use fear and the survival instinct to build alliances. Many, many people chose sides not for ideological reasons, but because they wanted to keep their families fed.

While I was with the PLO, two of my brothers had joined other factions. Fouad fought with al-Morabitun, and Ibrahim joined a group led by Saeb Salam, a former prime minister of Lebanon, who was well connected with the Saudis. This was the strategy of many Muslim families, to hook into several groups in order to survive.

As part of Abu Ibrahim’s cell, my mission was to split the Lebanese military, which included both Muslim and Christian soldiers. We hoped to turn the Muslim soldiers against the government and induce them to join the PLO. It was Arafat’s divide-and-conquer strategy: if we could
fracture the military, the Christian government could not stand against the increasingly powerful PLO.

The PLO fanned out in Beirut, beginning a strategic march to hold and protect Muslim neighborhoods. Five weeks after the Phalangist massacre, my unit had gone to investigate a Christian plot to invade a Muslim girls’ school when I heard of the next outrage: Christian militias overran Karantina, the settlement near the slaughterhouse, and turned it into a slaughterhouse of its own.

Reports crackled over our radios: The infidels had invaded Karantina and were shooting Muslim civilians in the head. A Christian fighter used a knife to slice open the belly of a pregnant woman, aborting her child on the spot. Another fighter placed a boy in his grandfather’s arms, then shot the child in the head. A Christian raped a Palestinian woman with a glass Pepsi bottle, then killed her by kicking the bottle up into her womb. Before the day was over, a thousand Muslims, many of them Palestinians, were butchered like animals in Karantina and two other areas in the city.

Hearing the reports, my blood turned to foam in my veins and fantasies of murder consumed every thought in my head. The urge to kill vaulted past vengeance and became justice.

The Karantina incident plunged Beirut into chaos. The PLO retaliated immediately, pounding Christian neighborhoods with mortars and artillery. But some among us lost our couth and became vampires and savages. Some PLO units and Muslim militia acted on their own and invaded Christian areas. They captured Christian women, raped them, then literally cut their hearts out of their chests to kill them.

It was as if a zookeeper had opened all his cages and the animals were tearing at each other’s throats. Beirut, the beautiful city of my childhood, was being crushed into ruins as Muslims and Christians carved it into an ethno-religious jigsaw puzzle, with each side trying to annihilate the pieces they hated.

A few months after Karantina, I helped launch an attack to take a Christian neighborhood near the Beirut
manara,
or lighthouse. Early that day, Christian militia had tossed grenades into an open-air market in a Muslim area, killing seventy people. Now they would pay. On a hilltop about five kilometers away from the
manara,
we set up our bat
teries and started shelling. We did not care whether a location was a military target: Because Christians dominated the government, their neighborhoods had better roads, better sewers, better everything. With hundreds of artillery rounds and mortars, we set out to change that. Grocery stores exploded. Restaurants collapsed in torrents of rubble. Soon, the entire neighborhood bristled with columns of smoke and fire, and the acrid odors of gunpowder and cordite choked the sky.