The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (20 page)

A moment of panic gripped me:
Did we take cover far enough down?

I tried to stand up and run but had to grab a support column because I had lost all equilibrium. In that moment, I heard the ceiling of the next story up smash down onto the floor over my head. Instinct sent me diving to the floor again.

Allah, save us!
I prayed, then tensed my body and prepared to die.

4

The chain reaction of destruction lasted for a full minute. Gradually, the noise died away leaving above us the silence of what had to be a literal tomb. I raised my head off the floor and coughed up puffs of dust. In the smoking air, I felt I could not get a full breath. The two other
fedayeen
stirred, rising slowly amid the dust and gravel like ghosts.

My guts ached. But I knew I had to shake the pain off quickly—all of us did—in order to advance to whatever remained of the roof.

I heard the rest of our force rumbling up from below, ready to finish the attack. The upper stairwell was a tumble of wreckage. Armed and moving in relays to cover potential attacks from above, we climbed it like a concrete mountain. It was a short trip to daylight. I emerged into the sun to find a tangled mass of masonry, utility sheds, air-conditioning parts, and bodies.

Picking my way quickly through the rubble, I moved to the edge of the tower that faced the main road and looked down. Cars parked below looked the size of credit cards. I was about to call in a report to Abu Yousef when a slight movement caught my eye. Turning swiftly, I spotted a Phalangist lying on his back about five meters away, his fatigues burnt black and stained crimson. Had the blast carried him another meter, he would have been blown over the edge of the tower. Now he lay on his back, slowly turning his head back and forth.

I keyed my radio and gave Abu Yousef a victory report, then a footnote: “We have survivors.”

Abu Yousef did not hesitate: “Make an example of them,” he said. “Dead or alive, make an example of everyone you find.”

I knew immediately what he meant. Walking across the wreckage, I closed the distance to the Christian fighter and stood at his right side looking down. His eyes were closed and he moaned softly. His guts peeked out from a wide gash that ran down his left side from chest to hip. I bent down and grabbed his wrist and his knee.

His eyes snapped open. I lifted the Christian’s body perpendicular to the ground, swung him to my right, and launched him out into space.

Stepping toward the building’s edge, I leaned out and watched his silent fall. For a long moment, he turned in the air like a plane in a flat spin. Then the weight of his torso pulled him down head first. When he hit the street, his right arm came off.

I turned around to see several men staring at me through the smoke. “We have orders!” I shouted. “Make an example of everyone you find!”

For the next few minutes, at least seventy bodies sailed off the top of the tower as the Muslim fighters disposed of the living and the dead. Some Christians made the trip to meet their God screaming.

5

In the beginning of the civil war, the battle lines were clear: the Lebanese army and Maronite Christians, led by the Phalangist Party and militia, allied themselves against the Palestinians, who were mostly Muslims. But those alliances swiftly shifted, crumbled, and shifted again. Syria, whose army had opened the way for Fatah assaults on Israel from the border, now played both ends against the middle. They pretended to support the Palestinians but in truth hoped to
arm the Shia and establish a separate Shia government in the South of Lebanon.

Meanwhile, I saw criminal gangs becoming powerful, stealing and selling relief shipments to buy drugs and weapons. As the situation deteriorated, I could soon see there would be no winner. I grew confused about a lot of things. I did not see myself as a grunt soldier; I was a jihadist. People go to university to become teachers or to a carpenter’s shop to learn woodworking. I had trained in Beirut to advance the cause of Islam with a gun. This dirty war of treacherous nations had ceased to be about Islam and had become only about survival.

I wanted to get out, to a country where my back was safe. I wanted to start fresh, to establish an Islamist movement somewhere else. Sweden seemed a prime destination. I had heard it was clean there, and ripe for a spiritual takeover. Many
fedayeen
talked of moving to northern Europe, quietly invading the cities in a cultural
jihad.
To establish a movement there would be a step toward reclaiming for Allah what the Ottomans had lost.

To save my own skin and not be labeled a traitor, I confided my feelings to Abu Yousef. He agreed that I had labored long for the Palestinian cause and would benefit from another sabbatical. I did not tell him I meant to get away forever.

In late 1976, I applied for a work visa to Sweden. While I waited for the wheels of international bureaucracy to turn, I continued to fight. But where I had fought with fierce resolve in the past, now my heart betrayed me.

By this time, a “Green Line” split the city from the seaport to the mountains. It was a line of demarcation, a burned-out no man’s land that divided hate from hate. The Christians dug in on one side, holding their end. We dug in on the other, holding ours. Pavement formed the dividing line: eight lanes and a concrete median plus sidewalks. If you crossed the line, you were crazy. Snipers on both sides would take you out.

At times during the long civil war, the warring sides would call for a temporary peace—a day to claim your wounded, resupply, and take a half-respite from the constant vigilance that wore us down like acid.
The Christians called these days a cease-fire; the Muslims called it
hudna
. Generally, each side honored the temporary truce. I remember the day we did not.

It was a mission of opportunism. Why should we honor this code of war when our enemy had shown time after time that they had no honor? Along the Green Line, large sections of downtown Beirut were unoccupied. Our plan was to cross into Phalangist territory in an area filled with empty theaters and cheap hotels. In previous battles, we had blown holes through the buildings; now we had ready-made tunnels we could use to penetrate deep into Phalangist territory without being seen in the streets. Then, while the Christians were off-guard, we would do what we called “combing”—killing all the Christians we could find.

Three leaders took a group of eighty to ninety fighters from three factions. We rallied near the theaters where we would begin our attack. I led the largest group, a PLO unit of about forty men. The rest of the force was split between two men, Hamza, who led about twenty
fedayeen
from al-Morabitun, and a Syrian named Abu Zayed.

The Syrian and I disliked each other instantly. Over the years, to blend in with the PLO, I had taken to speaking in a Palestinian dialect, Arabic with a different slang, a different accent that was closer to Egyptian. When my face was covered with camouflage paint, people could not tell I was Lebanese. Abu Zayed seemed to think I was Palestinian and because of this, suspicion dripped off him like sweat. As it had been on my first mission into Israel, the Syrians still thought of Arafat’s fighters as trash. Now, for me, the feeling was mutual: a Syrian, I felt, would sell his mother in the streets at a discount. Abu Zayed matched the stereotype. Looking into his eyes, I could see a hunger for blood.

Now, our force climbed fire escape ladders to the top of the theater and scrambled across the theater roof, our boots crunching sun-warmed gravel. Reaching the opposite edge, we dropped into an alley on the Christian side of the Green Line. Now we were able to run through the connected buildings undetected. We often had to step across the corpses of soldiers killed in past battles, some so old their flesh had worn away.

For about an hour, we advanced through the building interiors until
we came to a building I knew to have a balcony that looked over a large public courtyard.

I turned to Hamza. “Keep watch here. We will go up and have a look.” I motioned to Abu Zayed to follow me, and together we climbed six flights of stairs, emerging in a large empty room. I did not want to go with him, but I also did not want to let him out of my sight.

When we reached the highest floor, Abu Zayed and I got down on our bellies below window level. Slowly, carefully, we crawled to the balcony door and pushed it open. Below, I could see thirty or forty young men wearing the uniform of the Phalangists. But their small unit was completely off-guard, snacking, talking, and laughing, their weapons laid aside, enjoying the peace.

I knew it would be the perfect invasion. I knew we could kill them all.

I carried a Seminov rifle that day. I raised it and peered through the scope. A quick count revealed that I had brought two men for every one of theirs.

Abu Zayed spoke quietly. “It’s perfect. An easy kill. I will get the others.”

But then, in my heart, a quiet voice rose:
Don’t touch them. These are mine
.

I did not hear a voice. I
felt
a voice. Was it Allah speaking? I did not know. What else could it be? Who else?

Whatever it was, my resolve to attack dissolved. I was not afraid, but I knew instantly and without question that we should abort. I had a problem, though: Abu Zayed lay beside me transmitting tension, ready for battle. My brain sorted through excuses to give him, a reason to abort.

An ambush.

“This is an ambush,” I whispered, my mouth forming the words as soon as they popped into my mind.

Zayed whipped his head toward me with a hard stare.

“They saw us coming,” I said carefully. “Their commanders sent those boys out there as bait.”

Zayed peered back out at the scene. He raised his rifle and scanned the area with his scope.

“Where is the ambush?” he said skeptically. He motioned for my binoculars and swept them across the buildings and streets. “I see nothing.”

I raised my arm and pointed to a random apartment building. “There, in the higher floors. If we move forward, they will see us immediately.” I spoke evenly, firmly, full of false facts. “If they have Katyushas, we’ll be murdered right here, and those who crossed with us will be dead.”

“You’re dreaming!” Zayed pointed to the young Christians with his rifle. “They are right there for our taking. We can
do
this. Besides, if we die, we will be
al-shaheed
.”

“True. But I am not ready to die today.”

With that, I moved off the balcony, sliding backward in a combat crawl, then stood and headed down the stairs. Abu Zayed was on my heels all the way down, spitting whispers in my ear. “You are a liar and a coward. There is no ambush!”

Emerging onto the lower floor, I called retreat. Immediately, my men and Hamza’s formed a loose group and began moving out, back in the direction of our tunnel system. But Abu Zayed’s men stood still.

“Don’t listen to him,” he said. “It’s not an ambush! It’s the perfect attack. He’s a liar!”

I whirled on him and stared, looking him up and down. For the first time, I noticed how clean he was, how unlined his face. Suddenly, he struck me as a man who had never engaged, who had never crawled in the dirt, never spilled a drop of blood. All at once, I knew his heart: he wanted glory for this battle, glory he had never tasted.

“Palestinian traitor!” Abu Zayed hissed. “You cost us a victory!”

I turned away and moved to follow my men through the hole. I had taken only three steps when a bullet seared into my back. I knew it was Abu Zayed who pulled the trigger. I kissed the ground immediately and laid there, still as a rock, feigning death.

But the Christians had heard the report and now gunfire lit the alley outside. Abu Zayed and his men pounded past me in retreat, hurrying to get through the tunnels back to the other side of the Green Zone. Then I heard the high scream of an artillery shell. Seconds later, an explosion shook the building.

I staggered to my feet, felt blood running down my back, pooling in the waistband of my pants. Hamza ran back through the hole toward me.

“Kamal! Let’s go!” He put my arm over his shoulder and helped me through the hole into the alley outside. Gunfire snapped around us, and I noticed a bizarre sight. A pair of boots sat in the alleyway with feet still inside them.

“Abu Zayed,” Hamza said.

As my fight against radical Islam became more public, tension grew inside our home. My wife, Victoria, found herself rising several times each night to check on our daughter. Both of them had grown to dread my speaking trips, as it seemed each new venue brought more who attacked and tried to discredit me.

After a 3 Ex-Terrorists speaking engagement at Stanford University, a student named Adnan Majid, who was vice president of the school’s Islamic Society, wrote an op-ed in the
Stanford Daily
. Young Mr. Majid, by his own account, was a devout Muslim who prayed five times a day, but who, despite video beheadings, suicide bombers, and more than a dozen thwarted terror attacks in the United States by radical Islamists following 9/11, wished his readers to know that the 3 Ex-Terrorists were lying about the threat of radical Islam.

“Our community at Stanford can easily reject such fear,” Majid wrote. People can “easily dismiss the first two speakers, Zak Anani and Kamal Saleem, for offering us nothing but that fear.”
¹¹

Rejecting fear is a simple matter for a student who has likely never looked down the barrel of a gun. Not so simple for us.

In late 2007, while I was away speaking in California, our home telephone rang. It was an administrator from Tamra’s school. “Tamra nearly
fainted in class, and she can’t catch her breath,” said the woman on the phone.

Tamra’s teacher had run to her aid, catching her before she collapsed on the hard tile. “Her pulse is racing, and her heart rate is around two hundred beats per minute,” the administrator said. “We’ve already called an ambulance.”

While driving to the school, Victoria called me on my cell phone to tell me the news. And when she arrived on the school grounds, images hit her: A white ambulance. Spinning red lights. And Tamra sagging in a wheelchair, her face completely drained of color.

The paramedics diagnosed Tamra’s episode as a panic attack. Later that evening, Tamra told Victoria that she had been sitting in science class thinking about the Seattle confrontations and the Pakistanis hunting me near my home, when an avalanche of terror engulfed her:
What would the Islamists do to Daddy? Behead him, like they had those hostages in Iraq? Could they find Mom? Could they find me? What would they do to
us?

“Mom, I cannot stay in this house while Daddy’s not here,” Tamra told Victoria.

So for the rest of my trip, they stayed in a local hotel. Our family physician prescribed Xanax for my daughter. She was only thirteen years old.