The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (6 page)

Then I heard seven clicks.

A knife blade glinted and the hand holding it belonged to the big teenager. He meant to cut me again, mark me as a trophy. Maybe this time on my face. Pushing through the ring of smaller boys, he stepped toward me.

“What are you doing, you hoodlums!” Through a red haze and a forest of legs, I saw an old man appear on the sidewalk in front of the cobbler shop. “Why do you cause trouble by my shop?”

The teenager dropped his hand down by his leg, hiding the knife from the shopkeeper’s view. I heard a hard whisper from somewhere above my head. “Not this time! He will see you! Next time, if he doesn’t bring money, you can cut him!”

Seven clicks again. My tormentor put the knife away.

Painfully, I stood up, cupping one hand under my nose. Blood oozed through my fingers in huge sticky drops.

“Look at this mess!” the old man fumed. “Who is going to clean it?”

I stumbled down the sidewalk, toward the shopkeeper. He stole a glance past me at the boys and seemed about to reach out to me. But instead, he turned away toward his shop, yelling, “Farouge! Come and see what those hoodlums have done this time!”

4

Tears rolled down my face as I staggered down the sidewalk, blood dripping onto my white shirt. My right eye had puffed to a slit. The metallic taste of blood slicked my tongue and I could feel that my mouth was cut inside. Glancing behind me, I saw the gang of boys skulking back toward the bakery like one animal with many legs. The cobbler was waving his arms at them, berating them, threatening to call the police. I knew he would not. He would not risk having his shop vandalized on account of a Lebanese boy.

Miraculously, I had not lost Father’s umbrella. I put my hand through the wrist strap and took off my black vest. Still walking, still stealing backward glances, I used it to mop the blood and mucus from my face. Soon I had put five blocks between myself and the Armenians, and I began to think the worst might be over. It was full morning now, with a good number of people out walking. I kept my head down, not wanting anyone to see how badly I’d been beaten.

Two more neighborhoods
, I thought.
Two more, and then I will be at my uncle’s.

At that moment, a pair of boots appeared dead in my path.

“What did they take from you?”

I knew the voice, and it was like a terrible dream. It belonged to a Kurdish boy named Iskendar, the neighborhood’s worst bully, one who loved to shake me down for money. I looked up at his stringy brown hair and slim face. Like the Armenian, he was a teenager, sixteen or seventeen. His skinny lips disappeared into a smirk so that all I saw was teeth.

“I
said
, what did they take from you?” His tone was that of an old friend stopping for a chat.

“Nothing,” I said.

Iskendar looked me up and down, then craned his neck a bit to see behind me. “What did you do with your lunch?”

I backed up a step. “I threw it away.”

“You’re lying,” Iskendar said. But his tone was warm, as if this was only a joke.

Footsteps fell behind me. Without looking, I could feel a gathering at my back.

“I would like you to give me your umbrella and your vest,” Iskendar said congenially.

With my peripheral vision, I could see that his friends now surrounded me. Still, I tried to bargain.

“You can have my vest. But this is my father’s umbrella and he will hurt me.”

Iskendar let his face melt into a mask of false pity. Then he laughed. “I don’t care!” He snatched the umbrella out of my hand and stuffed it in his back pocket.

Suddenly, a dozen hands descended on me as the Kurds hustled me off the sidewalk into the yellow tile of a stairwell entrance out of sight of the street.

“Please! Don’t!” I yelled, looking wildly around for someone who might see me, might rescue me. No one came.

Iskendar followed us into the stairwell. While the other boys held me, he stood in front of me and slapped me hard across the face. My nose and eyes burst into new pain. I held up my arms to shield my face. The other boys punched me, in the ears, the neck, anywhere they could land a blow. I tried to remain standing; I looked for a way to run, but I was caged in. Some of Iskendar’s gang climbed partway up a flight of stairs behind me, and kicked me through the railing. One boy bent and pulled off my shoes to see if I had hidden money in them.

They beat me until I was lying in a heap. Finally, Iskendar reached down and grabbed the pocket of my bloody shirt, and ripped it downward. “Remember,” he said. “I did that to you.”

I heard laughter, and my body felt the pounding of feet on the concrete. Every spot on my body hurt. Skull, neck, back, chest. Throbbing and stabbing pain everywhere. I looked down the length of my legs and saw that my feet were bare. The bullies had taken my shoes. And my father’s umbrella. For a few minutes, I simply sat and cried.

Anguished confusion tore at me. I could not go back the way I came and risk facing the Kurdish and Armenian boys again. But if I went forward, I might run into the Shia gangs. It had happened before. In the
end, I based my choice on simple arithmetic: It would be better to pass through one battlefield than two. Maybe I would get lucky.

Struggling to my feet in the yellow breezeway, I peeked out. The street was empty of people. Hobbling quickly, I stole to the edge of Kurdish turf, cowering close to buildings, my bare feet slapping the wet winter pavement. At each corner, I hunched like a hunted rabbit, my one good eye ticking left and right, looking for the Shia.

The first time I met Zakariah Anani, I saw a thousand stories in his eyes. I walked into an airport hotel room in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and saw him, his back bent like the branch of a cedar tree. Zak had already joined Walid Shoebat and started speaking out against radical Islam. I had done some speaking on my own, taking leave from my job as IT manager for a large nonprofit. But this would be my first time speaking with both Zak and Walid, and the next day we were booked at the University of Michigan. When I walked into the hotel room, Zak stood to greet me, using the back of a chair to support himself. His eyelids drooped as though heavy with secrets. His skin was rough as though etched with many tears.

I stopped just inside the doorway. “You are Kamal Saleem?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Where are you from?”

“I am originally from Lebanon.”

“Really? Me, too.”

I thought about his family name. “Anani…Anani. Are you not Shia?”

“No!” Zak said, sounding almost offended. He stopped to cough, hacking violently into a cloth. “We are Sunni.”

“But the Ananis live in the Shia area.” In Lebanon, you can know a family’s tribe by where they live.

He lifted his chin, resolute. “Yes, but we were Sunni.”

“Who did you fight with?”

“The Muslim fragments.”

He meant militia. In Lebanon, there were the PLO and Fatah—major groups with hundreds or even thousands of soldiers. But small bands of warriors often sprang up to join the fight. When they got enough people to make a noise, they became recognized as a party or a faction.

For the first time in more than twenty years, I felt the bond of kinship. Here was someone like me, who had come out of the darkness. I crossed the room and embraced Zak like a long-lost brother. We began speaking in Lebanese, my tongue skipping happily over my native language like feet revisiting a beloved country. For so many years, I had altered my manner of speaking, concealing it behind an Arab dialect or speaking mediocre French or snippets of Spanish. Now, I babbled along with Zak, letting my heritage shine.

Zak did not tell me which militia he fought with. I assumed immediately that the militia was Shia and that he was ashamed to say it. For a Sunni to fight on the same side as the Shia is the ultimate shame, and the same is true in reverse. If you are Shia and you fight alongside the Sunni, you are never trusted, never included in the inner circle. If there is a security leak, you are the first to be suspected. If someone is to be sent on a foolishly dangerous mission, you are the first to go.

Zak told me about his first kill.

“The
fedayeen
knocked on my door,” he said. “‘If you are going to join us,’ they told me, ‘you have to prove yourself.’ They said they had cornered a man on a rooftop nearby, and they wanted me to go and take care of him.”

So, Zak said, he climbed up to the top of a high-rise and threw the man off. Zak was only fourteen years old.

This story rang true with me. The factions were often like American gangs. In order to belong, you had to “make your bones,” as they did in the Mafia movies.

This trading of our histories was the way we verified each other. If I was going to be in league with him, to stand on the same stage and
claim a former life in
jihad
, then I wanted to know who he fought with, what he did. He wanted to know the same thing about me. Each of us would know instantly whether the other was lying.

Zak told me about his daughters, how proud he was that they were excelling in school. He was raising them on his own because his wife left him when he converted to Christianity. He also talked about his medical problems, which included severe diabetes.

As Zak told his story, he stopped often and pressed a handkerchief to his face to muffle the deep, booming coughs that wracked his small frame. Once, after such a spell, he pulled an old photograph from his shirt pocket and handed it to me, saying, “I have not always been this way.”

The young warrior looking back at me from the picture was tough and muscular, his eyes awake, bright, and proud. The man before me now could not weigh much more than a hundred pounds. Suddenly, I wanted to protect Zak, to watch over and cover him.

When I met Walid Shoebat, I had challenged his experience in
jihad,
just as Walid and Zak had challenged each other. But I did not challenge Zak. Like me, like all of us, there were parts of his life of which he was not proud. He had reached his harbor of peace, but his earthly vessel was crumbling. Standing in that hotel room that day, I knew that I only wanted to see laughter return to his face before he went to his final home.

1

Just inside the boundary of the Shia neighborhood, I stopped and tucked myself into the vestibule of an apartment house. The boys here had robbed me many times. Should I go on? Maybe I should go back home and tell my family what happened to me. But I knew my father would be angry that I had not earned money from my uncle.

“You should have found a way!” he would say. “Take different roads!” And where was his good umbrella? he would want to know.

Huddled in the vestibule, I shivered as the chilly air bored into my bones. A mist had begun to knit itself in the air, and I looked through it across the street at mossy, old French-era buildings, their wrought iron balconies sagging like jowls on a once beautiful woman. Some of these tired old ladies squatted behind high stone walls whose tops were jeweled with broken glass in many colors, cemented down to keep out intruders.

I wish I was enclosed in a circle of jagged glass.

In the gutter before me, a sudden wind dug into a leafy drift, kicking up a swirl of leaves and sending up the scent of mildew. My head ached. I could feel tight patches of skin on my face where my blood had begun to scab. My feet seemed rooted to the dank concrete. Without seeing them, I knew the Shia boys were waiting for me—as surely as I knew my uncle was waiting—looking impatiently at the old clock on his wall.

My stomach quivered, and a new tear traced a salty trail to the corner of my mouth.

Allah, help me!

Shaking from cold and fear, I edged out onto the sidewalk. The cold wind looped through the curving streets that wound through the neighborhood, streets that did not let me see too far ahead.

I had not gone far when I heard laughter.

If I can run…

I could hear their laughter coming closer.

If I can run as fast as the wind…

I stopped and leaned against the wall of a high-rise, gathering my nerve like steam in a kettle. The pain in my head and body vanished, swallowed in a rush of adrenaline. Then, like a startled bird, a small cry flew out of my throat and I took off.

“There he is! Get him! Get him!”

How many? Ten? Twelve?

The concrete blocks drummed beneath me, the pounding of many feet as a gang of Shia boys surged across the street toward me. Shops flashed by in a blur, and my senses fed random, useless thoughts to my brain:
Military surplus. American uniforms in the window. A restaurant. The smell of hummus.

The beast gathered speed behind me. Jingling zippers. Thudding feet.

“Faster! Don’t let him get away!”

The fastest boys were only an arm’s length away.

“Grab him, stupid!”

An intersection. I did not slow down. Brakes squealed. An American car, big and black, stopped inches from my hip. A man cursed in English.

I sensed the beast slip back. And ahead, I saw salvation.

Like a lighthouse, a large mosque rose in the distance. It was Sunni. Only two blocks away. Pounding and screaming about my whore of a mother, the howling animal was nearly at my heels again. Adrenaline carried me like a rushing current. I bounded up the mosque steps just as I felt the brush of fingers reaching out to grab me, then realized suddenly that Allah had smiled on me:
I am not wearing shoes!

I was able to burst through the mosque doors without slowing down. The Shia boys had to slow down to kick their shoes off.

“Help me! Help me!” My cries echoed off the tiled ceiling in the outer court.

I saw a small knot of men, long-bearded and dressed like imams. They leapt up as a group and ran toward me. An instant later, the mosque door flew open and the Shia boys tumbled in. I reached the imams, and one of them, a tall man with fiery eyes, brushed me behind his robe with a protective arm and faced the boys, who stopped as though dropping anchor.

“What’s going on here?” the imam demanded. “What do you want?”

A tall, slim boy stepped forward, jabbing a finger at me. “He stole from my father’s store, then hit us and ran away! We are supposed to bring him back!”

“They are liars!” I screamed. “I did not steal! I have not been in any store! They are chasing me to hurt me!”

Another imam stepped forward. Looking up, I saw that he had hooded eyes, wise like an owl.

He regarded the boys and said, very evenly, “If this boy stole from your father, tell me—what did he steal?”

“Something from the shelf!” the slim boy answered quickly. “It belongs to my father!”

The wise man turned to me. “Turn out your pockets.”

I stepped from behind the imam’s robe and pulled the white fabric of my trouser pockets out. Only lint fell to the floor.

Now the first imam took a step toward the Shia boys.

“Go! Let’s go!” the tall boy shouted, and the little gang spun as one and ran out the mosque doors. One of them called back to me: “We will find you later!”

The imam with the hooded eyes shouted after them. “If you come here again, we’ll break your legs!”

Now the men gathered around me like a protective flock. “I am Abdul Rahman,” said the man who had first challenged my attackers. “Tell us what happened.”

2

I told them, neighborhood by neighborhood, my high voice echoing like a flute in the cool vastness of the outer court. The Armenians and the missing Maronite lady. The Kurds and my father’s umbrella. Now these Shia boys. By the end of the story, tears of exhaustion and frustration rolled down my face. They could see from my wounds I was telling the truth.

“What is your name?” Abdul Rahman said.

“Kamal Saleem.”

“Saleem? Is your father Mohammed Saleem?”

I nodded.

Above his red-tinged beard, Abdul Rahman broke into a smile, and around me the other men nodded in recognition. “We know your uncles! Do not worry. We will take care of you.”

Now Abdul Rahman led me to an area called
al-wodoug
, a place of many bathrooms where worshippers cleanse themselves before
salat,
prayers. I had done this ritual countless times, washing first my hands—right then left. Then my face three times, my mouth, my nose, a dash of water to my hair, then wrist to elbows, and last my feet.

Leather-strapped wooden clogs waited outside the
al-wodoug
. I slipped my feet into them, and Abdul Rahman led me inside. Along one wall a rank of cold-water faucets stretched, poised over a long marble trough. Opposite the faucets on the other side of the trough, marble blocks marched away in a long line, forming benches on which to sit and wash.

As I rinsed away the morning’s violence, weak sunlight crept in through windows set high in the wall. Icy water trickled down over my feet, and blood skated toward the drains in crimson threads. As I washed, I wondered why these men were being so nice to me. No one had been nice to me in a very long time, it seemed. For months, I had felt like a burden to my family. Like fat or a tumor. Sometimes I thought it would be better for them if I were dead.

“Does that feel better?” Abdul Rahman asked.

I nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”

Another imam came with a towel, and I dried myself. Then he took off his
abbayah
and draped it around my shoulders. The robe was much too long for me and doubled down on itself, the white fabric pooling at my feet. It dragged along the ground as the three of us walked back into the inner court, an enormous space with soaring ceilings and colorful carpets. A row of curved wooden stools, or
kursi
, sat along one wall; these were used to hold the Koran while reading it. Another wall was lined with high wooden shelves filled with Muslim books.

Nearby, a small kerosene heater was burning. The other men—with Abdul Rahman and the towel imam, I counted six altogether—stood around it. The heater cast a small circle of warmth, and the imams ushered me like a duckling to sit directly in front of it.

“Sit, sit,” Abdul Rahman said, and the men all sat around me on rugs someone had placed there in the shape of a crescent.

One by one, the imams introduced themselves. I do not remember all their names, but I remember two of them.

“I am Abu Azziz,” said one.

“I am Abu Tawfiq,” said another.

I wondered,
Are they every one Abu?

Abdul Rahman sat to my right. “Kamal Saleem,” he said thoughtfully, touching my knee. “Do you know that I play soccer with your Uncle Emad?”

My father had once touched me much as this man was touching me. But in the last year, only beatings.

“Why did you have to cross all these neighborhoods today, Kamal? Where were you going?”

“To work. It is the shortcut I take when it is cold outside. I have to work to bring home money to my family.”

Abdul Rahman’s brow darkened briefly, then brightened. “From this day on, no one will touch you on your way to work. Anyone who deals with you will have to deal with us.”

These words both pleased and surprised me. No more long hikes to avoid the bullies? No more fear? I desperately, desperately wanted to believe him. But what would these six do, I wondered? They were not like thugs or bodyguards. They were holy men.

“After
salat
, will you take us and show us the places where the boys hurt you?” Abdul Rahman asked.

“Yes!” I said. “I will show you!”

Instantly I forgot my pain, my scrapes, my bruises. So many times I had asked my father to help me, and he had said no. He was too busy. He thought the beatings were my fault. A teaching from the
hadith
popped into my head: If one part of the body is hurt, the whole body is hurt, and good Muslims must respond to any threat to our body. My family had not honored that teaching on my behalf; but now these men, perfect strangers, had committed to do so. I always thought my family was filled with the most observant Muslims. Were these men more righteous?

Abdul Rahman spoke again into the vast space. “Would you like to spend the day with us? Here, at the mosque?”

I dipped my head in gratitude. “Thank you very much, but I cannot. If I do not go to work, my Uncle Abdul Al-Karim will beat me. If I do not bring home money, my father will beat me.”

Abdul Rahman frowned. “This uncle I do not know. He is on your mother’s side?”

I nodded.

“How much does your uncle pay you?”

“Three
lira
a day.”

Laughter floated up from the men in the little semicircle. I looked around in wonder. Abdul Rahman opened his robe, searching for his pants pocket. When his hand appeared again, it held three Lebanese
lira
, which he held out to me.

“This should be enough to pay off your beatings for today.”

I did not hesitate, but took the money as if it were water in a desert.

I’m saved!

Now the conversation turned away from me, and the imams began discussing politics.

“I spoke with Omar Yazid in Syria,” said the man who called himself Abu Tawfiq. “He said Arafat is paying
fedayeen
more money to fight now. His forces are growing.”

Of course, I knew the name Yasser Arafat. Everyone did. As the founder of Fatah, a Palestinian resistance group, he was already a leg
end. I had heard my father and brothers talking about him, but this was different: I was included in a conversation with men who knew men who
knew
Arafat!

“The Palestinian issue is proving a good one for the Brotherhood,” Abdul Rahman said. I knew from my father that the Palestinians were Muslims who had been kicked out of their homeland. “Their story is a vehicle by which we can advance the faith. We have the teachings. Arafat has the guns.”

The imams laughed. Then Abdul Rahman turned to me, his eyes glowing like matched gems of dark topaz. “What do you think of all this, Kamal?”

I had no idea. But the imams knew my family and they were Muslim like me and Sunni like me, so I simply agreed. “The way of Islam is righteousness.”

Abdul laughed heartily. “I can see that your heart is strong for Allah, Kamal! That is very good.”

We prayed in the inner court, bowing to the east as gauzy sunlight showered down around us, turning the dust motes gold. I loved the ritual of the prayers, the holiness of the sound as it drifted up like the scent of flowers, pleasing to Allah. I sensed the strength of these men.

“Now we will go and make the neighborhoods safe for you, Kamal,” Abdul Rahman said.

I smiled at him and nodded briefly. When he had first mentioned this, my injuries cried out “yes!” in chorus with my wounded heart. But now I found my mind searching for a word I had heard my brother Fouad use. It was a word for men who were very committed to advancing Islam. Something about Abdul Rahman and the Abus, as I came to think of Abu Azziz and the other imams, stirred this memory—the political talk, Abdul Rahman’s luminous eyes.

I looked around at the imams and saw that their faces were somehow harder. A ghost of apprehension whispered into my ear. My injuries only stung now. I could live with them. And I had the money Abdul Rahman had given me. I could take the long, long way home, explain what happened, plead with my father.

Perhaps he will have mercy on me. Perhaps he will let me find a job in another part of the city.

Robes rustling, the imams herded me toward the front doors of the mosque. It seemed days since I had burst through them, propelled on a rocket of terror. Abu Tawfiq now spoke to me directly for the first time since introducing himself. “After we talk to these boys, they will never bother you again.”

The look in his eyes. Dark. Serious. Suddenly, I knew these men did not mean to appeal to the boys in the neighborhoods on the basis of peace. What had been a whisper of apprehension now turned into a gale-force wind, and I felt as if I were a leaf blown suddenly into the swift current of a river.

Now I remembered the word Fouad had used:
zealots
.

I turned to Abdul Rahman and bowed slightly. “I thank you for everything you have done for me today, but I think I should be getting home now.”

I watched as Abdul Rahman’s eyes tallied my fear and discarded it. Then he smiled and put his hands on my shoulders. “Kamal, if you do not face your enemies, your enemies will chase you forever.”