The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (25 page)

Prime Minister Gedi was waiting for us in a second-floor office in the three blocks of the old city
his government was able to hold. “There are terrorist elements hiding in this city,” he said as we sat in leatherette chairs. His favorite argument, like that of his Ethiopian ally President Meles Zenawi, was that Al Qaeda was “a clear and present danger.” His second-favorite argument was that the Islamists were “human rights violators,” which he seemed to believe, and which was sure to catch the
attention of an American journalist. “The United States is
very
cooperative,” he said. “Somalia is a very important country from a geopolitical point of view in the war on terror.”

A few hours after we left, a suicide bomber crashed a truck through his office gates, killing six people in the parking lot and injuring ten more. The bomber’s hand was left hanging from a tree. The prime minister
was rushed to an undisclosed location. It was the fourth attempt on his life. Soon after, my phone rang. It was Prime Minister Gedi looking for me. An assassination attempt was an unparalleled opportunity for spin. “This bombing will make the international community pay attention,” he said hopefully, connecting the ideological dots lest I miss them. “It is the mark of Al Qaeda.” I listened, not saying
that it would take much more than a suicide bombing against Ethiopia’s man in Mogadishu to get America’s attention.

That night, a salty wind lifted the hotel’s eight white flags from their posts. After a supper of scored halves of mango and
zuppa di verdura
—Gigi, the cook, was Italian-trained—I sat at the sole table in the empty parking lot. Dini, the hotel’s assistant manager, strolled outside
to show me old news-reels he had bought in the market. They were from the time of Black Hawk Down, when his cousin, Mohammed Farah Aideed, had ruled the city. During the day, Dini served as the hotel’s Internet guru, always futzing with a landline to find a miraculous connection. At night, he wore a yellow mesh tank top and a wraparound sarong. He wanted to be an entrepreneur like his boss, Osman.
And like Osman, he was proud of his toys. His blinking phone, his streetwise getup, and his laptop all came from Dubai. He wanted to see how my laptop worked. A MacBook with iTunes might be worth another shopping trip, once things calmed down,
if
they calmed down, in Mogadishu. Those early days of occupation were like the first few of flu: Somalia was coming down with something and no one knew
how bad it would be.

Despite having no government, Somalia had better telecommunications than most African countries, until the 2006 Ethiopian invasion. And Somalia had one of the most sophisticated informal banking sectors on the continent until after September 11, when the United States shut down the leading hawala company in Somalia, Al-Barakat. Hawala is a money transfer system—the Somali
equivalent of Western Union—that made it possible for Somalis in America and elsewhere to send about $790 million annually home to their country. A man could walk into an office in Michigan and give the agent $1,000, and within a matter of hours, his mother in rural Somalia could pick up the cash from her local office. This money kept Somalia afloat until Hussein Farah Aideed claimed Al-Barakat was
linked to Al Qaeda. The United States shut down the company, destroying Somalia’s economy in the process. Alex de Waal, program director of the Social Science Research Council, refers to this act as “the equivalent of a financial carpet-bombing.” The September 11 Commission never found a link between Al-Barakat and Al Qaeda. (Aideed, however, owed Al-Barakat $40,000.) The attackers, it turns out,
hadn’t used Somalia’s hawala system to pay for 9/11; they’d used interbank wire transfers at the SunTrust Bank in Florida.

In the darkness, Dini scrolled through icons on his laptop, looking for the Somalia news footage. As he searched, my eye caught the name of another file: “Toora Boora
[sic],”
the name of America’s largest battlefield in Afghanistan. “What are you doing with that?” I asked.
Dini said nothing and pushed Play. On the screen, a Libyan named Sheikh Abu al-Lai’th al-Libi sat in the darkness before a campfire. The light glinted off his square pharmacist’s glasses. He named the other men sitting around the fire, then lectured on the absolute oneness of God—
tawheed
—and talked about an upcoming operation in Shkai, a Pakistani village of South Waziristan on the Afghan border,
where Al Qaeda had a training camp. (Mention of this border village gave me a start: I had been in Shkai during the spring of 2004, days after Pakistani troops bombed it. To punish a militant leader named Nek Muhammad for sheltering Al Qaeda, the Pakistanis had reduced the village to muddy craters. It looked like an archeological dig.) The video cut to a daytime scene of pairs of sweating men
running some kind of wheelbarrow race up a rocky hill. Another cut in the video,
and another activity. This time, chicken fights: one man mounted on the shoulders of another, grappling with his opponent on the grizzled slope. It was laughable, really, but lethal, too: these men were training to kill American soldiers. It was a rudimentary promotional video likely dated around 2004, nothing like
the slick high-tech work of al-Shabab in 2009. A song played as a soundtrack in the background: “Gather ye men of tomorrow. Join hand in hand for an important and dangerous struggle . . .”

Dini then found the Black Hawk Down footage: Hussein’s dad, Mohammed Farah Aideed, strutted along a hallway wearing a straw fedora. I recognized a pair of plaster swan planters from the Peace Hotel foyer. Rounds
of failed peace talks had taken place where we were now sitting. Then Black Hawks whirred against the blue of a Mogadishu sky. Soon, some of these same Black Hawks would spin and fall.

Rapt, Dini leaned forward. His awe seemed to be less about Islam than about power and the human fascination with violence. These grainy images were the first public shaming of America in the Al Qaeda era. In essence,
these were the first jihadi videos—the first moment the world order was shown to be shakable, when boys like Dini, shut out of the West’s system, saw that the status quo could be punctured and America could be wounded. America could lose, even. After the eighteen U.S. Army Rangers died, Al Qaeda’s correspondence begins to refer to the American squeamishness at losing soldiers as a “Vietnam
complex,” with bin Laden’s recruits claiming responsibility for a victory they had little, if any, part in. “The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger,” bin Laden said later.
¹
God, indeed, was the real superpower.

And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.
—
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOHN
11:26

Anyone, male or female, who does good deeds and is a believer, will enter Paradise and will not be wronged by as much as the dip in a date stone.
—
THE QURAN, WOMEN
4:124

A Muzak rendition of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” echoed through the Jakarta airport’s domestic terminal shortly after dawn
on May 9, 2006. A forty-year-old man wearing knock-off Ray-Ban Wayfarers
and an Al Jazeera baseball cap shuffled along with a large cardboard box poked with holes tucked under his arm. A minor celebrity within the world of international jihad, Farihin Ibnu Ahmad, aka “Yasir,” was barely known outside of it. He was renowned for his violent pedigree, although few people other than militants would
have recognized his broad, hangdog face. He sidled up to a plainclothes security officer and thrust the box toward him.

“Will the X-ray machine kill them?” he asked. The officer pulled back one of the box’s dog-eared corners to reveal a pair of rabbits, mottled black and white, noses twitching wildly at the unfamiliar smells of stale coffee and perfume. Ibnu Ahmad
(ibnu
in Indonesian, like
bin
in Arabic, means “son of”) wanted to know if he should check the rabbits or if he could carry them on the plane. The officer glanced up from the rabbits to Ibnu Ahmad’s face, half hidden beneath the baseball cap. Though I was there to meet Ibnu Ahmad, I scooted furtively to the other side of the corridor, certain he was about to be arrested.

The rabbits should have been the least of the security
officer’s concerns: Ibnu Ahmad was a killer, and member of Jemaah Islamiyah, a lethal group of Southeast Asian militants most notorious for the 2002 Bali bombings, which left 202 people dead. The militants’ ties to Al Qaeda were precisely through men like Ibnu Ahmad.

For generations, Ibnu Ahmad’s family has been part of an Islamist movement—first opposing Western colonialism and later fighting
for Indonesia to become an Islamic state. When he was sixteen, Ahmad’s family offered him a choice: Did he want to be an Islamic teacher or a fighter? He chose to be a fighter, and in 1987 he shipped out to Al Qaeda’s Al-Sadda camp in the saw-toothed, snowy mountains on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, to fight in the jihad against the Soviets. He learned to build explosives and heard
a couple of sermons given by Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian preacher who served as Osama bin Laden’s spiritual mentor. Azzam believed that every Muslim was duty bound to fight in—or pay for—global jihad until the holy lands of Islam were restored to their former glory. He preached that Islam’s future lay in reviving its ideal, seventh-century past by whatever means necessary.

When Ibnu Ahmad
returned to Indonesia in the nineties, he brought with him a bloody, millenarian worldview intended to overthrow the secular government, and a network of contacts. In Jakarta, the nation’s buzzing
capital, he became one of Jemaah Islamiyah’s most ardent deputies. In 1996, when Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, one of the architects of the 9/11 attacks, visited Jakarta, Ibnu Ahmad served as his tour guide.
He did the personal bidding of Hambali (aka Riduan bin Isomuddin, known as Al Qaeda’s kingpin in Southeast Asia), and he helped plan an attack on the American embassy in Jakarta.

“The instruction was to drive a suicide truck into the U.S. embassy, or get a helicopter to bomb them from above,” Ibnu Ahmad said. The plan, apparently, did not work out. His surveillance photographs of the embassy
building proved too blurry to show to Al Qaeda higher-ups in Afghanistan. In August 2000, the group ended up bombing the Philippine ambassador’s residence instead, killing two Indonesians and injuring the ambassador. Most recently, Ibnu Ahmad was imprisoned twice for waging jihad against Christians on the island of Sulawesi, one of the largest of the seventeen thousand islands that make up Indonesia’s
vast archipelago.

With 240 million people, 8 of 10 of whom are Muslims, Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world. (Protestants make up about 6 percent of the rest of population; Catholics, 3 percent; Hindus, less than 5 percent.) Indonesia is also a vibrant young democracy, which held its first presidential elections only in 2004. In 1998, after thirty-two years in power, the
strong centralized government of President Suharto collapsed and political power spread to the outlying islands. On Sulawesi, power became something worth fighting for, and Christians and Muslims began to battle over local elections. As in Nigeria (where military dictatorship ended in 1999), in Indonesia’s wobbly new democracy, political and religious affiliations soon reinforced one another.

Once the religious violence began, Ibnu Ahmad traveled by boat to Sulawesi to train his Muslim brothers in how to fight a guerrilla war against infidels. His training in Afghanistan hadn’t been about killing Christians, however, but about overthrowing the secular government. Back at home in Indonesia, there were arguments among the militants as to whether these skirmishes were the right ones to fight.
Ibnu Ahmad went to Sulawesi anyway, where he was caught carrying thirty-one thousand rounds of ammunition, tried, convicted, and imprisoned. He wasn’t interested in talking about the electroshock or waterboarding he was subjected to in prison. “My brain doesn’t work right—it’s like a broken computer,” was all he would say. But evidence of his treatment seemed all too visible in his absent stares
and broken teeth.

_____

Apparently the security officer at the Jakarta airport didn’t recognize Ibnu Ahmad: after allowing the rabbits to be checked, he let him go without incident. Ibnu Ahmad strolled back across the gleaming terminal to where I stood with Zamira Loebis, a journalism professor and
Time
reporter in her forties, who was traveling along with us to interpret. From beneath her blunt
bob, Loebis’s eyes found mine in disbelief that Ibnu Ahmad had been allowed to check the rabbits as luggage. An animal lover, she had a household full of cats and dogs; she’d even rescued two parrots from different religious battlegrounds. (One could say, “Allahu Akbar!”; the other, “Alleluia!”)

These rabbits were a gift for Ibnu Ahmad’s newborn son and his second wife, Farhia, twenty-eight,
whom he had met while still in prison on Sulawesi, where the three of us were headed this morning. “Fathers used to come to the prison to marry their daughters off to us,” he said wistfully.