12/30/04 "Los Angeles Times" -- BEKAA VALLEY, Lebanon -- The handsome, 35-year-old teacher had many things to live for � a PhD, a steady job, a healthy salary � but still he decided to leave home, make his way to Syria and then sneak over the border into Iraq, intent on fighting Americans, even if it meant dying in a suicide attack.
In the beginning, the schoolteacher had struggled to decide how he felt about the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. It spelled humiliation and sorrow to Arabs. But as an Arab who had tasted the despair of despotism, he had a small spot of hope.
"At first, I thought, 'OK, the Americans want to bring democracy to the region,' " he said.
That was before he turned on the television to the grainy images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. "The human triangle. The woman dragging the man by the leash," said the teacher, a broad man with a clipped beard and intense gaze. "These images affected me deeply. The shame the Americans brought. I was fervently monitoring the TV images, not so much the words as the pictures."
He remembered that President Bush called the war on terrorism a "crusade." He thought about American helicopters being used by the Israeli army to attack Palestinians. And he decided that sitting impotently in Lebanon wasn't enough.
Over dates and sweet coffee in a middle-class living room here, he recently spoke in measured tones about his fervor to fight in behalf of Muslims against U.S. troops � and his decision to leave the battle in Iraq to make his way home again.
The story of the teacher, who spoke on the condition that neither he nor his hometown be named, reflects the oft-stated notion that the war in Iraq has opened a regional Pandora's box of jihad. In a region where so many people feel helpless before repressive governments and U.S. policy, the road to Iraq has become a trail of independence in the minds of some men, a way for young Muslims to come of age and to join the battles they see on television.
His journey began here, in a high valley that is so flat it looks like it was ironed, stretching like a gritty carpet between the mountains of southern Lebanon, hard against the Syrian border. Unemployment is rife and religious zeal intense.
It is a hardscrabble place where international worries and local woes are intimately intertwined. A recent Friday sermon called for martyr's blood to avenge the Iraqi insurgent shot dead on the floor of a mosque by a U.S. Marine. "Every day we are seeing these things and hearing the same word: Fallouja," the preacher cried. "What are we supposed to tell our men? To put down their weapons? To surrender? If we do, who's going to avenge their blood and tears?"
Then the sermon shifted seamlessly; the preacher tried to drum up donations to heat the schools. "We worry about Iraq and about Palestine," he said, "but it's getting cold here."
This ancient strip of farms has a history of defiance, and it has sent its share of men to join the insurgency in Iraq. Some made their way back home. Others have been commemorated at funerals without corpses after friends called from Iraq to report their deaths.
Martyrdom doesn't come cheap. Foreign fighters are expected to pay their own way, from smugglers' fees to meals. Many of the would-be mujahedin, or holy warriors, simply can't afford to go, said Shaaban Ajani, the mayor of a town in the Bekaa called Majdal Anjar.
Within Iraq, there is broad consensus that foreign fighters form only a small band of the insurgency roiling the country. Nevertheless, in neighboring countries the psychological resonance of the struggle, and the adulation and envy of the foreign jihadis, has been profound.
"If a man stands just an hour with a weapon in his hand to fight jihad, it's better than being a preacher in Mecca for 100 years," the teacher said. "It's not about preaching. It's about actions."
Ajani, the mayor, doesn't disguise the pride in his voice when he tells a visitor that two men from his town were killed fighting in Iraq. "It is noble, and it's a religious duty," he said.
In his town, tensions between a frustrated people and their national government exploded this fall. Lebanese agents swept through the Bekaa, carrying out a sting operation on what was described as an Al Qaeda cell.
Ten people were arrested. One, a Majdal Anjar resident named Ismail Mohammed Khalil, 32, died in custody shortly after his arrest. The government said he'd suffered a heart attack. Witnesses said his body came home covered with cigarette burns, bruises and scorch marks left by electrical shocks.
In the Bekaa, Khalil is remembered as a mild-mannered man who sold used cellphones to support his five children. After his body was returned, hundreds of men took to the streets and rioted. The suspect's real crime, his neighbors and family say, was sympathy for the mujahedin who trekked to Iraq � and his fervent hope that he could someday afford to join their ranks.
"America has declared war against the Sunni people," said the mufti of the Bekaa, Khalil Mais. "Are Muslims forbidden to defend themselves? Jihad is the defense of country and of honor. How can you watch television every night and not go?"
It was that conviction that inspired the schoolteacher to make his way to Iraq.
After he decided to go, he waited for a break in classes. It was a quick bus ride to Syria. He set off in the spring with a shortwave radio, a small bundle of clothes and some cash.
The teacher had collected $3,500 for his trip. It was all the money he'd saved from his salary, and he feared that it wouldn't be enough to keep him going for what he expected would be a long period of fighting. He had a local connection, a friend from the Bekaa who had joined foreign fighters in Iraq and had agreed to vouch for him.
He remembers standing, on a cold spring night, on the line between Syria and Iraq. Four border-jumpers before him had been caught by Syrian troops. The smuggler he'd hired to ferry him to Baghdad was edgy. They would hike through the desert rather than chance the roads.
It was a starless night, the teacher recalls, and he hadn't expected the desert to be so cold. Stray dogs roamed the sands; American helicopters thrummed overhead. He didn't let his guide rest or smoke cigarettes for fear of getting caught.
The schoolteacher walked all night through the Iraqi desert until he reached the outskirts of a small town. The guide walked toward the lights and fetched a truck while the teacher waited in the wastelands. Then they drove into Baghdad to meet a contact beneath a downtown bridge.
He was taken to a villa crowded with dozens of men from Yemen, Libya, Algeria, Syria and a host of other Arab countries. They'd order out for food, and when it arrived, they'd argue over who would pay.
"It was a very nice atmosphere. Nobody wanted to take anything; everybody wanted to give," the teacher said. "If there was a household chore to be done, we fought over it."
Most of the men seemed well-educated, and they didn't lack for cash. Some of them were veterans of the battle against U.S. Special Forces and their Afghan allies in Tora Bora, Afghanistan. At night, they'd sit in the villa, which was furnished with only a handful of chairs, and talk about the sort of government that the Islamic people would install once they kicked out the Americans.
After about eight days, it was the teacher's turn to move. They took him to Fallouja in a battered car. He believed the time for his suicide mission was near, but he ended up in another house, surrounded by Saudis � mostly Salafists, adherents of the most rigorous school of Islamic thought � who were waiting eagerly for their own suicide missions. The men were organized into platoons, the teacher said, with every 50 or so foot soldiers under the guidance of a commander.
"Many of the guys in the house had very limited military training," he said. "But it doesn't take much military training to get in the car and blow yourself up."
The teacher spoke reverently of Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi, who has been tied to numerous beheadings and other deadly attacks in Iraq. He bragged that he spent a night with a Zarqawi aide who has since been killed and that he caught a glimpse inside a spartan bedroom occupied by Zarqawi. Though he didn't see the militant leader, he described the Jordanian kaffiyeh, or headdress, he left behind.
After a week of waiting around in Fallouja, the teacher said, he began to feel guilty. It wasn't that he became frightened, but the dreams he'd had in Lebanon didn't match the mundane reality in Iraq. He felt more like an interloper than a savior.
"I realized I was staying in somebody's house, and the owners were moving from place to place to make room for us," he said. "Then I realized they didn't need us, and in fact we were sort of hampering the Iraqis."
The foreigners' accents made them a security threat, and their makeshift dormitories drew U.S. bombs to residential neighborhoods. Iraqi collaborators with the U.S.-led forces would throw compact discs onto rooftops to mark the homes where the mujahedin were sleeping for U.S. warplanes, the teacher said.
"We were a burden, and the Iraqis could take up the battle," the teacher said. "I came to realize that they didn't need people, they needed money much more than people. I realized I'd be of greater use if I financially supported them."
He made his way back through the desert under a moon that was nearly full. American patrols swooped overhead. At the border, he said, he spent $200 bribing Syrian officials to let him pass.
Now he is home, among friends envious of his adventure. He has occasional regrets about returning to Lebanon.
Other men from the Bekaa also have come home, community leaders said. But the humiliation that drove them into the desert continues to fester, given in regular doses by the evening news.
"When I saw the man shot in the mosque, I wanted to go back," the teacher said with a shrug. "They say it's a war crime. I think the whole war is a war crime."
Special correspondent Rania Abouzeid in the Bekaa Valley contributed to this report.
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Copyright � 2004, The Los Angeles Times
