A Fighter's Story [Long Read]

[[]D]

This was published back in 2006, just found it and thought of sharing it with you people.

Khalid had been in Iraq for only a few weeks, but he was already sick of the place. It wasn't the missions that bothered him. He was fighting alongside a small group of Saudis, and they were consummate professionals when it came to jihad, completely focused on the lightning-fast attacks they staged each day on the foreign invaders. The ambushes usually lasted no more than five or 10 minutes, but Khalid revelled in the chance to hit the streets and fire off his AK-47 at the American soldiers and their allies, four grenades strapped to his waist so he could kill himself if captured.

After the attacks, however, Khalid and the other fighters were confined to safe houses in Mosul and Haditha –– dark, dank places with no hot water or electricity. The biggest problem was the Iraqis, the very people he was there to help. Sometimes it seemed as though there were double agents everywhere, checking him out on the street, trying to overhear him speaking the Yemeni dialect that would betray him as a foreigner, all so they could pick up their cellphones and call in the Americans, maybe even collect a reward. That made this jihad more dangerous and unpredictable than the other wars Khalid had fought in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Somalia, places where they were often treated like heroes. When they weren't out on missions in Iraq, he and the Saudis were forced to stay in the safe house, the shades pulled down, with only a well-thumbed copy of the Quran and five prayer sessions a day to break the monotony.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a pillar of strength to the insurgents. Khalid knew him from a decade and a half ago, when they were fighting the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan. But now, meeting al-Zarqawi in Mosul, he was amazed at the changes in his old comrade. Back then al-Zarqawi was an ordinary foot soldier like Khalid. Now, flanked by two bodyguards and barking orders with fiery determination, he was the most wanted man in Iraq, an Islamic militant with a $25m price on his head.

Khalid, who agreed to recount the story of his jihad on the condition that his identity not be revealed, is a Yemeni from the ancient city of Sanaa in northern Yemen. The country is one of the most lawless and drug-addicted places in the world.

I met Khalid at a qat chew in the mafraj –– a room where qat chewing gatherings are held, of a friend. Qat sessions usually begin with a raucous flow of conversation. But Khalid was quiet, smiling at jokes, carefully pruning his stalks, venturing little. When he finally spoke, he told me that he had just been let out of a Yemeni prison. I asked him why. “I was arrested as a terrorist,” he told me in English.

Late one night, he went on, an undercover anti-terrorism squad had dragged him away from his family’s home in a comfortable, middle-class neighbourhood of Sanaa. He was locked up and questioned repeatedly by Yemeni police in the presence of American agents. To curry favour with the Bush administration, Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Salih, has arrested hundreds of suspected terrorists, imprisoning almost everyone who returns to Yemen with a Syrian or Iranian stamp in their passport –– prima facie evidence that they fought in Iraq. Khalid was released after 30 days, when a family friend posted a large bond to ensure that he would stay out of trouble.

He then proceeded to recount the extraordinary story of his 16 years fighting as a foot soldier in the jihad. Although it is impossible to independently corroborate every detail of his tale, other Yemenis confirmed Khalid’s long, frequent absences from Yemen, his presence at training camps in Afghanistan and his imprisonment in Yemen by the anti terrorism police. His passport contains entry stamps to Syria that match the dates he said he had gone to Iraq, and the account he gave of his arrest in England mirrors one reported by police in the UK around the same time.

Khalid is not an ultra-orthodox, unbending Muslim. Although he meets to chew qat wearing his Yemeni dress cut midcalf, in the style of an Islamic purist, he also wears button-down shirts and European hiking boots. He has lived in Britain for years and has befriended Westerners. Slight and handsome, Khalid, a jihadi, has a quiet charisma and modesty; he is, in short, not the kind of enemy we have been led to believe we are fighting.

He harbours some of the same doubts that American and British soldiers have about what brought them to fight and, perhaps, to die, in a place so far from home. To hear a polite and thoughtful man talk casually about his friends in al-Qaeda is to have the whole enterprise reduced to a more fragile, human scale. It is to see this war for what it is: a battle between men filled with contradictions, inconsistencies and weaknesses –– not a mythic struggle between our supermen and their ghosts.

Khalid’s jihad began with a videotape he viewed at a mosque in Sanaa in 1989. He can still remember the anger he felt when, at the age of 16, he watched that footage of Muslim brothers and sisters being slaughtered in Afghanistan. A friend of his had died fighting there and he didn’t think much about his own decision to follow his friend into battle; it was the natural, instinctive thing to do. He had seen what the Russians were doing to the brothers, as Khalid calls his fellow soldiers in the holy war. His best friend had stood up to them and died. Now it was his turn.

There was nothing in Khalid’s childhood to suggest that he would wind up joining the jihad. His father was a moderate Muslim with a steady job as a civil servant in the Yemeni government. Khalid worried that he wouldn’t be able to get a passport or leave the country without his father’s permission. But the recruiters for the Afghan war were acting with the support of the Yemeni government, and within a few weeks, whether or not his father liked it, Khalid had a brand-new passport stamped with a visa for Pakistan.

The reality of jihad, Khalid quickly discovered, was very different from the images presented on the videotape. When he finally made it into Afghanistan, he spent his first night near the front.

Khalid fought in Afghanistan for two years. He learned to use his weapon, to fight, and to pray with precision and punctuality. It was a harder, less forgiving kind of Islam than he had known in Yemen, but its rigidity gave him the strength and discipline he needed to survive as a homesick child at war in a foreign land. He had arrived in Afghanistan at a pivotal moment.

The war against the Soviets was giving birth to a new breed of Arab fighters known as ‘Afghan Arabs’. It was there that the seed of allegiance was planted for the thousands of young men who had flocked to the mountains of the Hindu Kush to help fight the communists. Afghanistan represented the birth of the global struggle.

In 1993, after Khalid had returned home from Afghanistan, he began to hear about a war in Europe where Christians were slaughtering Muslims. Stirred by the stories, he went to join the fighting in Bosnia. Again, as in Afghanistan, he was on the side the world viewed as the good guys –– the Bosnian Muslims who were the victims of relentless ‘ethnic cleansing’ at the hands of the Serbian nationalists led by Slobodan Milosevic.

The combat was much more intense than the action he had seen in Afghanistan, where the Soviets used superior firepower to bomb them from a distance. In Bosnia, the enemy was right in front of you, and you had to kill or be killed each day. Khalid fought alongside a group called the Green Berets, named not after the American Special Forces but after the colour of Islam.

One day, after a year at war in Bosnia, Khalid was on the front line between Tuzla and Zenica, battling Serbian snipers who were shooting into Muslim villages from a nearby mountain. Suddenly, he came face to face with a Serb.

The Serb got the jump, firing seven bullets into Khalid’s stomach. Bundled up in heavy winter clothing, Khalid at first couldn’t even tell how badly he was hit. When he started to peel off the layers around his stomach, part of his guts leaked out into his hands. He stuffed whatever he could back in and lay down on the ground. When a Saudi brother managed to drag Khalid beyond the reach of the Serb snipers, it took three injections of morphine to quiet his screaming. It took hours to carry Khalid down the mine-covered trail. When he finally arrived at a triage area at the base of the mountain, he was put with a group of those too far gone to save and left to die.


Soon after, the medic who had given Khalid the morphine arrived and began searching for his patient. He found Khalid lying among the rows of the dead and ordered a Bosnian army helicopter to speed Khalid to a hospital, where he woke up in pre-op. For six months he lived off an IV tube, his intestines hanging outside his body in a sterilised bag. He shrank to skin and bones –– under 5-1/2 stone –– until he looked like ‘an African famine victim’. The hunger was so intense, he would claw at his own stomach.

On his way to Saudi Arabia for further surgery, Khalid stopped home in Yemen. He received a warm welcome in Saudi Arabia, where people from all over the country visited him in the hospital, leaving gifts of flowers, perfume and money for a man they considered a hero.


It took Khalid several years to recover from his wounds. In 1996, he joined a group of Arab fighters going to Kosovo, where Christian Serbs were once again menacing a Muslim minority. By the time he arrived, however, the Serbs had already sealed off the country, making it impossible for him to enter. Unable to join the jihad, Khalid decided to move to England, where many of the brothers had settled.

England is the home of one of the largest concentrations of Yemenis in the world; parts of Yemen were long ruled by the British, and thousands of Khalid’s countrymen have settled here. When Khalid arrived, he went to see a Palestinian cleric he knew, who helped connect him to the Yemeni community. Khalid settled down to work at a corner store, chewing qat all day while manning the register. The leaf is legal in England, and Khalid’s store stocked and sold qat to Yemenis in the neighbourhood.

Khalid was 23. For the past seven years, he had been fighting in battles all over the world. He had never been on a date, never kissed a girl, never really talked to a female who wasn’t a close relation. So he did what many a lonely guy does when he’s stuck in a city he doesn’t know very well: he fell for the waitress at the coffee shop. She was of Irish descent, and she smiled every time she brought him his coffee. Khalid went to a Yemeni friend and explained his quandary: he was in love, but he didn’t know what to say. “No problem,” the friend told him. “I’ll ask her out for you.” The waitress was receptive but confused.

A couple of dates later came the gifts: three bottles of pricey perfume and a ring. He could barely get the words out in English: “I want to marry you.” “Marry me?” She was surprised, amused even. He gave her a week to decide. His gallantry must have won her over, because they were married within a month. Right after that, the misery began. Khalid wanted her to wear the hijab, the headscarf worn by devout Muslim women. Their arguments were so loud that neighbours knocked on the door and banged on the walls. They separated, and Khalid got a British passport out of the marriage.

Khalid returned to the only life he knew. This time, his destination was Somalia. There were 40 Arab fighters in Luuq helping to fight the Ethiopian army, which regularly attacked from across the border. The longer Khalid stayed, the more dire conditions grew. At times the insurgents survived only by eating pure sugar. The group eventually organised a counterattack and retook the city. Khalid fought for two days straight, until he and his men ran out of ammunition. Reduced to throwing stones, most of the Arab and Somali fighters were killed. At one point the few remaining survivors were so desperate, they started to dig their own graves.

Khalid escaped, badly shaken but alive, with neither the money nor the means to get home. What do you do when you’re on jihad, all the money’s run out and you just want to leave? For Khalid and his remaining men, their only chance was to try and get a piece of the forty grand that Khalid had already delivered to the warlord.

Khalid and his fellow fighters eventually escaped to Yemen by crossing the Gulf of Aden on a dhow packed with goats.

When the United States invaded Afghanistan, Khalid saw his most intense fighting in and around Khost. Even with help from a local sheikh, the foreign fighters couldn’t do much against the American onslaught. One night, Khalid was sleeping in a car near Khost with three other fighters. When he woke up and walked away to relieve himself, the car was blown to bits.

In late 2001, Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda operational chief, ordered Khalid to guide a group of 50 women and children to safety in Iran, over the same mountains he had crossed to enter Afghanistan. “You know the route,” Mohammed said. “Take some families with you.” He gave Khalid thousands of dollars to pay for Afghan guides and to take care of the Iranian border guards.

The journey to Iran took two weeks. They trekked across high mountains –– a string of women and children wandering through a remote corner of the world, eating dates, plants and whatever animals they could kill along the way. When they reached Iran, pro-Taliban allies were waiting to shuttle them to safety. For weeks after the trip, Khalid’s shoulders ached from carrying so many children on his back.

Now, returning to Britain from Afghanistan in 2002, Khalid discovered that even a real British passport couldn’t protect him from scrutiny.

At Heathrow, he was detained again. British officials asked for his luggage and he told them he had only hand baggage. Strike one. They examined his ticket: one-way from Tehran. Strike two. As he sat on a hard bench in a glass panelled interrogation room, deathly afraid, he could see officials leafing through his passport in the next room. They kept coming back to one page –– a page that had been doctored in Afghanistan to remove a Pakistani visa. He claimed he had accidentally left it in his trousers and then ironed them, but they didn’t buy it. Strike three. At midnight the agents handcuffed him, shoved him in the back seat of an unmarked car and took him to a maximum-security detention facility.

They questioned him for five days. As the interrogation continued, however, Khalid came to see that he was safer in Britain, protected by that country’s laws, than many of his colleaques detained by the Americans in Afghanistan. Realising that the police had nothing on him, he denied everything. They finally let him go, unable to hold him without further evidence.

The incident communicated something important to Khalid: the jihadi’s life had changed after 9/11. Not long ago he’d travel all over the world with impunity; now they were hassling him at Heathrow just because he was flying in from Tehran on a one-way ticket with a piece of hand luggage.

Khalid lived quietly in this country for a year and a half, working at the corner shop and praying at a local mosque. Around that time, he befriended a fellow Yemeni who would come to share his passion for jihad.

In 2003, when the US invaded Iraq, it was clear to Khalid where he would next do battle. Getting into Iraq from Syria was no more difficult than dressing up like a farmer and walking across the border with phony papers in the middle of the night. But the fighting was a different story. In the early stages of the war, there weren’t many foreign fighters like Khalid in Iraq; the bulk of the insurgency was comprised of native-born Iraqis who simply wanted to drive the Americans from their country.

Khalid quickly discovered that it was impossible to blend in –– Iraqis tend to be bigger than Yemenis, and their body language and dialect are hard to imitate. Shiites were especially quick to report foreign Sunnis to the authorities. Khalid and his Arab brothers had the same problem as the American forces they were fighting: they didn’t know which Iraqis they could trust.

Most of the foreign fighters in Iraq were very young. At 32, Khalid felt like an old man. Stuck in their safe houses, the Mujahideen had to rely on Iraqi insurgents to report on the movement of American convoys, scouting for an opening that would allow them to attack. Months after President Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ in Iraq, Khalid was ambushing US forces in the northern city of Mosul.

After three months in Iraq, Khalid returned to Britain through Syria. But jihad seemed to shadow him everywhere. One evening, Khalid heard a helicopter overhead. Seconds later the police kicked in the door, handcuffed him and arrested him on suspicion of terrorism. People on his block couldn’t believe that the friendly guy who sat behind the counter at their corner store was an al-Qaeda fighter.

The agents interrogated Khalid about his past. They knew he’d been in Syria. Business, he explained. They knew he’d been detained in 2002 after returning to Britain from Iran. Shiite pilgrimage. I’ve never been in Afghanistan. I don’t want to go. They knew there were Yemeni fighters being held in Guantanamo who said Khalid had recruited them to train in Afghanistan. Liars. They knew he had spoken on his mobile phone to Wail, shortly before his friend had died in Iraq. Just a chat.

After Khalid spent a week in prison they let him out, just like they always did. They didn’t have enough evidence to keep him. When he was released, his next-door neighbours, mostly white Britons, were there to welcome him home. “I might doubt my own son,” one old man said, “but I’ll always believe Khalid.”

After the arrest, Khalid returned to Iraq for two more months in 2004, in part to honour the memory of Wail. Living in safe houses, he once again went out on raids against the Americans. The heaviest fighting he saw was in A1 Qa’im, where 30 Arabs and more than a hundred Iraqis fought for a week against the Americans.

On a trip back to Britain in late 2004, he had proposed to a Muslim woman he met through friends. In August, his fiancee and her family visited him in Yemen. He was visibly excited about the prospect of settling down and starting a family. He and his betrothed would go on heavily chaperoned picnics to a park outside Sanaa with their extended families, or visit the home of a close relative. They have never been alone together.


But Khalid can see no way to escape from his past. Like many veterans, he looks back on his years of fighting with nostalgia –– the thrill of battle, the feeling of brotherhood, the steadfast devotion to a cause. But on some days, it feels as if he has no place in the world. He lives in Sanaa, but it no longer seems like home. Every few days he walks down to a call centre and phones his brother in England. He doubts he can ever go back to the life he knew there.

These days, when they come over to his house and try to rally him for a mission to Iraq or Sudan, Khalid refuses and says he can’t go anywhere now, that it would put his family in Yemen at risk. Even his fiancee’s younger brother tried to enlist his aid to join the insurgency in Iraq. Khalid told him he couldn’t help. He keeps silent, and waits, and imagines the day when the war, and all that comes with it, will finally end.

[Darth Vader]

Interesting, well-written and informative story. Only if Khalid had known that Saddam was a puppet originally installed by the West and later removed, perhaps he would make a different decision for those Iraq missions and the confusion going on there. I understand that the common man is not bothered by such complexities and merely plays in the hands of their own puppet masters, like they say in pashto ala-bala pa gerden-e-mula (the details are the mullah's headache).

I would congratulate him on settling down and marriage. A new life. Most of Khalid's doings are probably commendable except a few, like he should have explained to the Irish girl what he would later have her do, i.e., convert. His heartache for Muslims all over and his journey to Bosnia is also very commendable and his thoughts, or atleast as they are written in the story, are simple and noble. In contrast, Zarqawi was an extremely cruel criminal. Maybe the Jihadists will realize soon that they had only fought for USA in Afghanistan before and that the jihad is so difficult now because the other hand of the same entity that used them in the past is no longer in need of those services, infact it is now benefitting by creating drama from and eliminating common jihadis and simple minds like Khalid. While the "jihadist version" of islam is now being used to deface it. I wish the simple, brave muslim youth could see all the careful planning and mastermindry done long ago and which is manifest in history and waiting to be found.

[mafiadog]

So Khalid Published his own story????

Flawed...anyone taking part in the conflict in Afghanistan or Iraq were to be detained without evidence and be immidiately transferred to Guantanamo.