Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists by Scott Atran Read Free Book Online

scholarships, job opportunities, religion and art workshops—was likely to prove far more effective in the long run than was targeting individuals. In Palestine, I found that suicide bombers will usually turn down individual scholarships if the choice is between personal gain and family and friends. I gave the example of Nabeel Masood, the high school boy from Jabaliyah refugee camp in Gaza who blew up himself and other people in the Israeli port of Ashdod in 2004. He had a scholarship to study in England, which his mother said he was proud of, but it was no match for the eternal esteem of martyrdom in a cause shared by friends. What if he and a friend each had had scholarships; what if they’d had the chance to go to England together? Yet for some at the briefing, it seemed this rather simple message was incomprehensible.
“But don’t these young people realize that the decisions they make are their personal responsibility,” a young woman on Dick Cheney’s staff sternly said in her most authoritative voice, “and that if they choose violence against us we’re going to bomb them?”
“Bomb them?” I was truly bowled over. “Who are you going to bomb? Madrid? London? Morocco?”
Contacts in Tetuán had given me names of five young men who had gone on to Iraq, the first of whom had been identified by his DNA as a suicide bomber in Baquba. As with the Mezuak contingent of the Madrid bombers, two were brothers and all were soccer buddies. It turned out that the cousin of one of the Iraq-bound volunteers was married to someone from the Madrid group, which would make the Madrid deaths a family matter for the Iraq-bound friends.
And all of them, Madrid bombers and Iraq-bound martyrs alike, had lived their formative years along Mezuak’s Mamoun Street. All had gone to the Abdelkrim Khattabi primary school, where icons of Mickey Mouse framed the lessons of the day. They played soccer at the schoolyard or in the field below the Dawa Tab-ligh mosque that first promoted jihad in Mezuak. They saw the larger world on Al Jazeera at Café Chicago and other nearby hangouts, and at the Cyprus Coiffure and other barbershops, where tending hair was always a serious matter. There they earnestly debated the meaning of world events through the filter of their common experiences.
But why did just these ten, out of many hundreds who seemed no different, decide to kill and die for friends and faith? We’ll see that there’s as much randomness as purpose in the process of radicalization: Someone gets the jihad bug, for whatever reason, and friends follow, gathering force from sticking together, like a stone rolling downhill.
There are, of course, a few pathological jihadis. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was probably a crook and a killer, and one of the two main movers of the Madrid plot, the diminutive bucktoothed Chinaman (El Chino), as he was called, sometimes resembled the violent, coked-up Al Pacino character in the movie Scarface. For the most part, though, jihadis span the normal distribution of the surrounding population. The great majority cluster under the highest part of a bell-shaped curve: average in schooling, wealth, social adjustment, psychological disposition, and intelligence, with a few outliers at the tail ends.
The idea that joining jihad is a carefully calculated decision or that people are “brainwashed” or “recruited” into “cells” or “councils” by “organizations” with “infrastructures” that can be hit and destroyed is generally wrong. This (minus, perhaps, the brainwashing part) is the way most government bureaucracies, law enforcement agencies, and military organizations are structured. It’s their reality, and they mirror that reality by interpreting, understanding, and acting on the world in these terms. But generally, this isn’t the way most human lives are structured, including the jihadi social movement. Hierarchical armies whose minions act on their own