| Giving Up Their Lives for God
Some of Zarqa’s young men began displaying their commitment to Islam by going to fight in Iraq, and the funerals back home seemed to have had a profound effect on young men.
“Four of my friends died,” Abu Ibrahim said. “I was happy for them because they were going to paradise, but I was upset at myself.”
Abu Ibrahim said he was frank with his parents. “I started to tell them that God wants us to give up our lives for jihad. They didn’t like it. They told me, ‘You’re still too young, wait.’ You know how mothers and fathers are. They didn’t want to hear such things.”
He left home in October with only a sports bag full of clothes. His seat in a group taxi to the Syrian border cost $11. Neither the Jordanian nor Syrian border guards asked many questions, he said.
He slept in a Damascus hotel, and then took a six-hour bus ride east to the Iraq border area, where he had the name of a smuggler who took travelers across the border for about $150 apiece. But the police pulled him off a bus, questioned him and detained him before he could reach his contact. He said he had memorized the address of his destination, and gave the police a false one. But after four days in a Syrian prison — tiny cells with no heat and no light — he said he confessed.
“Later, they put me in a cell with other prisoners and most of them had been less religious ones, so we, the religious ones, took one corner and we prayed and talked about the Koran,” he said.
After three more weeks, he said, the Syrians handed him to Jordanian authorities, who kept him for several days. “I became much stronger,” he said of his prison experience. “But most of the days I was very upset I didn’t arrive and I pray to God that he will get me what I wish to get.”
Back in Zarqa, he said his parents told him: “Enough, Abu Ibrahim. You tried to go and God doesn’t want you to go. So sit down and get married.”
“It is hard to leave our families,” Abu Ibrahim said. “But it is our duty, and if we don’t defend our religion who should do it? The old people or the children?”
He spends his days now in Zarqa at work with his brothers, then evenings with friends who share his convictions. They visit Islamic Web sites, discuss the news from Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq.
“I still have the same aim, fulfilling the rules of God,” he said. “I wouldn’t do the same mistakes the next time and hope that God would open the way.”
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