Recruitment

Almost every night I watch satellite television with our Iraqi interpreters.  Some channels are infamous for anti-Western propaganda.  Such as the Al Jazeera Documentary Channel--which has great cinematography and an artistic eye, but has aired two features on White Supremacists in the last week.  One showed footage of skinheads at a death-metal concert in Europe.  A teenager at the bar had SNIPER tattooed on the back of his head.  He used to be in the army.  Later in that feature, the skinheads assembled for a torchlit march through the city.  Their flames were endless, trailing off into the night.

Another channel had an advertisement promoting the Iraqi Insurgency.  A man wearing a dishdasha crawled under concertina wire at the Iraqi border, he was carrying a blue duffle-bag.  I asked the Iraqis if they were ever asked to join Al Qaeda.

"Oh yeah, when I was in Syria," said Ali.  "When I worked in the grocery stand."  His family moved there several years ago and opened a small business.

"How did you know they were Al Qaeda?"

"These four guys, they come to the store and ask, 'how much this' and 'how much that' but I know these guys do not want to buy anything.

So I said, 'what do you want?'

'We're here to tell you good news.  To show you the way.'

They knew my family was Iraqi, see?

'We can help you go back to Iraq to fight,' they said.

'I don't want to fight Coalition Forces.'

'Why? You scared?'

'I'm not scared but I'm not crazy either.'  I asked them, 'where you from?'  Two were from Iraq and two from Syria.  'Okay, man so you're Iraqi, so why you go back to Iraq and kill your brothers?'

'They aren't my brothers, they're bastards.'

One said, 'Americans in the Arab Homeland, man!'

I told them if I ever saw them again, even just in the street somewhere, I would kill them.  So they left.  And my father he say this was dangerous and ask me why I talk that way but I knew how to deal with these guys."

"Did you see them again?"

"No, I left to come here.  I decided to be interpreter with the Coalition Forces."

Ali was impassioned: "and now Iraq become the first country to defeat Al Qaeda!" The channel we were watching showed another cache of enemy weapons discovered by the Iraqi Army.  "See?" Ali pointed.  "I'm going to have grandkids, and I'll say 'let me tell you a story, we were the first country to defeat Al Qaeda: they were a bunch of assholes who did not deserve to live and we kicked them out.'"