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Reign of Terror
INSIDE ISLAMIC JIHADTulkarem, West Bank The black flags of Islamic Jihad flutter from rooftop TV antennas in the warrens of the refugee camp in Tulkarem, and graffiti scrawled on cinderblock walls proclaim eternal struggle against Israel. "Islamic Jihad is a volcano on which no grass grows," reads one. "Greetings to all Palestinian prisoners from the Islamic Jihad movement," declares another. Up a steep alley covered in mule droppings, two teenage bodyguards with matching black T-shirts and pistols in their belts lead me to the hideout of the local cell commander. "Welcome," said Ghaleb Ismail Shaafi, a slight 20-year-old with a baby face and an overbite. He ushers me into a small living room and gestures for me to sit on a battered sofa. Posters of martyred leaders of the movement, all of them killed during Israeli military incursions, cover the walls. "We are not part of the tehdiya," he tells me, referring to the state of calm that has existed for the past year between Israel and Hamas, the ruling authority of the West Bank and Gaza. "As long as Israel keeps attacking us, we will attack them back." Hamas may have suspended its operations against Israel and refocused its efforts on governance. But for the bloodied remnants of Islamic Jihad, the Al Aqsa intifada never ended. Despite the near-completion of the separation barrier between Israel and the West Bank, and the jailing and killing of thousands of militants in the last four years, the group has refused to join the Hamas ceasefire, and teenage martyrs continue to sneak across the Green Line. The group has carried out seven suicide bombings in the past year, including an April 17 attack on a Tel Aviv schwarma stand that killed nine Israelis. Islamic Jihad's terror campaign has deepened the sense of crisis inside the Palestinian territories, which have lost billions of dollars in Western aid since Hamas came to power. Nominally responsible for policing their former partners in terror, Hamas officials have instead applauded the bombings. Their statements have fueled suspicions that Hamas is using Islamic Jihad as a surrogate for killing Israelis, and made it even more unlikely that the international community will rescue the bankrupt government. Security forces and other civil servants have gone unpaid for two months; internal checkpoints, blockades, and Israeli raids in the West Bank continue. And that may explain why, despite Hamas's continued rhetorical support, the general public has begun to swing against Islamic Jihad and its suicide bombers. Ibrahim Ajami says that he tried to give his son, Suheib, a normal life. In the waning days of the intifada, with Hamas in power and the tehdiya in place, Ajami believed that the lure of militancy had faded for the young people of Attil, the Palestinian village where he lives. Ajami, a blacksmith, encouraged his son to finish his studies at the local high school and the teenager seemed headed for a career as a nurse. But Luay Al Sadi, a veteran militant from Attil, was quietly recruiting village teenagers into an Islamic Jihad cell. On July 14, 2005, an 18-year-old classmate of Suheib's named Ahmed Sameh strapped on a suicide belt, penetrated the security barrier, and blew himself in Netanya, killing five Israelis. "Suheib could not believe that Ahmed would do such a thing," his father told me. "He said, 'Is he crazy? What is the reason? What happened to him?'" But shortly afterward, Suheib began spending evenings and Friday afternoons with the 18- and 19-year-old recruits of Islamic Jihad. "I warned him, this track you are following is a bad track, it will lead to bad things," Ajami said. In October, Luay Al Sadi was killed in the Tulkarem refugee camp by Israeli commandos dressed as Arab women. "Suheib's reaction was severe," his father said. Two months later, he approached a checkpoint leading from Tulkarem to Israel. His behavior aroused the troops' suspicion. When they asked him to remove his shirt, he blew himself up, killing two Palestinian bystanders and an Israeli soldier. Four years ago, at the height of the intifada, 75 percent of the Palestinian population supported suicide bombings, according to polls, and the perpetrators were celebrated in songs and videos that played constantly on Palestinian television. But the mood is different now. Suheib Ajami received the obligatory martyr's funeral in Attil, and local dignitaries paid homage at the gravesite, but there was little glamour attached to his death. But Ajami says that many parents have pointed to the fates of Suheib and his classmate as cautionary tales. "They are telling their kids that belonging to an armed group guarantees a bad end," he told me. "There are two options, prison or death." What's more, many Palestinians have begun to blame Islamic Jihad for their sorry living conditions. "For normal people, Islamic Jihad is not popular," Ajami told me. "My neighbors tell me, 'Look at our lives now, because of your son.'" The Israeli Defense Forces are pursuing the remnants of Islamic Jihad relentlessly, and sometimes killing civilians in the process. Earlier this month, troops shot dead a 41-year-old woman and injured her two daughters during a gun battle with a top militant in a house in Tulkarem. But the onslaught continues. Eighty-two bombers, most of them from Islamic Jihad, have tried to pass through breaches in the Jerusalem barrer since January, according to Israel's State Attorney's Office, including the 16-year-old who blew himself up at the schwarma stand in Tel Aviv last month. The group's continuing infiltrations have made completion of the wall surrounding Jerusalem one of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's priorities. Ghaled Ismail Shaafi, the Tulkarem refugee camp commander, says, "We will always find ways of getting through." But Shaafi's own mobility seems to have diminished recently. After years of running from Israeli troops, the 20-year-old has wound up hiding out at the home of his parents. They are unenthusiastic about providing him with a sanctuary. "I tried twice to give him up to the Israeli soldiers, but he ran away each time," Shaafi's mother told me, as her son looked on with a stony expression. "I say, 'All of your friends have been killed or arrested. Your turn is next.' He says, 'I cannot change my ways.'" The few Islamic Jihad militants left seem to know that they're fighting a hopeless war. A high-school dropout who joined Islamic Jihad when he was 15, at the start of the Al Aqsa intifada, Shaafi has attended "hundreds of funerals" in the past few years, he told me. Of his four immediate predecessors, two were shot dead by Israeli commandos; two languish in Israeli prisons. The entire generation of Islamic Jihad members over the age of 25 in the camp has been wiped out. Shaafi and his cell of teenage fighters spend their days searching for guns and ammunition, their nights taking potshots at Israeli troops and running from hideout to hideout. "We have to stay as thorns in the Israelis' throats," he said, sipping tea and chain smoking cigarettes as his bodyguards looked on. Besides, he said, "After five years of this, we don't know how to lead a normal life." Posted by: ryuge 2006-05-17 |
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