Is This Your First War? Read online

  But Zarqawi’s bitter war against democracy never materialized. More than 200,000 demonstrators filled Amman, Jordan, to condemn him in 2005, after al-Qaeda in Iraq bombed a wedding party in that city. And in Egypt in 2011, even larger crowds forced out Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, accomplishing peacefully in a few weeks what religious extremists failed to do in decades of terror and bloodshed. It was a stunning defeat of everything bin Laden stood for. Shortly after Mubarak stepped down, Egyptian blogger Mostafa Hussein told me a transition to democracy in Egypt would make al-Qaeda “irrelevant.” Empowered citizens, he said, won’t look to extremist groups “because there is no reason to join them when you can speak loudly, and tell people your ideas.”

  There is an awakening that is very different than what had been proclaimed by bin Laden. And bin Laden himself must have known this as he watched popular uprisings sweep the region from a safe house in Pakistan. He was almost certainly protected by elements in the army or security services of a nuclear-armed nation, and yet he was still isolated and ignored by most of the Muslims he sought to inspire, when American special forces stormed his compound in May 2011 and shot him dead.

  None of this means the Muslim Middle East will shortly and easily democratize. Dictatorships are proving to be murderously stubborn. Not all the forces hoping to reform the region are liberal. Al-Qaeda’s most violent and radical version of Islamism may have few adherents, but less extreme strains of political Islam have many. Indeed, in all the countries swept by the 2011 Arab Spring, Islamists have tried to fill the vacuum created by toppled dictators. Other ideologies in the region, such as ethnic and religious nationalism, do not typically lend themselves to peace and political pluralism. And most of the Middle East and Central Asia suffers from appallingly low levels of employment, literacy, women’s emancipation, and wealth. These factors, which are also explored in the pages that follow, typically don’t push democratic development. But they are not the only ones in the mix. Liberals and democrats, long suppressed and still embattled, will also play a consequential role in the region’s future.

  The book’s title refers to the “Islamic world.” It is a flawed term. There are millions of Christians and Jews living in the countries I’ve described here, and millions of Muslims living in countries that aren’t mentioned. And though the widely used Arabic word ummah refers to the community or nation of believers, there is no unified and homogeneous collection of Muslim communities, any more than there is a Christian one. Muslims in, say, India have more in common with their Hindu compatriots than they do with the Muslims of Albania or Morocco. And yet Islam is the common thread that runs through the places covered in this book, even if it does not bind them.

  One

  Before the Storm

  The elderly Kyrgyz woman moved quickly when Chinese military trucks pulled up outside her hut on the shores of the icy Lake Karakul high in the mountains of northwestern China.

  She was cooking lagman, a Central Asian dish of noodles and fried mutton, over an iron stove fuelled by sheep dung, while I sat against the wall of the hut and watched her. The woman had had a deeply lined face swathed in white cloth and wore several dresses and sweaters. She was making the noodles from scratch — leaning over a plastic tub and vigorously kneading flour and water into a dough ball, which she would then drag along the sides of the tub to pick up loose flour and bits of dough before kneeling over the tub to knead the dough again. Then she began rolling and stretching the dough, folding the lengthening and multiplying strands over and over each other each other until they were draped between her two hands like a child’s string game of cat’s cradle. The sheep dung in the stove burned hot but too quickly, and the woman would periodically pause in her food preparation to throw more dried patties into the stove. She’d open the door, toss them in, and blow on the fire. Its glow would illuminate her smudged and reddened cheeks and eyes that seemed permanently squinting, and then the door would close and her face would recede a little into the darkness.

  It was difficult to see her too clearly. The air in the hut was smoky and dark, illuminated only by two candles and what little light filtered in through the greasy plastic sheeting affixed to the window. The hut’s walls were piled stones held together with rough plaster, dirt, and moss. The roof consisted of slender logs, which must have been carried in from valleys elsewhere, as there were no trees visible for miles, and woven grass mats. Patties of sheep dung were piled on top to dry out. The hut had two rooms. One, where we were sitting, was for people. Its floors and walls were covered with rough wool carpets in the simple designs and bold, primary colours typical of Kyrgyz weavers. The room next to it served as a stable. The woman and her family were nomads, and this was their summer home. Soon winter would come and they would be moving to a less punishing environment. Dusk was falling and the temperature was dropping rapidly to below zero.

  An hour or so earlier, my travelling companion Adam Phillips and I had arrived at the shore of the lake and were met by the woman’s grandson, who spoke basic English and offered to let us stay in his family’s hut for a few dollars. Adam and I had known each other since we were ten years old. We had competed against each other to earn top marks in Latin during high school, and later lived together at university. We had been making our way across northern China for the previous month and hoped to cross the Karakoram Mountains into Pakistan to explore its remote northern and Tribal Areas. This was in October 2000, and what little I or most anyone in the West knew about the region was tinged with romance rather than anything sinister. The route into Pakistan from China was once a branch of the Silk Road trading route and was then the setting for covert jousting between spies of the of the British and Russian empires during the nineteenth century. Some of the mountain valleys in northern Pakistan had only been open to the outside world for a couple of decades, which is why we were there. The region seemed about as far from our homes as it was possible to get. I had been working and travelling for a couple of years since graduating university and would be starting a job in a few months. Adam had rough plans to go back to school. We were both in our mid-twenties and wanted to get off the beaten track before steady employment dragged us back on.

  Lake Karakul, northwestern China.

  I didn’t give the trucks much thought when I heard them rattle and rumble down the nearby road, but the old woman froze. When the trucks stopped, she dropped her noodles, blew out one of the candles, and tossed my backpack, which weighed forty pounds, into the corner of the room and threw some rugs on top of it. By now I had caught on and blew out the second candle. In the darkness I could still see her ushering me into the corner where she had thrown my bag. I curled up against the wall while she dragged several more rugs on top of me, filling my nose with dust and the pungent smell of wool. I lay there breathing heavily and trying to pull an exposed foot under the cover of the rugs when I heard the door being forced open and loud Chinese voices flooding the room. Adam was out walking near the lake. I hoped that if he saw the truck, he had the sense to stay away.

  From underneath the rugs, I could glimpse the packed earth floor of the hut. I saw boots and a flashlight beam sweep the room. I heard the soldiers and the old woman arguing back and forth. The soldiers rummaged among the rugs, pots, and harnesses and came within inches of finding me but didn’t. I heard them leave the room, so I relaxed a bit, only to hear the hut’s door slam open a few minutes later. More footsteps, more lights. Then they left for good, heavy metal music bizarrely blaring from the truck’s stereo as they drove away.

  I didn’t move until the old woman and other family members dug me out, all smiles and apologies.

  “Army?” I asked.

  “Ahh.” The old woman nodded.

  “Stay in tents, okay. Stay in Kyrgyz village, not okay,” said her grandson.

  China’s central government has always had an uneasy relationship with the country’s ethnic minorities — especially the mainly Muslim, Persian Tajiks, or Turkic, Uighurs, Kyrgyz, Tajik
s, and Kazakhs of China’s vast, resource-rich but scarcely settled Xinjiang region, whom they suspect of wishing to separate or “split” from the rest of China. We had spent the previous week in Kashgar, a crossroads city on the old Silk Road. It still functions as a trading post. The city’s population swells by tens of thousands every Sunday as Central Asian merchants gather in a market outside the city centre to sell everything from spices, to horses, to ornate dowry chests. Strict ethnic segregation was evident in the city. The Uighurs lived in mud-brick houses with few facilities; the Han lived and worked in the concrete downtown. Uighurs staffed the shops and street-side market stalls, pushed around wooden wheelbarrows full of cement and other building materials, or hung around the mosque. Virtually every soldier, police officer, or city administrator was Han Chinese.

  Muslims in Xinjiang rebelled against Chinese rule during the 1930s and declared an Independent Republic of East Turkestan a decade later. The new state didn’t last and was absorbed by the People’s Republic of China. But few Uighurs are that happy with the arrangement. Riots and uprisings in the decades since have resulted in dozens of deaths. In 2008 two Uighurs attacked Chinese border police in Kashgar, killing at least sixteen. The next year in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, riots and clashes between Uighurs and Han Chinese left more than 150 dead.

  The Uighur rebellions, sporadic as they are, are fuelled mostly by ethnic nationalism, resentment toward the influx of Han Chinese into Xinjiang, and anger over real and perceived ethnic discrimination. But Chinese authorities are keen to paint any Uighur opposition to Chinese rule as Islamic terrorism. They point to Chinese Uighurs who were captured in Afghanistan and later jailed at Guantanamo Bay. The Chinese case appeared strengthened in 2009, when al-Qaeda released a video in which senior member Abu Yahya al Libi urged Chinese Uighurs to “prepare for jihad in the name of God” and drive the Han Chinese from Xinjiang. There’s little evidence that this message resonates among China’s Turkic minorities, but their anger is very real. Probing where it might lead is difficult because of the restrictions China places on foreign reporters working in the area.

  Even young backpackers were discouraged from interacting with the Muslims of Xinjiang when Adam and I passed through. Chinese authorities didn’t mind tourists paying to sit down and watch colourful ethnic folk dances at state-approved singing and dancing shows, but they didn’t want foreigners to talk to anyone — let alone sleep in their summer homes. Apparently there was some sort of hotel a few miles down the road where those heading for border with Pakistan were supposed to stay. Instead, Adam and I spent a long evening drinking tea in the smoky hut. Language barriers made communicating in any detail difficult. But several children in the family got a big kick out of pretending to be me, cowering under rugs in the corner while Chinese soldiers peered into the darkness.

  In the morning we hiked around Karakul and into the foothills below two massive Pamir mountains that rose above the lake. Yaks and Bactrian camels grazed around us. The view was stunning, but Adam’s Chinese visa was due to expire, and we were anxious to move on. We shouldered our bags and started trudging south along the road. Karakul disappeared behind us on our left, and the teeth-like mountains that marked the border with Tajikistan rose above us on our right. At a truck stop a Chinese driver offered us a lift to the last major town before the Pakistani border for $400. “We’ll give you twenty-five,” Adam said. The driver grabbed his crotch and drove off.

  Two Kyrgyz men in a jeep with no windows then pulled up. Their black hair appeared brown in places because of the dust coating it, and they wore traditional Kyrgyz felt hats. They agreed to take us for about $40. Neither Adam nor I smoked but we had brought American cigarettes as icebreakers. We passed these around along with a bag of sunflower seeds the Kyrgyz had with them. In addition to window glass, the jeep was missing most of its dashboard and part of the floor. We were already 3,700 metres above sea level when we left Karakul and now the road switched back and forth on itself as we climbed above the snow line. There were no longer any animals grazing in the mountain fields beside us, only rock and ice. The temperature plummeted further as dusk fell. We drank the tea that was left in our water bottles before it froze. We rolled past a deserted military checkpoint. A few minutes later, with daylight gone and a full moon rising above the mountains, we ran out of gas.

  The driver disappeared into the night with a jerry can. He returned an hour or so later from some unseen nearby village with gasoline and a plastic tube, which he used to suck fuel out of the jerry can before spitting onto the ground and then plunging the tube into the vehicle’s gas tank so gravity could fill it up. A few cranks of the engine and we were on our way, with backslaps and Marlboros all around. The next checkpoint wasn’t abandoned. Chinese soldiers with flashlights and submachine guns waved us to a stop and berated the driver, pausing between yells to point at Adam and me in the back seat. One climbed into the car with us as we drove into Tashkurgan, the last major town before the border. Adam and I got out and slipped the Kyrgyz in the passenger seat the remaining money we owed him in the midst of a shouting match between the driver and the Chinese soldier. We checked into a rundown hotel filled with Pakistani traders and smugglers and caught a few hours of sleep.

  More hitchhiking seemed like a bad idea, so in the morning we boarded a bus bound for the border. It was a rough road, but the driver was considerate enough to stop on the Chinese side so the Pakistani traders could finish the alcohol they were drinking and dispose of the bottles before crossing into officially dry Pakistan. The actual frontier was snow-swept and desolate. At almost 4,700 metres, the Khunjerab Pass is the highest paved border crossing in the world. We crossed safely and began a stomach-churning drive down the other side of the mountain into Pakistan. The air got warmer as we descended back and forth into a steep-walled mountain gorge. Marco Polo sheep bounded away from the bus, and rocks occasionally shot down the mountain over our heads. At one semi-active landslide, the bus stopped and the driver ordered all the passengers off the bus.

  “What happens now?” I asked one of the Pakistani traders who stood beside me as we eyed the expanse of rubble strewn road in front of us. Small stones falling from much higher on the mountain careened off the road and went ricocheting into the valley below. The road was extremely narrow and had no barrier before a dizzying drop of several hundred feet.

  “We run.”

  “What? Are you serious? Why don’t we stay in the bus? At least it has a roof.”

  The Pakistani was trying to roll loose tobacco into a cigarette paper. The first few passengers bolted across the landslide zone.

  “If a large rock hits the bus while everybody is on it, it could be a disaster,” he said. “If the bus goes over the cliff with just the driver, it’s not such a big deal.”

  Another passenger sprinted across. He was almost decapitated by a basketball-sized boulder that came rocketing down the mountain as if it had been thrown by a giant somewhere above the clouds. The trader’s fingers were shaking, spilling tobacco on the ground.

  “Damn it,” he muttered, and crumpled the paper in a wad before tossing it away. The swirling wind blew it off the edge of the cliff. The Pakistani took a deep breath and took off, his woollen blanket billowing behind him like a sail. I looked up and ran after him, Adam just behind me.

  When all the passengers had made it across, the bus followed. The road was full of smashed rocks that the driver had to avoid or roll over. The bus teetered, the many bells and trinkets affixed to its painted sides tinkling as it swayed. Through the bus’s dirty windshield I could see the driver’s lips moving quickly. He made it, climbed out of the bus to smoke a cigarette, and then we were on our way. Groves of poplar trees soon appeared on terraced fields below us, next to the silty headwaters of the Hunza River that gushed and roared through the bottom of the valley. Their yellowing leaves picked up the light from the setting sun and seemed to glow.

  The next few weeks still appear in my mind’s eye like scenes from
a pleasant dream. We watched pickup polo matches played on dusty fields surrounded by garbage and stray chickens. The players charged up and down the field with the reckless abandon of street hockey players, and spectators celebrated each goal with shouts and musical flourishes on drums and clarinets.

  Our arrival in the alpine village of Karimabad coincided with a visit by the Aga Khan, Karim al-Hussayni, Imam of the Ismaili Muslims. Locals celebrated the occasion by hauling tires up mountains and, when night fell, lighting them on fire and rolling them off cliffs into the valleys below. We watched the spectacle from the roof of our guesthouse, eating skewers of yak meat that teenagers cooked and sold on the side of road, fanning the coals in their makeshift barbeques with scraps of cardboard. It looked like the mountain was spewing lava.

  We hiked through and sometimes dangerously above spectacular mountain valleys. Ten-year-old boys implored us to hire them as guides. “It is very dangerous. Without my help, you will surely die,” one solemnly informed us. We slept rough but enjoyed warm hospitality almost everywhere. Strangers fed us, invited us into their homes, and pushed gifts into our hands as we left them. Outside Passu, a small village nestled between glaciers, a jeep decorated with streamers and ribbons pulled around a bend in the road with seven young men piled inside, or clinging, somehow, to its bumpers and frame. It was late in the day, and while the valley through which we walked was shadowed, above us the jagged mountain peaks shone with reflected pink sunlight.

  A polo game in Gilgit, Pakistan.

  A bridge over the Hunza River in northern Pakistan.

  “Where are you going?” the driver shouted.

  “Passu,” I told him.