Introduction

Imagine a world where a boy's dreams dictate the behavior of warriors in battle ; where a young couple's only release from forbidden love is death; where a suicide bomber survives only to become fiercely pro-American. This is the world of Terrorists in Love.

A former federal prosecutor and congressional investigator, Ken Ballen spent five years as a pollster and a researcher with rare access—via local government officials, journalists, and clerics—interviewing more than a hundred Islamic radicals, asking them searching questions about their inner lives, deepest faith, and what it was that ultimately drove them to jihad. Intimate and enlightening, Terrorists in Love opens a fresh window into the realm of violent extremism as Ballen profiles six of these men—from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia—revealing a universe of militancy so strange that it seems suffused with magical realism.

---

Amazon Exclusive: Ken Ballen on Terrorists in Love

Terrorists in Love defies conventional thinking. Even though I had studied radicals and criminals for most of my career, when I went behind the lines, and got to know some of today's terrorists closely, everything I thought I knew was shattered. That's why I decided to write this book.

I started out as a federal prosecutor, a job in which I convicted international terrorists and then I became a Congressional investigator. From nearly two decades in this line of work, I learned a simple truth: you can really only find out about people by talking to them?in depth and at length.

So I started a non-profit organization to learn what makes people support extremism and spent five years researching and interviewing more than a hundred extremists?-in Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and throughout the Muslim world.

And what I found surprised even me. From frustrated love to mystical visions, from envy of Americans to blind hatred, here is a world so different from our own, it begs for understanding?-and a different response than what our policy makers have given so far.

I got to know Taliban soldiers, Al Qaeda suicide bombers and extremist leaders, even though I'm American and Jewish. I learned what no amount of torture or confinement of terrorists could ever tell us: what lay within their hearts. These straightforward lessons will help give us all a clearer path to defeat terrorism in our times-?and build better understanding across religions and cultures. --Ken Ballen

---

Editorial Review

No editorial review at this time.

Excerpt

1

AHMAD’S TRIP TO HEAVEN AND BACK

CNN LED the news on Christmas Day 2004:

On the heels of a visit to Iraq by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a fuel truck driven by a suicide bomber exploded Friday in western Baghdad….

At least eight people were killed and 20 others wounded by the explosion…. Fifteen people, including women and children, were in critical condition, and many had suffered severe burns, hospital officials said….

Baghdad police said they were looking for another fuel truck in the area and a BMW that they believe is associated with the attack.

My inside story of the suicide bomber responsible for this attack actually began in Washington, D.C. Through contacts in the media and a senior American intelligence official, in the spring of 2008 I met one of the top officials of the Saudi Arabian government responsible for counterterrorism. The high-ranking Saudi Ministry of Interior official became my friend. It helped that he was looking to buy a condo in D.C. and his son wanted to attend an American graduate school—both areas where I guided him through foreign shoals. The favor was returned inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

But my unprecedented access inside Saudi Arabia was not only the result of a personal trust between me and the Saudi official; I also benefited from timing—and luck. From 2008 through 2010, the Saudi Ministry of Interior decided to open its jihadi prison rehabilitation program to a few select outsiders. The Ministry of Interior is the most powerful government agency in Saudi Arabia, responsible for counterterrorism and internal security.

Saudi Arabia, in many ways, is the country most important to the future of Islam. Home of the faith’s holiest places, it is the world’s richest kingdom, with a quarter of the earth’s oil reserves and wealth highly concentrated in the royal family and few others. Saudi Arabia is also the home of a strict, fundamentalist interpretation of Islam founded by Muhammad al-Wahhab, which is the source of Al Qaeda’s ideology. Saudi citizens continue to be the principal financial supporters of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other radical Islamist groups. However, since 2003, when Al Qaeda began attacks inside the country, the government has led an official campaign against the radicals, or jihadis, as they call themselves. Still, Saudi Arabia is one of the most closed societies in the world, largely inscrutable to outsiders.

As president of the nonprofit research institute Terror Free Tomorrow, I interviewed more than a hundred terrorists and Muslim radicals throughout the world to understand what motivates them. In Saudi Arabia, over many months, I had the unique opportunity to interview at length forty-three Saudi jihadi militants who had fought inside Iraq and Afghanistan. I conducted the kind of in-depth, one-on-one interrogations that were a part of my professional background as a federal prosecutor and congressional investigator. Some people’s accounts were not credible. Other radicals’ activities offered little in the way of implications for future policy, while many were not insightful or self-aware. Yet, by persevering, I came to uncover a world “behind the veil.”

My interviews in Saudi Arabia began during the summer of 2008. In a convoy of Ministry of Interior (MOI) black GMC Yukons, with as much security as afforded the vice president of the United States in Washington, D.C., we sped to the euphemistically named “Care Center”—the special Saudi prison for rehabilitating jihadi militants. When I say sped, I mean it literally. We reached speeds of 100 mph or more on Riyadh’s American-designed superhighways, which reminded me of “the 10” approaching Santa Monica, only without the Pacific on the horizon.

As we left modern Riyadh, the Saudi capital of nearly five million (which also reminded me of Century City with its isolated gleaming skyscrapers surrounded by neighborhoods of strip malls), I looked out at the bright brown terrain in search of Arabian life in the patches of desert that were now cropping up. Instead, I saw all manner of ATVs and 4×4s spewing exhaust and dust, with people camping next to their Land Rovers, open flames, and barbecue grills, and the ubiquitous ice cream vans that continually trolled the sands.

We sped through the “resort” northeast of Riyadh, Al Thumama, with its dusty amusement parks, finally passing Al Fantazi Land on the right. It’s Riyadh’s great amusement park, a Disneyland, my MOI driver said, where Islam reigned.

While I was staring at Fantasy Land, the latest-model Yukon, which still had the factory plastic shrink wrap over its leather seats, took a sudden, jarring right off the highway. Past the run-down Lebanese Fruits Restaurant, over dirt roads and sand-colored, walled-off homes, we pulled up to an unmarked security gate.

The guard waved us in before we drove through another gate, stopping at a grassy dead end and finally a sign: MINISTRY OF INTERIOR, DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC RELATIONS, THE CARE CENTER. For two years, this would be my “home from home,” as the prison warden, MOI Major General Yousef Mansour, told me. The Care Center prison for reforming jihadi terrorists offered psychological counseling, antidepressant medication, religious re-education, art therapy, vocational training, water sports—some dubbed it the “Betty Ford Jihadi Clinic.” (I had mentioned to my high-ranking MOI friend the fact that the prison was part of the ministry’s “Department of Public Relations” might give Americans the wrong message, and I noticed on subsequent visits that the center was renamed and the original sign had been changed to remove “Public Relations.”)

Of the forty-three jihadi inmates (“beneficiaries”) I interviewed, Ahmad al-Shayea, nicknamed “Bernie,” had to be the most striking, his entire body bearing the scars of the first suicide bomber in Iraq who had survived his attack. His face was covered with red pustules. His nose curved to a strange hooked point, like a ski jump. The fingers on his right hand ended in a stump that resembled melted candle wax, while his left-hand fingers were twisted like the roots of a miswak stick jihadis regularly chew in imitation of the Prophet Muhammad (and that tastes exactly like the bitter herbs from a Passover Seder). His fingernails were little more than yellowed brown stumps, the color of toes infected with athlete’s foot.

Sitting in the prison faux-tented reception area, or majlis, with the air-conditioning going full throttle, I was accompanied by MOI Lieutenant Majid, my favorite interpreter, who spoke in 1980s American slang (he’d grown up in Orlando, Florida), and “Dr. Ali,” Ahmad’s prison psychologist, a phenomenal host, with whom I shared many long dinners and who had received his doctorate in psychology from the University of Edinburgh. We were also accompanied by the usual retinue of Pakistani and Bangladeshi servants, with the endless small cups of gahwa (Arabian green coffee), highly sweetened black tea, and sticky dates. The occasional MOI security guards never had the patience to sit through more than thirty minutes at a time of our six-to-eight-hour-long interview sessions.

Ahmad was shy and modest. It took much prompting from me, Lieutenant Majid, and most of all Dr. Ali, who would prod Ahmad with what they had discussed in their therapy sessions. As is fitting for a student of both Sigmund Freud and the Holy Qur’an, Dr. Ali helped Ahmad begin his singular life story as a failed suicide bomber with a dream—even if a dream from Abu Ghraib.

BURNED BEYOND RECOGNITION, his skin charred and dark, Ahmad al-Shayea could dream of only one thing: dates. Not the light tan Sukkary dates his family had once so proudly grown in the center of Saudi Arabia—“the best dates in all Buraydah,” his grandfather always bragged. Ahmad couldn’t stop dreaming of the rival dates from the distant eastern province of Saudi Arabia: the bitter, black Khlas dates that Grandfather scorned.

The Holy Qur’an told Ahmad that as a martyred fighter in the way of jihad, he would be eternally nourished in Paradise by “date palms.” Yet instead of the sweetest Sukkary that Grandfather said would be the food of Heaven, his veins were hooked to salty water. Instead of wearing “robes of silk” and reclining on “jeweled couches,” as the Holy Book pledged, Ahmad lay on a stiff white bed. Missing too were “the dark-eyed, full-breasted virgins, chaste as pearls” offered by Allah the Most High to any martyr. He hadn’t reunited with his family as promised either—his younger brother, cherished grandfather, beloved mother. He was alone.

Ahmad had been “thrown into the fire of Hell,” as the Holy Qur’an warned all sinners. He’d come to Iraq to fight the Americans on Noble Jihad. But his suicide mission had ended instead at Abu Ghraib.

And all Ahmad could dream of was the darkest Khlas dates.

FOOD HAD ALWAYS foretold the fate of Ahmad al-Shayea’s family, as far back as anyone could remember. More than two centuries before, with literally no food to eat because of unending drought, the family had left Ha’il in the north to go to Buraydah, an oasis capital of Al Qassim in the heart of Arabia.

Then it was all about the dates.

The family became date farmers and traders, growing mostly Sukkary, unique to Al Qassim. From Buraydah, the “Date Capital of Saudi Arabia,” they cultivated some of the best Sukkary, the most sought-after dates in Arabia, particularly prized during Ramadan. And for Ahmad’s grandfather Abdurrahman al-Shayea, his Sukkary had no equal in sweetness of taste, smoothness of yellow meat and amber skin. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. The title of the book is Terrorists in Love. How does love—or the lack of love—play a role in each of these stories? Why do you think Ballen gave the book this title? Do you think it the best title to encompass the stories?

2. Dreams play an important role in Ballen’s accounts of these six very different individuals. Discuss the “true night dreams” that were most salient (whether Malik the seer’s, Kamal’s utopian future, or even Ballen’s own table-turning dream with Shaheed). How important are dreams and mystical jinn to the radical movement?

3. Compare the different upbringings of the people profiled. Consider Ahmad’s differing relationships with his father, mother, and grandfather; Abby’s fast love with Maryam, and Kamal’s privileged bloodline, in your response. What role does childhood play in forming these current and reformed terrorists? In your opinion, do formative moments of youth account for their commitment to jihad?

4. After reading these stories, how do you interpret radical jihad as it relates to orthodox Muslim practice? How are terrorist groups, like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, distorting the Quran’s message, or following it?

5. Zeddy cites his mission to die for God as rooted in a “logic of emotion” (p. 125). How does emotion affect the six radicals’ initial pledge to terror?

6. Of Malik, Mullah Omar’s personal seer, Ballen writes: “He just wanted to do God’s work. He had fought for jihad too but kept wondering who the real enemies of God were now” (p. 109). Why do you think his interactions with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) officers made him feel differently about his mission?

7. Discuss the various ways in which these radicals’ opinions about holy war and terror changed over time. Can you attribute their transformed attitudes to one specific incident or moment, like a new interpretation of the Quran or a realization of equality and compassion? Why or why not?

8. Some of the interviewees are murderers and terrorists. How do their accounts change your view of the Muslim radical? Did you feel any sympathy or compassion for any of the six individuals profiled? Can you “forgive” them, knowing what you now do about their struggles and paths? Why or why not?

9. Of Kamal, Ballen writes: “He now began to see that Al Qaeda’s jihad fell short. Despite bin Laden’s sacrifices, his jihad wasn’t about finding the difficult struggle to better himself and others before God. Instead, Al Qaeda offered too much of a quick-and-easy path, a simple shortcut with ready-made answers that can lure someone from the long and hard true jihad of God.” After reading Terrorists in Love, do you think Kamal’s view is correct? Why or why not?

10. How have these stories of ISI corruption influenced your view of Pakistan? Consider the statement made on page 79 in your response: “Besides Saudi Arabia, Pakistan is the most important country to the future of religious extremism in the Muslim world.” Do you feel, as Zeddy suggests, that America is funding both sides of the war on terror?

11. The author poses the following question in the Afterword: “Without U.S. troops in Iraq, would Ahmad ever gone off to fight? (p. 295).” Discuss the role of American policy in fomenting radicalism as it relates to the radicals Ballen profiles in Terrorists in Love.

12. “Hope is as real as the hateful ideology of the terrorists” (p. 297). Do you agree? Explain your answer.

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Terrorists in Love web site

Book Club Recommendations

Recommended to book clubs by 0 of 0 members.

Member Reviews

There are no user reviews at this time.
Rate this book