SULAYMANIYA, IRAQ

'Jihad' was not long for captured militant

By Charles M. Sennott, Globe Staff, 4/7/2003

nside a security prison in the Kurdish-controlled area of northern Iraq, the guards dragged a captured Islamic militant from Ansar-al-Islam out of his cell.

His wrists were bound behind his back with a leather strap, and spatters of blood were still visible on his shirt after he had surrendered to Kurdish fighters during a fierce US Special Forces-led offensive on the group that Washington says is linked to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.

But Adam Ayoub Ahmed hardly looked the part of a hardened international terrorist. He was a scared, 17-year-old, rail-thin recruit to the Islamic movement who scarcely had enough facial hair to constitute the beard required under Islam to be old enough to enter the "jihad," or "holy war."

He described the process of recruitment from a poor village named Takia in the rugged mountains along the Iranian border where Ansar-al-Islam once had its strongholds, and which have been reduced to rubble by US airstrikes. He described how he came to believe in the militant message thundered down from the pulpit of the mosque and how he came to take up a Kalashnikov assault rifle to join the jihad.

"We prayed together in the morning before the fighting began," Ahmed said.

"We were setting up an ambush when the airstrikes began. It was like the US missiles were chasing us everywhere we moved, coming into the mountains just above us," he said, on several occasions asking that questions be repeated because he had at least temporarily lost hearing from B-52 raids dropping 500-pound bombs in the hills around him.

If he was a fighter, he said during an interview in which he was surrounded by his captors, the fight is out of him now. He said, "I was scared. The veteran fighters sent me to the river to get water and then I looked up and saw the peshmerga," as the Kurdish fighters are known.

"I dropped the gun when I saw them. For me, the jihad was over," he said.

This story ran on page A27 of the Boston Globe on 4/7/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.