A Jihadist's Tale

Ra'ed al-Banna loved America.  During his nearly two years in the U.S., al-Banna, a lawyer by training, made a living as a factory worker, a shuttle-bus driver and a pizza tosser. He went to the World Trade Center and the Golden Gate Bridge, grew his hair long and listened to Nirvana. He told his family back in Jordan about the honesty and kindness of Americans. "They respect anybody who is sincere," he told his father. He said he had planned to marry an American woman until her parents demanded that the wedding take place in a Christian church. After a visit home in 2003, he set off again for the U.S., hoping to find a wife, have a family, settle down. "He was hoping for a job that earns a lot of money," says Talal Naser, 25, who is engaged to one of Ra'ed's sisters. "He loved life in America, compared to Arab countries. He wanted to stay there."

He never got the chance. After he was denied entry at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport for apparently falsifying details on his visa application, al-Banna's life took a turn that led him down the path of radical Islam and ultimately to join the insurgency against the U.S. in Iraq. His odyssey ended on March 3 when al-Banna's brother Ahmed received a call on his cell phone from a man identifying himself as "one of your brothers from the Arab peninsula"--the term radical Islamists use to signify the core of the Muslim world, centered on the holy city of Mecca. Al-Banna's family says that as far as they knew, Ra'ed was in Saudi Arabia working at a new job. But the voice on the other end sounded Iraqi, Ahmed says. "Congratulations," the caller told him. "Your brother has fallen a martyr."

In the two years since the invasion of Iraq, thousands of young Arabs have poured into the country to take up arms against U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies--and, in some cases, to seek martyrdom through suicide bombings, of which there have been at least 136 since May 2003. The lethality of the jihadists was highlighted on Feb. 28 when a suicide bomber detonated himself outside a health clinic in the city of Hilla, killing at least 125 people, the worst single massacre since the U.S. invasion. On March 11 the Amman daily newspaper Al-Ghad identified Ra'ed al-Banna as the attacker, in an article purporting to describe the family's wedding-like celebration of his martyrdom. The story was picked up by Arab satellite channels, provoking outrage among Iraqi Shi'ites, who have held demonstrations ever since outside the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad. The report also ignited a diplomatic feud between Jordan, which has denied that al-Banna was involved in the Hilla attack, and the interim Iraqi government, which is furious at the failure of its neighbors to stop the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq. The war of words has become so heated that both countries briefly recalled their ambassadors. "The people are fed up," says Labid Abawi, an Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister. "They don't see the Arabs as helpful. The [Hilla] incident has really exploded a lot of bad feelings."