The Jihad Next Door (2 of 3 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
The Jihad Next Door by Dina Temple-Raston. Copyright 2007 by Dina Temple-Raston.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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PROLOGUE: MUKHTAR'S BIG WEDDING (CONT'D)

MUKHTAR AL-BAKRI WAS settled under the sheets for the first time with his teenage bride just before police burst into his hotel room. He had no idea that only hours earlier his name was on the lips of officials at the highest levels of the U.S. government. The FBI and CIA had been briefing President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney regularly about al-Bakri and his friends. Bush and Cheney then gave the order that would make Mukhtar's big day memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Bahrani police officers swarmed around al-Bakri's wedding bed with their guns drawn, sights trained in his direction. They hustled him from his hotel bed, and snapped on handcuffs. He recalled the sound of his teenage bride in tears as the police bundled him down the corridor, lamenting that he never had the chance to consummate his marriage. He knew that there must be some mistake. It never occurred to him that the Bahrain commandos who arrested him had burst into the room expecting to find guns and explosives, perhaps even a suicide vest instead of a terrified young man.

A short time later, and nearly halfway around the world, other arrests followed al-Bakri's. Unmarked sedans and police cars came to quick stops in front of houses and malls and delis. One by one, police and FBI agents rounded up al-Bakri's friends and pushed them into the backseats of cruisers. Anyone watching would have said they all looked scared and baffled. To a man, they were all obedient and compliant, nodding numbly when they were advised of their rights. It took only minutes for news of the arrests to filter through the tightly knit Yemeni community. The bulletins were met instantly with shaking heads and clicking tongues. It wasn't the boys about which the residents were worried, it was the authorities. This was racial profiling, neighbors said. We know these boys. They are just like us. We watch them play soccer. We pray with them. We know their parents and their brothers and sisters and wives. If these six are suspects, then so is everyone else.

Someone said something about terrorism. Neighbors were sure that couldn't be right. These men were native-born or naturalized U.S. citizens. Four were married. Three had children. One rode a motorcycle. Another was voted "friendliest" of his graduating class at the local high school. One sold used cars. Another was a telemarketer. They were all registered Democrats. Why had the authorities singled them out?

Mukhtar al-Bakri was a twin, one half of a pair of Yemeni brothers who had lived with their family in a small, two-story, yellow and green wood frame affair on Ingham Avenue. They were part of the second largest Yemeni community in America, just a stone's throw from Buffalo, New York. The al-Bakri household was actually made up of two families: Mukhtar, his twin brother Amin, their mother and father occupied one part of the house; and his older brother, his wife, and their two children comprised the other. It was a typical arrangement. There was no pressure in this community to have the elder sons marry and go off to make their own way. Instead, the families stayed together with succeeding generations and new members--wives, babies, sisters-in-law--simply folding themselves into existing households the way they did in the old country.
Home was a place where meals were big raucous affairs with the men of the house eating in one room and the women, more traditionally, taking their meals in another. A look at the al-Bakris during the dinner hour revealed that all the men resembled each other. Mukhtar and Amin were tintypes. Standing five-feet-seven with wiry frames, they looked younger than their years. Their faces were dominated with oversized brown eyes, and they had ears that stuck out at odd angles from their heads. They carried a perpetually vulnerable look, like someone had just struck them from behind without warning.

Their father, Ali al-Bakri, was working class, a twenty-five-year employee at the Sorrento Cheese Factory off Ridge Road downtown. His story was a template for many of the men of his age in Lackawanna's First Ward. He had come to America from Yemen, hoping to find work in the steel mills and to create a better life for his family. The mills inspired such extraordinary hopes that entire clans uprooted themselves for the promise of a better life than the one behind them. The al-Bakris weren't rich, but they had what they needed. The al-Bakri sons had graduated from an American high school with decent educations, and while they didn't have steady work, exactly, they were good boys--or so their father thought.

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