The al-Qaeda foot soldier
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Asked what Americans would understand differently about the Middle East if they had seen what he had seen, John Kiriakou answers with the biographies of the captured, and calls the finding revelatory.

He prefaces it with his own standing: a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies, a master's in legislative affairs focused on Middle East foreign policy, Arabic, years living in the region, and an affection for its history, literature, poetry, food and culture, "I love all of it."

The same story, over and over

"What was revelatory to me was when we started capturing al-Qaeda fighters, not the leaders, but these kids, 18, 19, 20 years old. They all essentially told the same story, or variations on the same story."

The common elements: an isolated village in whatever country they came from, Yemen, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, mostly illiterate, no job skills, and "very poor relationships with their fathers, which struck me as very interesting. And I'll let the psychologists sort that out. I don't know what it means."

The thing that actually moved them

The element Kiriakou treats as decisive is neither theology nor politics but marriage. "They were of an age where they wanted to get married. And what father is going to want his daughter to marry a kid who can't read, can't write, can't work, and has no prospects for the future? I wouldn't want my daughter to marry a guy like that."

Into that gap came a recruiter with a price list. "The local imam went up to them and said, 'Why do you want to stay in this village? You don't want to stay in this village. You should go to Afghanistan and make jihad against the Americans, and we'll pay you $300 a month. And if you're martyred, we'll give your parents a $500 martyrdom bonus.'"

Their answer, as Kiriakou reports it, was not ideological either: "Okay. Have nothing better going on."

What follows from it

The policy conclusion he draws is economic rather than military: "what we really need to do in the Middle East is spend money on economic development, on education, and on infrastructure. And it doesn't have to be our money. It can be Emirati money or Qatari money or Saudi money."

The mechanism is occupation of a life rather than persuasion: "what they really need is economic development so that people are busy building careers and growing families, rather than looking for a place to go make jihad against the Americans."

Why they went

Kiriakou's account of the grunt level rests on the interrogations of the men taken in the Pakistan raids, who told him substantially the same story. They were illiterate, lived in isolated villages, and wanted to marry, but no father would give a daughter to a man who could not read or write and had no skills or prospects. The local imam offered a way out: go to Afghanistan and make jihad against the Americans for $300 a month, with a $500 martyrdom bonus paid to the parents if he were killed. They could not find the United States on a map, could not name its president, and had no idea what it stood for; $300 was better than nothing.

The first counterterrorist raid Kiriakou led after arriving in Pakistan in January 2002, on a house believed to be an al-Qaeda safe house, took two eighteen-year-olds from Tunisia. Both burst into tears as the door came down and one asked whether he could call his mother. Kiriakou turned to a colleague and said: "This is the fearsome al-Qaeda. This is what we've been so afraid of. These are children."

The leadership had different motives from the recruits, and in this telling they divide two ways. Osama bin Laden personally objected to the establishment of American military bases in Saudi Arabia. For many of the other al-Qaeda leaders the grievance was the staunchly pro-Israel cast of American foreign policy, and the organisation was a way of paying the United States back for what they saw as turning its back on poor Arabs.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Foreign aid
- Yemen
