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didn’t like them.
    Didar told me his upbringing had not been particularly religious. Like most Kurds he went to the mosque to pray several times a week and kept the fast at Ramadan but little else. Nor had he been involved in politics, though he said he felt strongly that things were not right with the world from his early teens. His education, he said, was unlikely to get him a decent job. He played football a lot but had few male friends and no girlfriends. When he left school in 1999, without employment, he ‘didn’t have much to do so started going to the mosque a lot’. Soon he was spending every evening there and was invited to join a Qur’anic study group. He enjoyed the meetings and liked being with his new friends. Didar’s teacher at the mosque, a man about twice his age, gave him books and pamphlets to read. Some were Wahhabi tracts published with subsidies from the Saudi Arabian government. Others were reprints of Abdallah Azzam’s works. His teacher explained Azzam’s doctrine that jihad was the duty of every Muslim man and told him that men like Osama bin Laden were true Muslims whose examples should be followed. He introduced Didar toother young men with similar ideas. Didar felt welcome and was happy with his new group of friends. ‘We felt we could change things. We could make everything come right in our homeland. What Osama and my teacher said was true. If everybody did what it said in the Qu’ran then everything would be OK. It was only the atheists in government who were stopping that and their supporters among the Jews and the Crusaders. We had to fight them all,’ Didar told me. He and one of his new friends, Hisham, were soon talking about the new party they would form that would be part of al-Qaeda. ‘We would be warriors and strong and everyone would be proud of us,’ Didar said.
    In November 2001 Didar was told by his teacher that a group called Ansar ul Islam had announced a jihad in Kurdistan. He had not heard of the organization before. ‘I was very excited. I wanted to be a part of it very much,’ he told me. The two men took a bus across the mountains to Sulaimaniya and then another bus out towards Halabjah. As they neared the city they got off and picked up a battered local taxi up into the hills to the headquarters of the group.
    Ansar ul Islam’s base, in a series of interlinked valleys and mountains just outside Halabjah, was surrounded on three sides by the PUK’s peshmerga. On the fourth side was the Iranian border. Around forty Arabs had recently arrived. There were around 500 Kurds.
    The first man Didar met was Abu Abdullah al-Shami, a Kurd who had spent most of the 1990s in Afghanistan before returning to Kurdistan a few months previously. Another Kurd who had spent time in the Afghan camps was running the training of new recruits and for the next three months Didar was instructed in basic infantry tactics, explosives, urban warfare and assassinations. The training followed the syllabus that had been taught to Ansar ul Islam’s representatives who had made it to Afghanistan in the previous year. On one of the walls of their dormitories, Didar said, was a rough mural of bin Laden standing above a burning World Trade Center with a Kalashnikov in his hand. Every morning the recruits would rise for morning prayers and then run until the sun came over the horizon. They spent the rest of the day training, in lectures or reading the Qu’ran. The idea of ishtishahd , or ‘martyrdom operations’ was first raised by the Arab instructors, but it was Didar’s friend, Hisham, the twenty-two-year-oldwho he had met in the mosque at Arbil, who starting talking about suicide seriously.
    ‘Hisham said we should do it together. He quoted all the verses of the Qu’ran and repeated the prophet’s teaching on ishtishad and every day we talked about it. Especially after two of our group were martyred when they attacked the [PUK forces] in Halabjah. I decided that I wanted to do this