Seeking Salvation In City of Insurgents

Abu Thar rested Sunday. He didn't plan to return to Yemen, where his wife and six children live. "The only place I am going from here," he said, "is heaven." (Ghaith Abdul-ahad -- Getty Images)

A year passed. Abu Thar turned 30, and might never have tried to reach Iraq again but for the photographs that emerged of U.S. military police abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. Seeing the photos, his wife, also a religious student, urged him to leave everything and go to Iraq to fight jihad. She was pregnant with their sixth child.

"She told me, 'If they are doing this to the men, imagine what is happening to the women now,' " Abu Thar recalled. " 'Imagine your sisters and I being raped by the infidel American pigs.' "

He said he spent the night crying, tormented that he did not persevere earlier. In the morning he started making the rounds of friends, borrowing money to travel. From the Jordanian man, he got airline tickets to Syria. From his university, run by a senior Yemeni cleric, he got the name of a man in Aleppo, a city in northern Syria, who would arrange for him to be smuggled across the desert border into Iraq.

He said he told no one he was going. "I just told my wife. I borrowed a car from a friend, and we went out to do some shopping. She bought me two trousers and a shirt. We went then to my father's house. I told my mother, 'Forgive me if I had done anything wrong.' She said, 'Why?' I told her, 'Nothing, I just want forgiveness from you and Dad.'

"She asked me if I was going to Baghdad. I said no. She hugged me and cried."

At the memory, tears formed in Abu Thar's eyes. He wiped them with his checkered headdress and blamed the rain.

Back at his home, he had a final dinner with his wife and children, who went to bed without being told their father was leaving. "My favorite daughter came and sat in my lap and slept there. She opened her eyes and said, 'Daddy, I love you.' "

He was weeping openly now, a thin man with a thin beard under a ragged tree in a courtyard in Fallujah. "You know these memories are the work of the devil trying to soften my heart and bring me back home," he said.

He rejected going home with a passion. When a visitor told him, "We will come and see you and your family in Yemen," the anger in his reply contorted his usually smooth features. "The only place I am going from here," he snapped, "is heaven."

By the time he reached Damascus, the word from jihadi networks was that the Syrians had tightened security on the border with Iraq. For weeks, Abu Thar waited, moving from safe house to safe house -- cheap hotel rooms in Damascus, Aleppo, Hams, sometimes a mosque, or a mattress in a room above a religious school. In each place, he said, he found himself quarters with another dozen young men making their way to Iraq.

Eventually, he reached Aleppo, near the border.

There, he said, he met a young cleric who promised to help. He spent two weeks waiting in a small house filled with other jihadis. Each had a coordinator back home, usually the leader of a mosque or another prominent person who had vouched for him. Abu Thar, arriving on his own, was at first considered suspicious. That was "until they called my master in the religious school in Yemen," he said.

One night seven weeks ago, he was taken to a village on the Syrian side of the border. The border police were paid to look the other way, he said.

"They came and said, 'We are crossing today.' It was a very scary journey. We had to lay still in the desert if we heard American helicopters.