'I Will Go to Do Jihad Again and Again'

It was in Miram Shah this summer, at the home of a friend, that Sher Ali said he met Zubair, an Afghan in his late twenties, who recruited him to fight in Afghanistan. Ali, who was visiting from his village, said Zubair did not initially admit to being an insurgent. "But from the way he talked, I could tell that he had been a fighter," Ali said during an hour-long interview in the intelligence headquarters.

Ali said Zubair told him and his companions that Western troops were bombing, arresting and torturing innocent Afghans. "He kept saying, 'It's our duty as Muslims to go there and help,' " said Ali.

That night, Ali recalled, Zubair turned to him and asked point-blank: "Do you want to join the jihad?"

The son of a truck driver, Ali said he had never belonged to any religious movement and had never attended any of the thousands of free religious schools that cater to impoverished Pakistani children. Instead he had dropped out of public school at 13 to take a series of odd jobs, most recently as a security guard.

During that pivotal evening in Miram Shah, Ali said he thought of his wife and 1-year-old son, who lived with his parents in a mud hut. But he also thought of how he had often seethed at the idea of U.S. troops in Muslim lands such as Afghanistan and Iraq and at the U.S. military's detention of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"It was like Zubair had poured the petrol, lit the match and set fire to this issue of jihad for me," he said.

Several days later, Ali said he boarded a public bus for the four-hour journey from Peshawar, the city nearest his village, to the northeastern Pakistani mountain town of Mansehra. He carried only a backpack stuffed with three changes of clothes and a bar of soap. His ears rang with his mother's wails of protest at the news that he was setting off for jihad.

But as the bus sputtered through the flat, hot plain of his youth into hilly green terrain, Ali said his only concern was whether he would prove physically fit for the regimen ahead. Otherwise, he said, he felt deeply happy.

"I knew then that when I was killed in jihad, I would go directly to heaven," he said, smiling.

On reaching the bus stop in Mansehra, Ali walked to a stand selling fried dumplings and looked for the contact Zubair had promised would be waiting.

"Salaam aleikum," peace be to you, he said tentatively to a middle-age man with a long beard.

"Are you the person who has come from Peshawar?" the man asked.