Destination Martyrdom

Even before he vanished, Abd al-Salam bin-Ali was an easy young man to miss. Pale, lanky and blind in one eye, the unobtrusive 20-year-old didn't leave much of an impression in Darnah, his hometown in eastern Libya. In school he had studied to become a veterinarian, but after graduation he couldn't find a job. "The economic situation was terrible," recalls his older brother, Abd al-Hamid. "He was looking for work every day." Sometimes Abd al-Salam would set up a folding table in Darnah's Old City and hawk cheap perfumes.

Unmarried, with few prospects, he still lived with his mother. At home, for distraction, he would sprawl in front of the family television and watch "Lion of the Desert," the 1981 epic of Libyan resistance fighters starring Anthony Quinn. Abd al-Salam had seen it over and over. As the war in Iraq dragged on, he also tuned in to Al-Jazeera. Nobody in the family had supported the American invasion, but Abd al-Salam was particularly affected by the bloody images he saw on the Arabic cable news channel. He sometimes teased his mother that he wanted to run away to fight the Americans. Before she could protest too much, he always backed down. "No, no, no—don't worry, Mom," he would say with a laugh. "I'll get married instead." His older brother wasn't so confident. "I was sure he would go," Abd al-Hamid recalls. "He was always talking about it." Abd al-Salam was also growing more devout. According to his brother, he spent most of his time at the mosque.

Then one day in late September 2006, Abd al-Salam simply disappeared. "Where is he?" his anxious mother asked when he didn't show up for dinner. His brother reassured her that Abd al-Salam had gone to Benghazi, perhaps to buy perfumes, but Abd al-Hamid didn't believe his own story. The younger boy had probably hitched a ride to Cairo, and then flown on to Damascus. He later crossed the border into Iraq with $100 cash in his pocket, and joined a cadre of insurgents led by a coordinator he knew as "Hamad." Shortly after Abd al-Salam disappeared, the telephone rang in Darnah. "I'm in Ramadi," the voice on the other end said. "I'm in Iraq."

Late last year American soldiers raided an insurgent headquarters in the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar. Inside they found a document—perhaps an application form that Abd al-Salam had filled out on his way into the country—on the letterhead of the "Mujahedin Shura Council." The document listed little beyond Abd al-Salam's birthday, his brother's phone number and his hometown. Yet as they analyzed the papers, American investigators were struck by one thing. Of the 606 militants cataloged in the Sinjar records, almost 19 percent had come to Iraq from Libya. Previous intelligence estimates had always held that the bulk of Iraq's foreign fighters come from Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the largest number of militants in the Sinjar records—244 of them—were Saudi nationals. But in per capita terms, Libyans represented a much higher percentage. Perhaps the most startling detail: of 112 Libyan fighters named in the papers, an astoundingly large number—52—had come from a single town of 50,000 people along the Mediterranean coast, called Darnah.

Earlier this month I traveled to Darnah to try to figure out why it was contributing such a large portion of its young men to fight the Americans in Iraq. A stunning natural landscape surrounds the town, nestled in the shadow of rust-colored limestone bluffs that overlook the sparkling Mediterranean. Yet the city's corniche is lined with a dreary procession of crumbling concrete tenements coated in a patina of chipped pastel paint. Libya's economy is dominated by the oil and gas sector, which accounts for 90 percent of the country's revenues, but little of that wealth has ever trickled down to Libya's eastern province. Government officials in Tripoli acknowledge in private conversations that the east has long been neglected. The discrepancy is a truth too obvious for Darnah residents to deny, even given the hazards of speaking openly in Muammar Kaddafi's police state. "What have we gotten from this government?" asks Abd al-Hamid bin-Ali. One telling detail in the Sinjar documents: of the Libyans who listed their "work" in Iraq, more than 85 percent volunteered for suicide missions—a significantly larger fraction than any other country but Morocco.

Still, economic desperation alone doesn't fully explain the readiness of Darnah's young men to join the insurgents in Iraq. There are tens of millions of impoverished Muslims in the world, but only a handful—perhaps a few hundred at any given time—travel to Iraq to fight. There is little consensus about what ultimately motivates them, what changes someone from a disgruntled viewer of cable news into a suicide killer. "That's the big mystery," says Brian Fishman, a West Point counterterrorism expert who has extensively analyzed the Sinjar records. "The dynamics are very, very local." There are some common denominators. In their interviews with NEWSWEEK, family members of the local recruits spoke of young men with bleak lives in search of redemption. Far from being universally motivated by one global ideology, the jihadist recruits often seem to have been driven by personal factors like psychological trauma, sibling rivalry and sexual longing.