Destination Martyrdom

Nowhere is Darnah's past more present than in the basement headquarters of a local club known as the Hyena Society. It was my first stop upon arrival in Darnah. The group's 200-or-so members include a slightly incongruous collection of aging history buffs, along with a number of younger adventure seekers. The clubhouse is filled with historical artifacts and curios, including stuffed cobras, Ottoman-era carbines and Bedouin tents. The society's president, Muhammad al-Hinid, a wiry and eccentric 76-year-old who wears aviator sunglasses indoors, walked me past an enormous model of the USS Argus, one of the supply ships that met and resupplied Eaton's Army on the march to Darnah. The Barbary Wars are important to Darnah's history, Hinid told me. Still, he added, the Italian occupation left deeper scars on the town. "The Italian war is much more important," Hinid said.

Even by the ugly standards of early-20th-century colonial powers, Italy's domination of its southern neighbor was mind-numbingly brutal. According to one Libyan census, the native population dropped from 1.2 million in 1912 to 825,000 in 1933. "The bulk of the population drop was the direct result of Italian policy," says Ronald Bruce St. John, a widely respected scholar of Libya who says Italy's tools of oppression included concentration camps, deliberate starvation and "mass execution that bordered on genocide." Reading exercises for children in Libyan schools included phrases like "I am happy to be subject to the Italian government" and "The Duce loves children very much, even Arab children."

A strong local resistance emerged, primarily in the rocky hills of eastern Libya. The hero of the insurgency was a charismatic, white-robed Muslim holy warrior named Omar al-Mukhtar. The Lion of the Desert was a disciple of the Senussis, a secretive and deeply conservative order of Islamic ascetics. The order's founder had traveled extensively in Saudi Arabia, where he mingled with members of the puritanical Wahhabi sect in the mid-1880s. By Omar al-Mukhtar's day, the Senussis had honed a strict, yet almost evangelical, variety of Islam that spread quickly through eastern Libya, gaining adherents partly by offering social services like schools and access to wells. For 20 years, Mukhtar harassed the Italian forces with his small band of guerrillas, but the Italians finally captured him in 1931, as they infiltrated and destroyed the Senussi networks.

Today the cult of Omar al-Mukhtar is visible everywhere in Darnah: on posters, billboards, stickers on car windshields. His face may be more ubiquitous even than Kaddafi's. Bootleg copies of "Lion of the Desert" are brisk sellers in local souks. At the Hyena Society, Hinid showed me a portrait of Mukhtar. He said he painted it on the night of Saddam Hussein's execution. Hinid had watched the hanging on Al-Jazeera. The sad eyes in his painting of Mukhtar, Hinid explained, are actually Saddam's. It isn't difficult to see how the Iraqi dictator might provide Darnah residents with a modern-day stand-in for their martyred hero. "We all love [Saddam] here," Hinid told me.

III. 'Everything But The Girl'
Both Saddam and Mukhtar are revered figures at the Hassan Mosque, a spare, white- washed structure with green pastel trim in the center of Darnah's Old City. A poster of Omar al-Mukhtar, faded and tattered, is affixed to the front door. Anuri al-Hasadi, the mosque's muezzin, was just arriving for afternoon prayers when I stopped by. Dressed in a gray pin-striped dishdasha and sporting a walrus mustache, the 60-year-old had the air of a Dickens character. We sat down on folding chairs in the mosque's lobby, and I asked the muezzin what he thought of the Iraq War. He tried to brush off the question, reluctant to wade into politics—but then he erupted. "Oil! Oil!" he cried. "America needs oil. It's America's fault. You think they came here to buy fruit? They came for the oil!" He declined to say at first whether he thought it was OK for Libyans to travel to Iraq to fight. At last he said he did not approve. The assertion was a little hard to believe after his "oil" outburst. I asked about one of his relatives, an 18-year-old named Ashraf al-Hasadi. According to the Sinjar documents, the young man left Darnah last year for Iraq. The muezzin denied knowing the boy. Then somewhat under his breath, he said softly in Arabic: "He was just a kid."

Ashraf al-Hasadi worked just around the corner from the Hassan Mosque, at his family's spice shop on the Old City's bustling main artery. Tall and clean-shaven, but a little chubby, the youngest of four brothers was also "the quietest of the family," said his brother Bakr, who was working the cash register at the shop when I stopped by. Big sacks of candy, dates and a spice known as baharat were stacked on shelves behind him. Bakr looked a little wary when I first arrived, but he invited me inside and offered a cup of tea. I asked him to tell me what he could about Ashraf.