Destination Martyrdom

Bakr explained that he had lately been urging his brother to get married. At 18 years old, Ashraf was still a bachelor, and young to wed. Because a wedding ceremony is expensive and Darnah is relatively poor, most men in town don't end up marrying until at least their late 20s. Still, the spice shop provided the Hasadis with a steady income, and Ashraf was considerably better positioned than most of his friends. After his mother died in 2006, it was up to his brothers to set him up. Ashraf already had a job, a car and an apartment—all the prerequisites. Even so, his brothers worried that the young man was a little tightly wound, sensitive and severe at the same time. He recoiled at the images of Iraq that he saw on Al-Jazeera. "He never watched movies," Bakr recalled. "It was only the news." After work, Ashraf liked to whip his black Hyundai around the tight warrens of Darnah's Old City. To his brothers' dismay, he showed little interest in marriage. "He had everything," his brother Abdelkhader said with a laugh, "except for the girl."

Instead, Ashraf was spending more and more time at the mosque. Darnah is a religious town; several times a day, the shops in the Old City's main street roll down and lock their front doors as the mosques fill for prayers. Even so, Ashraf became "too religious," says his brother Sufian—"seriously religious. He lived at the mosque." One day in the summer of 2007, Ashraf went to see his brothers and told them he was leaving on a trip with a friend. The others didn't make much of the conversation, they said. Then, about a week later, the phone rang. Ashraf got quickly to the point: he was in Iraq. "And that was the last phone call he made to his family," brother Sufian says. The Hasadis fear the worst, but say they don't know for sure whether their brother is dead or alive. I asked them whether they thought Ashraf would ever come home. "God knows," Bakr said. "A lot of them go and come back. Some stay six months, some two years." Then there are the ones who volunteer for suicide missions.

The Hasadi family's flourishing businesses—they own a chain of the spice and candy shops on the same street—make them something of an oddity in run-down Darnah. Their story is just one example of how difficult it is to generalize about the motivations of foreign fighters. Still, there is no doubt that economic misery and its social consequences have scarred Darnah's young people. Many of Tripoli's prostitutes have come to the city from eastern Libya; in some cases they are their families' sole breadwinners. Tripolitan men joke—crudely but revealingly—that they patronize prostitutes from the eastern half of the country as a form of wealth redistribution. For young men in Darnah, unemployment means almost certain bachelorhood—a dismal state in a society as sexually conservative as Darnah's. In a male-dominated community, the predicament of prolonged celibacy also carries an acute social stigma.

That fate may be just what 28-year-old Abdelhakim Okaly feared when he slipped out of Darnah to Iraq last spring. When I called Abdelhakim's father, Mustafa, earlier this month, the elder Okaly at first refused to talk, and then quietly asked if I could tell him where Abdelhakim was. We made an appointment to meet in a parking lot behind a nearby mosque. When Mustafa pulled up, he looped his beat-up station wagon in a wide circle around my car, and then invited me to his house. The Okaly residence, a hardscrabble concrete apartment block abutting the seashore, was significantly more modest than others I had visited in Darnah. As Mustafa's wiry 20-year-old son Awad brought in a tray of cookies and guava juice, the father's eyes began to fill with tears. Later he told me that when he had first spotted me—an obvious outsider—he thought perhaps I had brought back his son.

Mustafa explained he had long feared that Abdelhakim would try to leave for Iraq. Like nearly everyone I talked to in Darnah, his son was deeply affected by the carnage he saw on Al-Jazeera and CNN. The Abu Ghraib scandal angered Abdelhakim, but "what broke his heart was Fallujah," Mustafa said, referring to the crackdown on the restive, mostly Sunni city in the fall of 2004. "Do you agree with this?" Abdelhakim asked his father. "I'm going." Mustafa went so far as to drive down to the local emigration office and ask it to withhold Abdelhakim's permission to travel. But the young man, who had once worked as a cabdriver in Darnah, somehow managed to sneak out of town.

When I asked whether Abdelhakim was married, everyone in the room laughed. "The older one's not even married yet," a brother said with a chuckle. Then their father chimed in. "Well, Abdelhakim's still getting no salary," he grumbled, in something of a scolding manner. "How will he get married now?" And then, almost as if he was trying to convince himself: "He's a grown-up, he'll do what he wants to do." As we talked, the father almost seemed to be trying to teach his other sons a lesson. He said he was particularly concerned about the younger boy, Awad, the one who had brought in the juice. "This one's got no passport," the father said, throwing a glance at Awad. "But he'd like to go." Then he widened his eyes. "One's enough," he concluded.