Destination Martyrdom

Awad, who was sitting on the floor in a corner of the room, insisted that he wasn't going anywhere. But then he went on: "If you did want to go, you would keep it a secret. If I was planning to go, I wouldn't tell anybody." It was easy to see why Awad's father was keeping an eye on his youngest son, who displayed a mischievous wit. When I asked whether his brother Abdelhakim had any previous military training, Awad replied, "No training at all. He didn't even have muscles." When I asked Awad what his brother looked like, Mustafa Okaly's youngest child stared at me and then shot back: "He looked like you."

The Okalys said they haven't heard from Abdelhakim for more than a year, nor have they received a call telling them that he has been killed. Before I left, Mustafa made me an offer. He must have seen me as something of a conduit to a distant American world he had little access to. The desperate father leaned in close and insisted, a little conspiratorially, that he would give me a camel if I could find some way to bring his son home.

IV. 'It's Only Me Now'
The answer to "Why Darnah?" is found, then, in an explosive mix of desperation, pride and religious fervor. These factors, present individually in many parts of the Islamic world, are found collectively here, on the shores of northern Libya. The town's crisis is a serious headache for Libya's diplomats. Libya was supposed to be one of the few triumphs in the Bush administration's War on Terror. In the 1980s and '90s, Muammar Kaddafi was the face of state-sponsored terrorism, denounced by Ronald Reagan as the "Mad Dog of the Middle East." His regime was accused of involvement in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 people, as well as the 1986 bombing in a Berlin discothèque that killed two American servicemen. America retaliated by bombing Tripoli. Yet in 2003, desperate to free Libya from economic sanctions, Kaddafi's government agreed to halt its WMD programs. Three years later the State Department finally removed Libya from its list of terrorist states. The White House trumpeted the news as proof that the invasion of Iraq was scaring America's enemies all over the Mideast.

Despite the Sinjar revelations, few U.S. officials believe that Kaddafi is sending fighters to Iraq. A wave of jihadists returning to Libya from Iraq with new skills would be at least as big a nightmare for him as it is for Americans. The territory around Darnah has long been a locus of Islamist opposition to Kaddafi's regime. In the mid-1990s his security services cracked down hard on militants in Darnah, calling in helicopter gunships to suppress local rebels calling themselves the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). The town seems calm enough now, but there are still plenty of checkpoints manned by uniformed police. When asked about the LIFG, most residents fall silent—even those who are happy to endorse sending local recruits to Iraq.

The Sinjar documents indicate that the Iraq insurgents had several local coordinators working in Darnah. There are few clues to how the young men were recruited, but after they signed up they were often sent to Iraq in small groups rather than singly. The Darnah pipeline passed through Egypt and Syria, where local coordinators arranged to have the enlistees smuggled across the border into Iraq. But the most recent records date only to last August, and it's an open question whether the pipeline is still flowing. Some analysts say the local Islamists disagree among themselves about whether the real jihad is in Iraq or at home in Libya.

But the old network may be renewing its strength. Late last month a prominent member of the regime's domestic spy agency was assassinated in Darnah, according to a Western diplomat in Tripoli. The diplomat says the murdered Libyan was a notoriously cruel interrogator and had made many enemies, so he wasn't necessarily killed by Islamists. "He was widely known and disliked because he was such an a––hole," says the diplomat.