Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East (3 page)

It was at this moment that I really began to feel that I was in a police state. The sense of adventure that I used to feel in Africa when I would put myself in dangerous situations was absent. This wasn’t fun; it was frustrating and emotionally draining. It was as if Mr. Sorush, with his two-faced offer, was rubbing the discomfort I felt. Cursing under my breath, saying it would all be OK, naïvely trying to assume nothing would happen—none of this worked. My lack of familiarity with a police-state society made my imagination run wild—not with pleasant and blissful thoughts, but instead with visions of ominous possible outcomes.

T
hat second night
in Iran was difficult. I felt alone and uncertain about the direction of my trip. I had not yet seen the friendly face of Iran, my time up until this point clouded by the set of unsavory characters I had encountered. Not a single person had made me feel welcome. I spoke to my mother that evening, but because I guessed that my phone was tapped, I couldn’t explain that I had been threatened with arrest. So when she asked me how I found the country, I responded sunnily.

“The people are so friendly, the sights are beautiful, and I am being well taken care of,” I lied.

I
woke up the next morning
to the sound of the phone. It was Marwa, explaining to me that I just needed to sit tight for a few days. She didn’t want to interfere with Mr. Sorush’s company, but she would try to arrange interviews for me and meet with me in the afternoon. I wasn’t surprised to find an escort waiting for me in the lobby and as he approached me, he extended his hand and said, “Mr. Cohen, don’t worry, we will take care of all your needs while you are here. I am Mr. Shapour and I am at your service.”

It was total bullshit, but I was trying to think positively and was willing to play along.

Shapour said he had a plan to take me to see what he described as “one of Tehran’s most beautiful and exciting spots.” We flagged down a taxi together and within thirty minutes we had arrived at our first destination, a subway station. We took the Tehran subway a few stops and we were there. It was the shrine to Ayatollah Khomeini, the late supreme spiritual leader of Iran and founder of the Islamic Republic. The shrine looked like a palace, with a large gold dome in the center and four towering gold minarets surrounding it. Like so many other monuments in Iran, this one was under construction. Everything always seemed to be under construction, yet I rarely saw anyone working. The weekend is Thursday and Friday in Iran, and because Wednesday is right before the weekend and Saturday is the beginning of the new week, the work ethic tends to be a bit lackadaisical on those days. When you combine this with the fact that in the summer it is dreadfully hot, in the winter it is terribly cold, and people take time to pray three times a day, it becomes obvious that very little time is left for work. The Khomeini shrine had separate entrances for men and women and a whole pile of shoes outside the entrance. Inside the shrine, there were not only visitors, but also at least half a dozen or so Iranians who had fallen asleep on the elaborate Persian carpets, while wrapping themselves in these intricately woven treasures as if they were blankets. I wasn’t sure if they were homeless, tired, or trying to feel close to the late ayatollah. Located to one side of the shrine, the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s body rested inside a coffin. It was protected by a room-size box, elaborately decorated with verses from the Quran and elaborately designed gold metal. Hordes of people flocked to his tomb to pay homage and embrace their dead spiritual leader, but recalling this man’s history with my country, I had no interest in joining them.

Most of the hundreds of daily visitors are people who are either deeply religious, or still revere Ayatollah Khomeini and the principles of the Islamic Revolution. Others treat this as a minihadj, or spiritual journey. The women that I saw at the shrine were all covered, the children that I saw were all with very conservatively dressed parents, and the youth hanging around the shrine seemed to show great affection toward the site. This seemed like the norm in Iran, that this was a place where youth often came to pay their respects to their former leader.

From the Khomeini shrine, my escort took me to the Behesht-e Zahra martyrs’ cemetery, which was just a ten-minute walk from the shrine. Along the way, young teenage boys offered me tea and biscuits. They refused to accept my money, which I later learned was a customary charade not to be taken literally, so when I learned this after the fact, I felt really guilty. Behesht-e Zahra cemetery is a powerful sight. The cemetery is gigantic, filled with tombs commemorating the martyrs. Cement tablets with the names of the martyrs fill thousands of rows throughout the cemetery. The cement tablets are protected by raised metal sheeting that form a canopy over the deceased. Each martyr is granted a shadow box that is decorated by the family. I could have spent days walking from shadow box to shadow box looking at what was inside. There were pictures of children, pictures of religious clerics, pictures of houses, and pictures of wives. I had never seen death as celebrated as it was at Behesht-e Zahra.

The mood of the cemetery was somber. This was not surprising, given where I was, but in Behesht-e Zahra death is both advertised and celebrated. It was not a quiet setting, either, as this seemed to be a gathering place in addition to a graveyard. There were plenty of women hunched over tombs in tears, but there were also groups of men just hanging out and laughing with one another. When I asked my guide if it was normal for so many people to hang around the cemetery, he explained that this is what they do on a Friday. After Friday prayer, hundreds of Iranians come to engage in celebrations to commemorate the martyrs as well as funerals to honor the fallen victims of war. Some come for the grief, others come because it is a fun afternoon activity and it is something to do.

Americans often refer to Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 war with Iraq, as the first Persian Gulf War. Behesht-e Zahra is a powerful reminder of what was truly the first Persian Gulf War, the Iran-Iraq War that raged throughout the 1980s. In September 1980, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein invaded Iran and began a conflict that would last eight years and achieve nothing on either side.

The war was bloody. Use of chemical weapons, torture, and brutal violations of human rights were frequent methods employed by both sides. The eight years of fighting claimed an “estimated four hundred thousand deaths and one million wounded on the Iranian side and three hundred thousand deaths and nine hundred thousand wounded on the Iraqi side,” although some estimates actually suggest an even higher death toll. As a comparison, the number of Iranian casualties actually exceeded the number of American casualties in the Second World War. In addition to the bloody consequences of the war, it was also financially draining. According to reliable sources, “by 1986 the economic costs of the conflict were already as high as $600 billion,” including loss of oil sales.
*

For Iranians, this was the first Persian Gulf War. I never would have understood this had I not seen the kilometers and kilometers of tombstones and the weeping women in chador falling onto tombs. In later conversations I had with young people in Iran, the Iran-Iraq War would always come up. They spoke of the magnitude of the horror, the death toll, the impact, and the humiliation Iran experienced during this period. While I can never truly understand what it was like to have lived through that war, just Behesht-e Zahra alone made me appreciate that it was no mere footnote in history, as the Western world tends to view it.

Shapour saw I was moved by Behesht-e Zahra, by its emotionally stirring shadow boxes and the haunting rows of tombs. He was careful to show me the tombs of the unknown soldiers, which consisted of small, unmarked cement squares. Shapour wanted me to see the death toll and the anonymity of those who died in the war. Intertwined with the rows of unmarked tombs were carefully planted shrubbery and poles adorned with flags for the Islamic Republic. Shapour placed his own Islamic Republic flag on one of those poles. I found the cemetery moving; this war I had only read about in books became a visual reality. I saw the pain of those who had lost; I saw the magnitude of the casualties in the sheer number of tombs; I saw the importance of this to Iranian society by bearing witness to the mourning rituals of Iranians who had come to pay their respects. But Shapour may have pushed his luck when he took me to a nearby museum where I could see posters declaring, “USA Is the Biggest Terrorist.”

Both the Khomeini shrine and Behesht-e Zahra affected me, and the fact that the government wanted me to see these sites did not reduce the impact. They were not, however, the “beautiful sights” Shapour had promised. That was still to come.

Shapour told me that our next stop would show off Iran’s beauty. He failed to mention that it would take almost two hours to get there and that most of that time would be spent in traffic. When we finally arrived, I found myself in an environment that I would hardly call beautiful. We were in the mountains, but all I could really see was the huge cloud of black smoke that seemed to form a fluffy tent over the city of Tehran.

On some days, the pollution is so bad that people start coughing up black smoke.

We left the “viewing” area and headed to what Shapour claimed was a really good restaurant somewhat nearby. His motive, of course, was to keep me out of downtown Tehran and distract from the prospects of interviewing officials. We soon arrived at an isolated small pizza café. Without realizing it, however, Shapour had made a crucial mistake that gave me a glimmer of hope for my time in Iran: He had brought me to Iran’s youth.

It was at this mountaintop café that I got my first view of an Iranian experience unfiltered by my government escorts. And I have the charged hormones of a few pairs of Iranian teenagers to thank.

As I first saw at that café, Iran has a lot more than religious shrines, martyrs’ cemeteries, and the regime. It also has a bunch of kids, who constitute nearly 70 percent of society, having the same kind of fun that we enjoy in America. All that other stuff—the regime and its trappings—just makes it a little bit harder for them.

The youth bulge in Iran is not random. The massive human-wave attacks that took place during that war wiped out a substantial portion of an entire generation. The memories of the Iran-Iraq War are deeply embedded in the minds of Iranian youth, not just because they grew up with this violence, but because it is the very reason for the size of their demographic.

In Iran, boys and girls are not permitted to show affection in public, and there is a morals police that strictly enforces the rule. When the Islamic Republic was established in 1979, the intent was to exploit nationalist sentiments and remold society in accordance with the Shi’ite interpretation of Islamic law. Drinking, public relationships, and dancing were all viewed as blasphemy. But, as I learned during my time at that dismal café, even the most repressive measures are no match for teenagers on a mission to get some.

I ate my lunch and I watched couple after couple after couple sneak off into the nearby bushes for some “privacy.” Every five minutes or so, the morals police would go into the bushes and roust the canoodling teens from their love nests. The teens would then wait a few minutes before heading right back into the bushes, where they’d stay until chased out again. It was a total charade. Still, I loved it. I was entertained, but I was also sympathetic. I remembered the anxiety of middle-school birthday parties, seventh-grade couples trying to sneak kisses every time an adult’s back was turned. We may not have had the Revolutionary Guards or the morals police watching over us, but we had our parents. At the time, it seemed just as bad.

While Shapour finished his pizza at the café I got up to walk around. I had a difficult time approaching people, but I did catch up with one couple immediately after the morals police had caught them. Happy for the chance to talk to somebody other than my escort, I struck up a conversation with them. I tried to talk to them about politics and Iran, but they seemed eager to end the conversation and sneak off again right in front of the morals police. When I was younger and kids would sneak off at parties, they would just get grounded; in Iran, there were potential consequences. I was amazed by this. I felt I had seen another Iran; a more liberated and vibrant Iran.

On the ride back to the hotel, my guide, Shapour, was not quite so jubilant. He remained silent on the entire drive back, clearly unhappy about something. Back at the hotel, Shapour and I sat down in two green cloth chairs in the lobby. During the conversation, I leaned back and he leaned forward; it was clear who was in control. He looked at me with his big piercing eyes and a stern look that I would become all too familiar with.

“You know, you have to mind what you ask people. This is not America, we do things differently here.”

“And why is that?” I managed, after a few minutes of stony silence. I knew it was the wrong thing to say, but I was frustrated.

“I think I will call up Mr. Sorush and have him tell the ministry that you are breaking the law.”

I felt myself losing it. This was ridiculous. I had done nothing wrong and I had acquiesced to every demand made of me. Was threatening me really that entertaining?

“What law?” I snapped.

Shapour took out his cell phone and dialed Mr. Sorush. For about two minutes, they exchanged words in Farsi, but I caught none of it. He didn’t tell me what was said in their short conversation, but he led me to believe that I might get arrested. I didn’t know what to do. My phone was almost certainly tapped and people were likely reading or filtering my e-mails.

I had been in plenty of life-threatening situations before and had always found a way to stay strong. At that moment, however, it wasn’t Shapour’s threat of arrest or any fear of imminent danger that scared me so much. It was something different, a completely new feeling that I had never experienced before. For the first time in my life, I felt captive to psychological intimidation. My travels in Africa had put me in physical danger, but I’d never experienced anything quite so terrifying as my dwindling sense of personal freedom. All my phone calls, e-mails, conversations, and actions were closely monitored. People watched over my shoulder. Even when I thought I was alone, someone was always following me. I began to feel as if I could not think my own thoughts. Having always had the luxury of being able to express myself, I was devastated to have it all stripped away from me. I just lost it. It was that feeling I remembered all too well from when I was younger; eyes tearing, every ounce of energy focused on holding those tears back. In another context I might have started yelling at him, or I would have just stormed off; but, in Iran I just sank my head into my lap. I didn’t want him to see how hard this was for me, but no matter how hard I tried, it was almost impossible to hold back.