James Hider - The Spiders of Allah

Whether its Shia death squads roaming the lawless streets of Iraq in the aftermath of Saddam or hardcore Zionist settlers still fighting ancient Biblical battles in the hills of the West Bank, the bloodshed perpetrated in the name of religion today is nowhere more obvious than in the Middle East.

Dodging bullets, dogma and certainty, James Hider travels around the region witnessing what he calls the crack cocaine of fanatical fundamentalism. From Israel to Gaza, to Iraq and then back to Jerusalem, his journey takes him to the very heart of todays holy wars.

There he meets terrorists and their victims, soldiers and clerics, ordinary people and extraordinary people. And the question at the back of his mind is: how can people not only believe in all this madness, but die and kill for it too?

James Hider is The Times Middle East Bureau Chief, currently based in Jerusalem. This is his first book.

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Al-Qaeda Goes to Hollywood

The Transmitter of Hopes and Fears

The Dirt Lot of the Philistines

Into Iraq

Freedoms City

The Birth of an Insurgency

Learning to Pity the US Proconsul

Tourism under Fire

A Festival of Blood in Karbala

How the Spiders of Allah Defeated the US Marine Corps

Battlefields of the Soul

Three Summers in Basra

The Fall of Fallujah

Bombs, Beheadings and Bullshit

Why We Fight

Canaanite Karma

I would like to express my deep gratitude to all my Iraqi friends and colleagues for their great courage and enduring friendship throughout the years of war: I could not have done what I did without them. Special thanks also to Rebecca Strong, my friend and agent, without whose encouragement and guidance this book would probably not have been completed. Thanks also to Doug Young and all the team at Transworld for their instant enthusiasm and continued hard work at each stage.

The two men are chained by the ankle to drainpipes in a squalid bathroom. Each wakes up with a Mickey Finn hangover to find he has a hacksaw at his side. Their faces are pale, full of fear and confusion. Between them is a corpse lying in a pool of blood, a pistol in one hand, a tape recorder in the other. A taped message tells one of them that if he cuts off his foot with the saw, crawls to the pistol in the corpses hand and shoots his fellow cellmate, he and his family will be spared death.

In an unappetizing hotel room in Baghdad, my makeshift home for the past two and a half years, a bootleg DVD is playing on the television. Saw is a gut-churning example of Hollywood psycho-horror, but theres not much else to do in the evenings here, except drink, spout bullshit and watch endless pirated films from Asia, the start of each screening inevitably blurred by silhouettes of Thai cinema-goers slipping late into the theatre. Lying here on my bed, with the antediluvian air-conditioning unit clattering behind me, the question crosses my mind: how did al-Qaeda tap so directly into the Hollywood psyche? Because out there in the city, beyond the blast walls that protect me from the car bombs where human beings explode every morning, waking me before my alarm even has time to count down to eight oclock, the terrorists are doing this to real people. Ive seen the beheading videos, watched the hostages Americans, Britons, Koreans, Lebanese, countless Iraqi soldiers and officials forced to endure a similar hell. Told to beg to their governments for their lives, issuing demands on behalf of the masked psychos filming their terror, while all the time knowing, somewhere behind the desperate cooperation, they will never be allowed to go free. Knowing with instinctive certainty that once the orange jumpsuit is on, the slow knife hacking their throat is the only way out. A skinny young Korean translator paces up and down a cell somewhere in the Sunni Triangle, or perhaps in the Triangle of Death (for some bizarre reason, doom is always packaged in triangles in this country). Then, in front of the video camera, a blindfolded Kim Sun-Il, who had been snatched in Fallujah while working for a South Korean supply company, howls and cries like a little kid, screaming: I dont want to die, I dont want to die, begging a government that is completely helpless to deliver him from this evil. The masked men butcher him anyway on film.

Probably all of these victims watched the vast Hollywood blockbuster that al-Qaeda engineered on September 11, 2001, the terrorist ratings spectacular to beat all others. At least one of them, we know now,witnessed it first-hand: watching the planes demolish the New York skyline inspired him to come to Iraq. Now here they are, as a direct result of that day, living out their own nasty little B-movie sequel, the straight-to-video, low-budget gore flicks that followed, and which are peddled for less than a dollar in the sandblasted shops of the Sunni Triangle.