The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption by Saleem Kamal

Author:Saleem, Kamal [Saleem, Kamal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Howard Books
Published: 2009-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

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The day of the dueling massacres became known in Lebanon as Black Saturday. The incident triggered a full alert at Sabra. We anticipated everything: retaliation by the Phalangists, an invasion of the Palestinian camps by the Lebanese army, even an air attack from Israel. We emptied the camp and set up a perimeter around Sabra with anti-aircraft gun emplacements and rockets. No attack came, but after Black Saturday, fedayeen in Beirut clustered into angry hives of warring factions with constantly shifting alliances and outright treachery.

When relief shipments came in to bless the country, the factions seized control of them. The only way to get a share was to be wired into a faction. If you did not belong to a group—the PLO, the Nasseriyeen, Fatah, al-Morabitun—your family did not eat. It was a form of manipulation, a way to use fear and the survival instinct to build alliances. Many, many people chose sides not for ideological reasons, but because they wanted to keep their families fed.

While I was with the PLO, two of my brothers had joined other factions. Fouad fought with al-Morabitun, and Ibrahim joined a group led by Saeb Salam, a former prime minister of Lebanon, who was well connected with the Saudis. This was the strategy of many Muslim families, to hook into several groups in order to survive.

As part of Abu Ibrahim’s cell, my mission was to split the Lebanese military, which included both Muslim and Christian soldiers. We hoped to turn the Muslim soldiers against the government and induce them to join the PLO. It was Arafat’s divide-and-conquer strategy: if we could fracture the military, the Christian government could not stand against the increasingly powerful PLO.

The PLO fanned out in Beirut, beginning a strategic march to hold and protect Muslim neighborhoods. Five weeks after the Phalangist massacre, my unit had gone to investigate a Christian plot to invade a Muslim girls’ school when I heard of the next outrage: Christian militias overran Karantina, the settlement near the slaughterhouse, and turned it into a slaughterhouse of its own.

Reports crackled over our radios: The infidels had invaded Karantina and were shooting Muslim civilians in the head. A Christian fighter used a knife to slice open the belly of a pregnant woman, aborting her child on the spot. Another fighter placed a boy in his grandfather’s arms, then shot the child in the head. A Christian raped a Palestinian woman with a glass Pepsi bottle, then killed her by kicking the bottle up into her womb. Before the day was over, a thousand Muslims, many of them Palestinians, were butchered like animals in Karantina and two other areas in the city.

Hearing the reports, my blood turned to foam in my veins and fantasies of murder consumed every thought in my head. The urge to kill vaulted past vengeance and became justice.

The Karantina incident plunged Beirut into chaos. The PLO retaliated immediately, pounding Christian neighborhoods with mortars and artillery. But some among us lost our couth and became vampires and savages.

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