How a young Iraqi grew into a terrorist

Nothing in Qais Ibrahim Khadir's childhood hinted that he would one day be ready to kill in the name of Allah.

Nothing in this young man with large brown eyes and long lashes indicated that he would embrace the most uncompromising interpretation of Islam, yearn for martyrdom, and today recoil from the handshake of any visiting "infidel."

Sure, Khadir was a bit obsessive - as teenage boys often are when it comes to girls. "He would always wander around the girls' school," his mother recalls, laughing. "He loved a girl called Dahlia, and there is a special brand of soap called 'Dahlia,' that he would buy and bring home."

Today, the 26-year-old Khadir spends his days alone in a cell in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq. He offers a unique window into the mind of an Islamic firebrand, and the evolution of a self-taught true believer. He's a follower of Osama bin Laden, the kind of quiet young man who emerges from an apparently normal upbringing, and is unknown to any Western intelligence agency until he strikes.

Khadir says he's proud to be dubbed a "terrorist." And he has a warning for Americans.

"If something happens to Osama bin Laden, nobody will care, because so many people behind the curtain are doing the job," Khadir says, scratching the long stringy beard he has grown since his arrest last April. "Not enough people believe like me, but this jihad is pushing more people to us. It will never finish."

Last spring, he wielded an AK-47 as part of a three-man hit squad that failed in an attempt to assassinate Barham Salih, the prime minister of the Kurdish territory of northern Iraq controlled by the secular Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The other two attackers, Khadir boasts, became "martyrs" by killing five of Mr. Salih's bodyguards.

Khadir was shot twice in the leg but managed to escape from the scene by foot and by taxi to a safe house. He was arrested 14 hours later. Officially, Khadir did not survive the assassination attempt. A fiction, perhaps, for Khadir's own safety; or so that fellow terrorists would be unaware of his capture.

Held in solitary confinement in a PUK detention facility here, he wears a towel over his head to hide his identity from other prisoners when crossing the prison courtyard. During a 4 1/2-hour interview, Khadir talked about his transformation to a terrorist.

"Even if bin Laden calls for an end to jihad, we will continue," says Khadir, who says he "found this myself, through reading. It grew in my mind."

He has memorized the 604 pages of the Koran, and says the Islamic holy book teaches that infidels must be exorcised from the earth; that sending apostates to heaven "early" is doing them a favor before God.

His strict views mirror those of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and are rejected by the vast majority of Muslims, who note that the word "Islam" means "peace." But in Khadir's world, duty and loyalty to what is perceived to be God's will propels "jihadists" from Bali to Algiers.

The Iraqi Kurd says he began to dabble in radical thinking in 1996,after hearing people in a barbershop in his home city of Arbil talk about Islamic issues that made sense to him.

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