WISER ANGELS

Karbarla, Iraq, courtesy LA Times

"I was depressed by my war. Everything I covered in Afghanistan and Pakistan seemed to be going in the wrong direction. Wars were supposed to have definitive ends and have identifiable enemies, like the twentieth-century wars I'd grown up hearing about. Instead we now seemed to be locked in some kind of forever war. And it was becoming harder to report them. Places I had travelled to freely in both countries had become no-go areas. Afghanistan was more violent; Pakistan more anti-Western. Peshawar, which had been such a friendly place to live in my early twenties, had grown so hostile I felt as if I was the only Westerner there. Women I'd writen about were being killed. Hotels I'd stayed at were being bombed. Friends had been taken hostage. Late-night discussions with fellow journalists had become macabre - instead of the old gossip of who was sleeing with whom, we talked about whether we'd prefer to be killed by sujicide bomb or a knife at our throats.

Christina Lamb. Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World

The guardians had come. He could feel them now, their wings half-furled, a black cat at the meditation site. "You need help," one of the many voices said, and he did not argue. The constant murmur had worn through the throne room, had disintegrated the flesh off skulls, had worn away in righteous probity the sins to which all flesh were prone. They had reached a new and more serious age. He was going to be wracked from heaven and from earth. He thought of him often now, the clack clack clack through the night of the old man playing chess in his dreams; "I've been here for a hundred million years and you've been abducted by aliens," he said, and laughed wrly, one afternoon during their briefly formed routine, playing chess in the late afternoon. "There aren't too many people like us."

The old man agreed and played another move. He heard all the lines of doubt and movement. "He's thrown away his livelihood." Everything was attack. There were no friends there. They had kept it up for years and wondered, why the erratic progress? But they forgot, he could see inside their sordid dreams. "We don't tell our bosses," one of them told him through the liquid ether; and he didn't have to be informed. Information shuffled down the line, transmitted in ways the carriers themselves did not understand. If the Apocalypse was coming, as so many feared, did any of it really matter? He would thrash against invisible voices and invisible enemies, strained, worn thin, a damaged psyche, and then, loh and behold, there would be another transformation.

There were trained empaths in the mix, but they were few and far between. And if not trained, they concealed their talents. "He knows we're here," one of them said at an Islamic conference, and he let it slide. There was no use attempting communication in such dangerous zones. "He has no business here." He closed all links. And in any case most of the messaging was negative; and he gained only slowly in confidence on one hand, and threw it all away with the other. The level of surveillance of the ordinary citizen is almost the same as that feared by the clinically paranoid, one commentator said, and at that he laughed. How true it was. He wanted time out, but there was no time out to be had. There was a bracing for future gusts, a terrible, wind-worn despair; and then the guardians declared their presence.

"You need help," one of them said again. "We're here now. We will protect you."

Well that might be a wan hope; in a treacherous time. Everything had been sacrificed, for what? A moment's drunken insanity, a kind of laissez faire "who gives a toss", a bravado that might have worked in the past but in the current, constricted age was no longer appropriate. What was once daring was now tragic. What was once a flaw was now a dangerous vulnerability. What had once been talk of a new style of consciousness was now a sentimental tug at a past that had never been, a future which never evolved.

The grand project of social reclamation, or reform, all the words, inclusive, harmonious, diversity, all of it was a charisma, a world that never was and never could be. They lived on the edge of a complex, devolving situation, both faroff and near. Where the threat lay? It lay everywhere; from within and without, from multiple contradictions and hypocries, on bureaucracies built on noble causes, higher causes, on government that had run rapidly out of control. You could have held me by the hand, you could have spoke to me directly. We tried to reach out. We tried to tell you. "Never mind," he shrugged. There are more things in heaven and on Earth.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/mehmet-biber-20150930-gjy2se.html

A Sydney man who has returned from the battlefield in Syria has warned of more attacks like the murder of police accountant Curtis Cheng and says he would voluntarily leave again if the government handed his passport back.

The Sun-Herald can reveal that Mehmet Biber, 23, has returned from the Middle East and is living in western Sydney with his wife and one-year-old daughter.

He is one of six men who allegedly left Australia to join the terrorist group Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria in 2013. The al-Nusra front was later usurped by Islamic State.

Mehmet Biber (second from right) with "fellow aid workers" in Syria.

Mr Biber is one of about 30 Australian alleged fighters believed to have returned home but only the second to be publicly identified after Melbourne nurse Adam Brookman, who negotiated with the Australian Federal Police to return in July.

AdvertisemeOn one of several Facebook profiles he has created then shut down in recent months, Mr Biber warned of more attacks like the shooting outside Parramatta last year by schoolboy Farhad Jabar.

"Let the general public know that home ground attacks such as the likes of the one we seen at parramatta will start to become more frequent as the australian government sticks its hands deeper into the blood of the muslims via joint attacks on muslims overseas," he posted.

Mehmet Biber with his Auburn soccer team.

After the Paris attacks in November, he posted: "f you attack Islam and Muslims for years on end indiscriminately then it's stupid and naive to think there wont be retaliation and consequences... just sayin".

Mr Biber has written lengthy posts blaming the Australian government "for breeding homegrown extremism" and espousing the importance of hijrah – an Islamic concept of migration that has been hijacked by Islamic State to refer to the highly-meritorious journey to the group's new "caliphate".

He said it is the most "undermined, feared, revered and belittled topic of our community leaders" and it was an obligation for Muslims in "lands of disbelief".

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Since 9/11, some 300 Americans--born and raised in Minnesota, Alabama, New Jersey, and elsewhere--have been indicted or convicted of terrorism charges. Some have taken the fight abroad: Americans were among those who planned the attacks in Mumbai, and more recently a dozen US citizens have sought to join ISIS. Others have acted entirely on American soil. What motivates them, how are they trained, and what do we sacrifice in our aggressive efforts to track them? Paced like a detective story, United States of Jihad tells the entwined stories of the key actors on the American front.

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