CAMP EL SOUF, JAVESH
(JORDAN), SUMMER 1970

“HE’S IRAQI,” DECLARED ABOU DINNAH.

Or rather Comrade Abou Dinnah, as he insisted on being called.

Thirty metres from them, a man in fatigues stood up, took several long, loping strides, and threw a hand grenade. They followed its arc with their eyes and, twelve metres away, saw a spruce-like shrub pop into the air, its branches splintered by the blast, the pieces falling to the earth in a brief shower of vegetation from a yellow cloud.

There was shouting, and someone clapped. The Iraqi walked back to the sixty or so men gathered in the hills in the middle of the desert. He was tall, well built, and the way he walked indicated that under the circumstances (with sixty pairs of eyes staring at him, watching his every move as he pulled the pin from the grenade, tossed the bomb in his hands two or three times before running like a cricket bowler and straight-arming the thing into the shrubbery) he was happy with the way he’d landed it just where he’d wanted it to go.

“Iraqi,” Comrade Dinnah said again.

“Apart from Lebanese and Iraqis, do you have other foreigners among you?” asked the journalist.

Abou was Lebanese. He spoke fluent French, which was why he’d been selected to guide the three journalists around the camp. They were sitting in the cool shade of the pines, separate from the group formed by the fedayeen and their Iraqi instructor. The three Westerners were a team: one worked the microphone and handled the script, another the camera. The third was taking still photographs for a magazine. The dazzling light, the incandescent nakedness of the stones, the biblical hills.

“Yes,” Abou Dinnah replied. “There are Saudis here, and Egyptians, and Turks . . . And even some Canadians, North Americans, who are fighting for the French there . . .”

“What? Québécois, here in el Souf?”

“That’s it, from Quebec. Yes . . .”

A second grenade exploded a hundred feet from them, and the journalist looked up instinctively. Then they fell silent as a fedayee, his head wrapped in a checkered keffiyeh and his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, passed close to them after detaching himself from the main group. He’d slowed down as he approached the four sitting in the shadow of the bush that sheltered the tents of the FDPLP, as though curious about their presence in this place.

The journalist jumped to his feet and went up to the fedayee.

“Are you Québécois?”

“Huh? How did you know that?”

“You’re the only one wearing Ray-Bans.”

Then the journalist saw a second revolutionary coming toward him, his features hidden under a keffiyeh even though most of the others were bareheaded. Waving madly, the journalist signalled his cameraman to join him. The second fedayin’s eyes were deep blue and his hand, when he held it out, was white and slender, a student’s hand.

“Hello! It’s good to see you somewhere other than on television . . .”

“The Kalishnikov is a good assault rifle,” Zadig was saying. “I’d even go so far as to say that the AK-47 is far superior to the American M-16. But for carrying out guerrilla warfare in an urban setting, it’s not so practical . . .”

“Why?” asked the reporter, moving the microphone a bit closer to Zadig’s mouth, which could be seen moving through the fabric of his keffiyeh.

“Because after a while it becomes difficult to find ammunition for it.”

“I see. But if the training you’re receiving here isn’t appropriate to conditions in Quebec, what are you doing in el Souf?”

Zadig hesitated. The journalist and the two terrorists were standing at the foot of a hill at the end of the valley. The camera was rolling, the photographer clicking away. Target practice and hand-to-hand combat training had just ended.

It was Madwar who answered.

“The FDPLP is the most radical, the most leftist Palestinian resistance group there is, and that’s what interested us from the beginning. But while we quickly saw that the commando training they provide is good, they’re not all that strong on the politicization of the masses. The priority here is clearly military instruction. The other problem is that they spend a lot of time each day discussing Marxist and Leninist dialectics, and we can’t understand a word of it because it’s all in Arabic.”

“Comrade Abou Dinnah helps us a bit,” Zadig said.

“So what you learn here, basically, is how to kill people?”

“More that than mobilizing the worker masses, anyway.”

“And when you return to Quebec, what will you do?”

“Begin a campaign of selective assassinations,” Zadig said calmly.

“Those who are responsible will pay,” added Madwar.

“And who are they, the ones who are responsible?”

“The premier, top businessmen, people like that.”

“And you won’t be going to fight in Palestine?”

“I think I will be,” said Madwar.

“Not me,” said Zadig.

“And where did you get your code names? Because these are code names you’re using, are they not?”

This journalist could be a real pain in the ass when he wanted to be.

“I took mine when I was studying literature at . . . I almost gave the name of the university. We have to be careful not to say anything that could be used to identify us,” Zadig explained, with an indulgent smile.

“And what about you, Madwar?”

“I have nothing to add to that.”

The photographer asked them to pose for a portrait: combat position, Kalishnikov held in both hands.

“Try to look fierce,” he told them. “That’s-good-hold-it-like-that.”

Like lambs to the slaughter.

At the end of the interview, he shook their hands.

Zadig: Long live the socialist québécois and international revolution!

Madwar: Long live proletarian internationalism!

Zadig: Long live Comrade Nayef Hawatmeh! Long live the FDPLP!”

Madwar: Long live the FLQ!”