Читать книгу The Black Widow - Daniel Silva - Страница 24

OF THE TERRORIST’S NAMESAKE, HOWEVER, the GID chief knew a great deal. Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, or Saladin, was born into a prominent family of Kurds, in the town of Tikrit, in approximately 1138. His father was a soldier of fortune. Young Saladin lived for a time in Baalbek, in present-day Lebanon, and in Damascus, where he drank wine, pursued women, and played polo by candlelight. Damascus was the city he preferred over all others. Later, he would describe Egypt, the financial hub of his empire, as a whore who tried to separate him from his faithful wife Damascus.

His realm stretched from Yemen to Tunisia and north to Syria. It was ruled over by a hodgepodge of princes, emirs, and greedy relatives, all held together by Saladin’s diplomatic skills and considerable charisma. He used violence to great effect, but found it distasteful. To his favorite son, Zahir, he once remarked: “I warn you against shedding blood, indulging in it and making a habit of it, for blood never sleeps.”

He was lame and sickly, watched over constantly by a team of twenty-one doctors, including the philosopher and Talmudic scholar Maimonides, who was appointed his court physician in Cairo. Lacking in personal vanity—in Jerusalem he once laughed uproariously when a courtier splashed his silk robes with mud—he had little interest in personal riches or earthly delights. He was happiest when surrounded by poets and men of learning, but mainly it was the concept of jihad, or holy war, that consumed him. He built mosques and Islamic centers of learning across his lands and lavished money and favors on preachers and religious scholars. His goal was to re-create the zeal that had allowed Islam’s earliest followers to conquer half of the known world. And once the sacred rage had been rekindled, he focused it on the one prize that had eluded him: Jerusalem.

A smallish outpost fed by springs, the city occupied a strategic high ground at the crossroads of three continents, a geographical sin for which it would be punished throughout the ages. Besieged, plundered, captured and recaptured, Jerusalem had been ruled by Jebusites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and, of course, the Jews. When Omar al-Khattab, a close confidant of Muhammad, conquered Jerusalem in 639 with a small band of Arab cameleers from the Hejaz and Yemen, it was a predominantly Christian city. Four and a half centuries later, Pope Urban II would dispatch an expeditionary force numbering several thousand European Christians to reclaim Jerusalem from the Muslims, whom he regarded as a people “alien to God.” The Christian soldiers, who would one day be known as Crusaders, breached the city’s defenses on the night of July 13, 1099, and slaughtered its inhabitants, including three thousand men, women, and children who had taken shelter inside the great al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount.

It was Saladin, the son of a Kurdish soldier of fortune from Tikrit, who would return the favor. After humiliating the thirst-crazed Crusader force at the Battle of Hattin near Tiberias—Saladin personally sliced off the arm of Raynald of Châtillon—the Muslims reclaimed Jerusalem after a negotiated surrender. Saladin tore down the large cross that had been erected atop the Dome of the Rock, scrubbed its courts with Damascene rosewater to remove the last foul traces of the infidel, and sold thousands of Christians into slavery or the harem. Jerusalem would remain under Islamic control until 1917, when the British seized it from the Ottoman Turks. And when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1924, so, too, did the last Muslim caliphate.

But now ISIS had declared a new caliphate. At present, it included only portions of western Iraq and eastern Syria, with Raqqa as its capital. Saladin, the new Saladin, was ISIS’s chief of external operations—or so believed Fareed Barakat and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department. Unfortunately, the GID knew almost nothing else about Saladin, including his real name.

“Is he Iraqi?”

“He might be. Or he might be a Tunisian or a Saudi or an Egyptian or an Englishman or one of the other lunatics who’ve rushed to Syria to live in this new Islamic paradise of theirs.”

“Surely, the GID doesn’t believe that.”

“We don’t,” Fareed conceded. “We think he’s probably a former Iraqi military officer. Who knows? Maybe he’s from Tikrit, just like Saladin.”

“And Saddam.”

“Ah, yes, let’s not forget Saddam.” Fareed exhaled a lungful of smoke toward the high ceiling of his office. “We had our problems with Saddam, but we warned the Americans they would rue the day they toppled him. They didn’t listen, of course. Nor did they listen when we asked them to do something about Syria. Not our problem, they said. We’re putting the Middle East in our rearview mirror. No more American wars in Muslim lands. And now look at the situation. A quarter of a million dead, hundreds of thousands more streaming into Europe, Russia and Iran working together to dominate the Middle East.” He shook his head slowly. “Have I left anything out?”