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Outside Magazine October 2004

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Out There
Jamboree Jihad (cont.)

THE DAY AFTER Beck takes me to the camp, he invites me to watch him raise money—by selling Iraqi Scout badges outside a cafeteria in one of Saddam's old palaces in the Green Zone.

Beck has laid his badges on a table in a narrow passageway, causing a traffic jam of tray-carrying men and women. Across the corridor, U.S. Marines line up for dinner that smells, as in every chow hall in Iraq, of overcooked canned tomato sauce. An older Iraqi in a suit stops.

"Salaam aleykum," Beck says, pointing to his wares. They read, AL KASHAFA AL IRAQIA ("Iraqi Scouts").

"Yes, yes, I know," says the man, a fifty-something named Mahdi Saleh. "I was a scout before the Baath party took over." The patches cost $10 each, but Beck gives Mahdi one for free. "When the Baath party took control," he tells Beck, "we were like little soldiers. We built bridges and trained with bombs."

Bombs? This is hard to imagine, even in Iraq. I ask if he means firecrackers.

"Yes, yes, firecrackers. And we spent nights in tents!"

A man in his early twenties comes up. Speaking in English, he introduces himself as Toufic Chehwane, from Lebanon.

"I was in Lebanon in 1984," Beck responds in French.

"I was a chief of a scout troop," Chehwane says, pronouncing it "scoot." Now he works as a "searcher" at the gates to the Green Zone, checking people for weapons and bombs. In Lebanon, he says, politics ruined scouting: "It became divided—Catholics, Muslims, Orthodox—and I didn't like it," he says sadly. "In Arab countries, they always want to divide us by religion."

The peddling continues, with Beck, a human Berlitz tape, thanking all comers in their native tongue: Poles, Japanese, Spaniards, Nepalese, and, of course, Iraqis. After watching more than 100 people buy patches, I begin to wonder if I've suddenly accessed some vast, previously invisible scout underworld.

In the days ahead, moreover, I seem to meet former scouts everywhere I go. An Iraqi friend—a guy who once spent time chasing looters out of his neighborhood, and killed two of them—tells me over drinks, "Of course I was a scout!" and pours himself another Jim Beam.

At another friend's house, an Iraqi is passing around photos, including some he took secretly from inside the now notorious Abu Ghraib prison, where he spent eight years as a political prisoner under Saddam. In one snapshot, he is much younger, and he's bending down by a campfire making tea. "Those were taken on an orienteering trip in Kurdistan," he explains. "When I was a scout."

Not long after, I visit a museum in Halabja, a Kurdish city in northern Iraq that Saddam attacked with chemical weapons in 1988, killing an estimated 5,000 civilians. On the walls are photos of Kurdish scouts wearing shorts and kneesocks. Some of them, no doubt, perished in the mass murder.

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