T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7, 2019 | 9

It was a cold and damp evening in Feb-

ruary 2012 when my son Malik and I

landed in Adana in southern Turkey.

Our journey from Beirut had been long

and we still had a two-hour drive to

reach Antakya, a picturesque city near

the border with Syria, where we were to

meet my husband and Malik’s father,

Anthony Shadid.

Until that day, I had been working in

the Middle East as a journalist for al-

most a decade. They were some of the

happiest and most rewarding years of

my life. The Arab Spring that Anthony

and I had been reporting on hadn’t yet

achieved any of the changes I, along

with millions of Arabs, had longed for,

but many of us still believed that it

would.

That night in Antakya, I lost all hope. I

became a widow. And almost instantly I

decided to quit journalism.

I had first met Anthony in September

2006 at a rally held by Hezbollah in the

southern suburbs of Beirut, which we

were separately attending as reporters.

I had been following Anthony’s cover-

age of the Middle East, beginning with

the American-led invasion of Iraq in

2003, with great admiration. He was

born in the United States to Lebanese

parents. I grew up in Lebanon, during

its civil war, in a politically savvy family

and had decided to become a journalist

largely because I wanted to be a part of

the national conversation.

By the time of the rally, I had wit-

nessed my country’s destruction, re-

habilitation and descent back into

instability and uncertainty. The Leba-

nese war officially ended in 1990, but the

nation remained deeply divided and

extremely precarious. The new turmoil

had been set off by the assassination of

former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in

February of 2005 by a car bomb in

Beirut. On the day it happened, I was

working as a reporter for a Lebanon-

based English-language newspaper

called the Daily Star, covering mostly

environmental news, and I instinctively

rushed to the scene. It was a harrowing

sight, one all too reminiscent of the

images I had seen on my television

screen during the 10 years of war I lived

through.

Mr. Hariri’s death, widely blamed on

Syria and its allies in Lebanon, split the

country into two camps, one backed by

Syria and Iran and one by the West and

Hariri supporters. The results were a

17-month political stalemate and a

string of political assassinations.

In July 2006, a 33-day war broke out

between Hezbollah and Israel, and the

Hezbollah rally where I met Anthony

was held to mark the group’s “divine

victory.” Because they had held their

own, the conflict was considered a

victory by many Hezbollah supporters,

despite the fact that about 1,200 Leba-

nese had been killed, entire villages in

southern Lebanon had been destroyed

by aerial strikes, and many key bridges

and highway leading to Beirut were

bombed.

As my relationship with Anthony

progressed, Lebanon teetered on the

brink of another civil war. Any hope that

the country would overcome its trou-

bles was quickly fading. I was now also

a stringer for The New York Times and

was starting to feel that going forward,

my work would be mired by conflict and

turmoil.

As much as I loved my job, there were

many times between 2005 and 2008

when I wished to be someone else or

somewhere else. During those years, I

encountered many deaths. The conflict

was starting to take its toll on me. Then,

in May 2008, I had a very close call of

my own.

In scenes reminiscent of the street

fighting during the civil war, Hezbollah

men with machine guns battled govern-

ment supporters on the streets of

Beirut, snipers took positions, and

neighborhoods were littered with

burned cars and debris. The four days of

fighting left at least 29 people dead and

19 injured.

On May 10, I went with my colleague

Raed Rafei, who was working for The

Los Angeles Times, to cover the funeral

of a young Sunni man who had been

killed by a sniper two days before. The

Sunni mourners believed that he had

died at the hands of someone from their

rival religious faction, the Shiites. But

the procession soon turned violent

when mourners clashed with a Shiite

man who refused to close his store that

was located on the way to the cemetery.

And when mourners smashed his win-

dows with rocks and chairs, he re-

sponded by opening fire.

I immediately got down and crawled

ANNA PARINI

My husband

and I met

while we

were both

reporters

covering

the changes

taking place

in the Middle

East. And

then one day

I suddenly

lost him.

Nada Bakri

What the Arab Spring cost me

B AKRI, PAGE 11

When a young Muslim man, self-radi-

calized online, kills in the name of

Islamist ideology, we have no trouble

calling him a terrorist and connecting

him with groups like ISIS. When a

young white man, similarly self-radi-

calized, kills in the name of racist

ideology — even when he publishes a

manifesto to that effect — we tend to

call him disturbed. We speak about

him as a troubled loner, rather than a

member of a wider network.

The disparities are not limited to

cultural perceptions. America’s law

enforcement agencies, intelligence

community and court system all treat

these two scenarios differently. Those

differences in treatment mask instruc-

tive similarities between these two

forms of organized hate. Having spent

almost 25 years fighting jihadi terror-

ism here and abroad, I see disturbing

parallels between the rise of Al Qaeda

in the 1990s and that of racist terror-

ism today.

White supremacists, like their Islam-

ist counterparts, explicitly seek to use

violence to create a climate of fear and

chaos that can then be exploited to

reshape society in their own image.

Their recruitment videos share an

emphasis on the lifestyle they purport

to offer recruits — one of “purity,”

militancy and physical fitness. While

jihadis share beheading videos, right-

wing extremists glory in the live

streaming of the deadly attack on two

mosques in Christchurch, New Zea-

land. While Islamic State supporters

communicate through an online plat-

form called Telegram, white suprema-

cists tend to do so through another

platform, 8chan.

One group for neo-Nazis, founded by

a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan

wars, has taken the analogy to its

logical conclusion, calling itself “The

Base” — a direct translation of the

meaning of the word Al Qaeda. The

organization also uses similar black

flag imagery. The Base maintains an

online library of terrorist manuals; the

Al Qaeda publication Inspire taught

the Boston bombers how to build

pressure-cooker explosives.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, both

groups have real-world war zones in

which to learn combat. Jihadis had

Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Balkans

in the 1990s and Syria today. White

supremacists have the war in eastern

Ukraine, in which they are fighting on

both sides. Dr. Kacper Rekawek, a

scholar who has studied the matter,

estimates that 17,000 people from 50

countries, including the United States

and many of its allies, have traveled to

fight in Ukraine. Those with ties to

far-right militias in Ukraine include at

least one of four Americans indicted on

a charge of promoting the deadly

violence at the Unite the Right rally in

Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. The New

Zealand mosque attacker claimed in

his manifesto that he had traveled to

Ukraine. What we know for sure is

that during his attack he wore a flak

jacket bearing a symbol of one of the

country’s main ultranationalist groups.

Against this backdrop, it is hardly

surprising to see the white-suprema-

cist threat growing inside the United

States. A study by the Anti-Defamation

League found that, in 2018, right-wing

extremists were responsible for three

times as many deaths in the United

States as were Islamists. The same

study showed that 2018 was the deadli-

est year of right-wing extremist vio-

lence since 1995 — when the Oklahoma

City bombing took place. Because of

massacres like the one on Saturday in

El Paso, the year 2019 may yet prove

worse.

Our intelligence and law-enforce-

ment agencies are not blind to the

threat. In May, a senior F.B.I. official

testified to Congress that the bureau is

pursuing about 850 domestic terrorism

investigations. But our current coun-

terterrorism framework was set up, in

the immediate aftermath of 9/11, to

deal exclusively with foreign terrorist

groups like Al Qaeda. For example, the

law allows for the monitoring of com-

munications between people con-

nected with foreign terrorist groups —

even if they are United States citizens

operating on American soil — and the

sharing of the resulting intelligence

among American agencies and with

our allies. But those monitoring and

intelligence-sharing tools cannot be

used against those connected with

terrorist groups based in the United

States — no matter how dangerous —

because domestic terror supporters

are protected by free speech laws in

ways that jihadis (including those who

are United States citizens) are not.

Since 2001, a long list of people have

been indicted on a charge of providing

America

can’t fight

domestic

terror groups

efficiently

until the law

treats them

the way

it treats

foreign ones.

I fought jihadis. White supremacists aren’t so different.

An elderly father, center, his head bowed, mourns at the grave of his son who was killed

in an attack by terrorists inside the Karte Sakhi shrine in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2016.

SHAH MARAI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Ali H. Soufan

S OUFAN, PAGE 11

Opinion

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forms of organized hate. Having spent

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parallels between the rise of Al Qaeda

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parallels between the rise of Al Qaeda

in the 1990s and that of racist terror-

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in the 1990s and that of racist terror-

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in the 1990s and that of racist terror-

VK.COM/WSNWS

in the 1990s and that of racist terror-

ism today.

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ism today.

White supremacists, like their Islam-

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White supremacists, like their Islam-

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