NoMuzikNo:zilchide

Bereft of any information, their mothers wait. Some of them told me they refuse to believe that their boys could be capable of such horror. They are really in Spain, they said. They will be coming home any day.

“A mother can feel it when her child has a fever,” Souad Ashtut, the mother of Bilal and Muncif, said. “So how could I not feel that he died? I feel that my children are still alive.”

Any little thing stirs a memory. The mother of Abdelmunim, the sea smuggler, opens the wrong drawer, and there are his swimming trunks. She spots a stranger with the same lumbering stride. She sees his black eyes in the daughter he left behind.

“I want proof,” Abdelmunim’s mother told me in July. “I want to see just a piece of his bone. Just to be sure. Just to be sure if he died.”

She leaned on a rusty door, her face buried in a towel. Chicks staggered around the yard. A breeze rustled the trees as a gate whined shut in the distance.

“If I ever find the person who put this idea in his head, I will kill him,” she said.

Grief has aged Abdelmunim’s 22-year-old wife, Boushra. She dreads walking in public. People talk. Some gossip that he sold her gold jewelry to buy the plane ticket. She has lost 17 pounds and can no longer look at photographs of her husband. “He could not have done this,” Boushra said as she sat in the sun one afternoon, rail-thin and draped in black. Her toddler, Maram, squealed at her feet.

Abdelmunim’s little brother, Usama, withdraws into bouts of silence. He used to ride into the ocean on his brother’s shoulders, he told me one afternoon. Then he paused and covered his face with small hands. He could no longer speak. His father has stopped working and wanders the neighborhood in a long djellaba. He is sure that his son is still alive.

In the months following the men’s departure, the authorities opened a police station next to the school where the young jihadis once congregated. In the course of reporting this story, families talked to me in their doorways while watching nervously to see who might be listening. I was followed closely by a government agent, who aggressively questioned several people I interviewed, threatening at least one of them with a visit from the police.

Suspicions have chilled the neighborhood. One afternoon in June, a woman peered out her window at Abdelmunim’s house. Her son played soccer with his little brother Usama. The boy seemed nice enough, but she worried that he was so quiet. “You can’t know what a quiet person is thinking,” the woman said. Usama might put the wrong ideas in her son’s head. A few weeks later, she sent her son to live with her parents a few blocks away.

People in Jamaa Mezuak seem deeply troubled by the violent fate of the young men who grew up in their midst. Some of the neighbors view the phenomenon as a sort of freak accident. Others see an obvious and alarming pattern. Whatever caused these men to become terrorists, the aftershocks of their decisions have been deeply felt. Mechanics, politicians, homemakers and schoolchildren have argued endlessly about the true meaning of jihad, about why some people are willing to kill themselves and take the lives of others, about whether these men did it simply for fame.

They seem most disapproving of the Madrid bombings, in part because so many locals have relatives living in the Spanish capital who could have easily been killed on the same commuter trains. Again and again, I heard the same refrain: killing innocent people is not jihad.

But some people in Jamaa Mezuak have a different take on the five men who left for Iraq. “They are resistance fighters,” Mohsin Chabab, a party planner, told me.

I asked Chabab about his own interpretation of jihad. Couldn’t these men have worked to improve their own lives, or conditions in their own neighborhood, rather than leaving to fight in another country? “Why didn’t George Bush work on the United States?” he shot back. “He went and occupied Afghanistan. It’s the same thing.”

The closer I got to the friends of the Madrid and Iraq groups, the less criticism of violence I encountered. In Madrid, Chino’s brothers live in the shadow of their brother’s notoriety. Five of them share a dingy apartment. They are closely watched by the police, they say. Yussef, who works as a waiter, no longer knows whom to trust. If he tells people about his brother, they may think he is capable of the same. He keeps to himself. “I’d prefer to put up a mirror and talk to it,” he said. Yet he still finds justification for Chino’s catastrophic plot and the many innocent lives it claimed. He does not consider his brother a “terrorist,” he said. “This was about injustice,” he said as we sat on a bench in downtown Madrid in July. “He wanted to help people. His intention was not to kill. It was to save.”

If people from Jamaa Mezuak feel conflicted about the meaning of jihad, they seem to have fewer differences in their view of the United States. Conversations about terrorism typically lead to the same pronouncement: “The biggest terrorist in the world is the American president,” a 30-year-old barber told me while wearing a baseball cap with gold letters that spelled “America” across the front. The same discussions often bring a facile condemnation of Jews. In the neighborhood, heroin is known as the “bone of Jews.” It was Jews, according to lore, who planted the drug in Jamaa Mezuak.

This kind of talk leaves Youssef Hnana, a local historian, feeling hopeless. His city has not lived up to its promise, he said. He prefers to reflect on the Tetouan of the mid-19th century, when the thriving port nearby drew a peaceful coexistence among Jews, Christians and Muslims. He believes that many young Muslims today are headed in the wrong direction. “The way they think has changed,” he said, swatting a fly from his face. “The fact that you kill yourself just like this, it is a very strange thing. It’s a shame for our city.”

The Moroccan authorities claim to have stemmed the flow of volunteers headed for Iraq. But terrorism continues to torment the country. This spring, six suicide bombers strapped with explosives blew themselves up in Casablanca, killing themselves and a police officer. Then in August, a man in the city of Meknes tried and failed to blow himself up, along with a bus full of tourists. Investigators are still trying to make sense of these amateur attacks. Some of the bombers knew one another from Sidi Moumen, a section of Casablanca that bears a certain resemblance to Jamaa Mezuak.

One evening in July, the sun was setting over the neighborhood when Dayday began making tea. He crushed mint leaves into a bowl as the water boiled. In the next room over, where he and his brothers sleep, I looked at an album of photographs. Bilal appeared again and again. The most recent picture was taken one month before he left. They had gone on a picnic in the mountains. In the photograph, Dayday, Bilal and two other men had formed an acrobatic pyramid. Bilal is standing on his friends’ shoulders. His arms are extended, as if he is flying.

Later that night, Dayday and I hiked up the highest hill in Jamaa Mezuak. The air had cooled, and the sky was black. A shepherd passed by with his herd. We continued to climb the garbage-strewn slope. Clouds rolled over us, almost close enough to touch. “We are living in heaven,” Dayday said with a chuckle. The city sparkled.

Suddenly Dayday extended his arms out and began running toward a cliff. “Watch me,” he said. “I’m going to make jihad.”

Then he bounded down the hill, pretending to disappear.

Andrea Elliott is a reporter for The New York Times. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for a series of articles about an imam in Brooklyn.