Free Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East by Jared Cohen Page A

it is a statement that the country these young people love so much has nothing to offer them. Some youth will literally sit in front of Voice of America on their satellite televisions all day so as to learn or perfect their English. They spend countless hours on the Internet learning various skills—ranging from fashion to real estate—in the hope that one will yield a job opportunity.
    I truly valued my relationship with Nezam and owe the comfort I experienced in the evenings to his unspoken trust. I would like to think that I reciprocated, but the value of what I did for him cannot be compared to the risks he took by protecting me and the loyalty he demonstrated by keeping my secret. When I was in Tehran, we sat down almost daily to talk about his hopes of getting an education outside of Iran. He had been studying engineering at the Polytechnic University in Tehran, yet he offered little indication that he would be rewarded for his hard work. I asked him once, “Why don’t you want to stay here after you graduate from university?”
    He looked at me and said, “I don’t want to work for the mullahs.” Unwilling to commit their futures to the clerical establishment, students find only grim opportunities for a real future in Iran. Some will join underground opposition, while others will go abroad; the vast majority, however, will end up in jobs that they are both overqualified for and uninterested in taking.
    The Iranian economy is not conducive to job creation. It is structured as a state-run society and unemployment is rampant, with many experts estimating that close to 40 percent of the population is unemployed. While the government tries to argue that unemployment is a mere 13 percent, the young people who know the reality of the dearth of opportunities see through these attempts to mask the country’s economic troubles with faulty statistics.
    It is difficult to imagine how the country with the world’s second-largest oil reserves, 10 percent of the world’s oil, and the second biggest natural gas reserve can experience such economic troubles. The regime in Iran has a virtual monopoly on all forms of business and squanders most of the country’s resources, enriching the kleptocrats in the ruling elite. Nezam, along with others I met, believed that to be successful in Iran meant that one had to basically sell out to the clerical establishment. Nezam also emphasized that “in Iran, this is not a real education. We learn the way the mullahs want us to learn. Why do we have to learn their way?” The history books are distorted and the curriculum is subjectively infiltrated with ideological prescriptions. Nezam, in common with many others, cares nothing about the ideology of the Islamic Revolution; he, and they, simply want to learn and don’t feel as though they can do it in Iran. Nezam once asked me, “What happens one day if this regime is not here anymore? We will have learned the wrong things and we will not be prepared for opportunities in Iran after the mullahs have left.”
     
     
     
    I n what would become my usual signal, I gave Nezam a smile and nod and walked outside to wait for Cirrus. In the passenger seat of Cirrus’s Volkswagen was his friend Pedram. Pedram was in his early twenties, had a goatee, and wore glasses. His hair was straight and long, dangling over his ears. He was dressed very smartly, wearing a button-down blue shirt and a gray blazer. Sitting next to me in the backseat were two large white jugs, several bags of chips, two decks of playing cards, a couple of packs of cigarettes, and several jars of sour cream dip.
    “Cirrus, what is all of this for?” I asked.
    “No more sitting in your hotel at night,” he said, laughing. He then repeated his quip in Farsi, and Pedram laughed.
    “Do you drink?” Cirrus asked.
    It suddenly became clear to me that the two giant white jugs sitting next to me were filled with illegal alcohol. I’m not generally a big drinker, but who could