My life as an insurgent, and why I quit

I never thought of fighting the Americans because I didn't regard the United States as a colonizing country. I thought it was a civilized state. Unfortunately, after the invasion, the opposite proved true. President Bush didn't send doctors and engineers, or construction and democracy specialists, or experts from NASA and Google. Instead, he sent uneducated gangsters who didn't know anything about Arabic and Iraqi traditions. This was one of the main issues that triggered the resistance. When I saw the first U.S. tanks in Fallujah in 2003 I opposed their presence, but at the same time I had always been against Saddam Hussein's regime. I just wished that change would not have come from the outside. A perfect change would have been through a coup or an assassination, not an occupation. I joined al-Qaeda on April 28, 2003, after several U.S. soldiers killed more than 13 Iraqi civilians from the rooftop of an elementary school in Hay al-Nazzal, south of Fallujah. The Iraqis were staging a demonstration and demanded that the Americans leave the school.