A look at the playbook for Islamic militants
By Michael Moss and Souad Mekhennet
Published: June 10, 2007

We were in a small house in Zarqa, Jordan, trying to interview two heavily bearded Islamic militants about their distribution of recruitment videos when one of us asked one too many questions.

"He's American?" one of the militants growled. "Let's kidnap and kill him."

The room fell silent. But before anyone could act on this impulse, the rules of jihadi etiquette kicked in. You can't just slaughter a visitor, militants are taught by sympathetic Islamic scholars. You need permission from whoever arranges the meeting. And in this case, the arranger who helped us to meet this pair declined to sign off.

"He's my guest," Marwan Shehadeh, a Jordanian researcher, told the militants. the rest