The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  THE MOTHER OF MOHAMMED

  An Australian Woman’s Extraordinary Journey into Jihad

  SALLY NEIGHBOUR

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Part 1 Robyn

  1 Robin Merry Hood

  2 Wild Child

  3 God Is Great

  4 A Javanese Wife

  5 The Death of Robyn

  Part 2 Rabiah

  6 Becoming Rabiah

  7 An Enemy of Suharto

  8 True Believers

  9 Muhajirin

  Part 3 Umm Mohammed

  10 Joining the Jihad

  11 ‘Wahhabi’

  12 A Letter to Osama

  13 Fugitives

  14 House Arrest

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  It was October 2001 and American cluster bombs were raining down on Afghanistan in retaliation for the September 11 attacks on the United States. Al Qaeda and Taliban encampments were being bombarded and their occupants were on the run, fleeing to the mountainous Afghan–Pakistan frontier or escaping across the border into neighbouring Iran.

  Among the exodus was an Australian woman named Rabiah Hutchinson, a member of the jihadist elite, known among her fellow fugitives as ‘Umm Mohammed’—meaning the mother of Mohammed.

  The former country girl turned hippy backpacker would have seemed an unlikely jihadist to those who knew her as a child in Mudgee, New South Wales, or as a dope-smoking teenager on Sydney’s northern beaches in the 1970s. But Rabiah Hutchinson was a veteran of the global holy war. She was a trusted insider, known and respected by the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership. She was married to a leading al Qaeda strategist and member of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle, and had been handpicked by bin Laden’s right-hand man, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al Zawahiri, to set up a new women’s hospital in Kandahar. Western intelligence analysts would later call her ‘the matriarch of radical Islam’; or—in the words of former CIA field officer Marc Sageman, who worked with the mujahidin in Pakistan—‘the Elizabeth Taylor of the jihad’.

  As she fled across the Afghan countryside, Rabiah certainly didn’t look like a Hollywood star. Her burka was tattered and caked with dirt; her hair, concealed beneath it, matted and unkempt. She hadn’t showered for months. Her four children who were on the run with her looked like a gang of grubby kuchis, the Afghan gypsies who roam the country’s barren mountains.

  In the wake of September 11, the United States and its allies had gone to war in Afghanistan to root out the al Qaeda perpetrators, their Taliban hosts, and anyone who supported or sympathised with them. ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’, US President George W Bush had declared. From the perspective of the US and Australian governments, Rabiah Hutchinson was ‘with the terrorists’. Now, like the rest of them, she was a fugitive: hunted from the air by US forces, and on the ground by Afghan troops.

  ‘The next four months—it was just living like you can’t imagine’, Rabiah recalls. ‘Every few days we’d have to move, and the Americans would find out our position and they’d attack. You can’t imagine in your wildest dreams—you’re fearing rape and torture and mutilation and death. Sometimes the Apache helicopters would come down so low you could see the pilots sitting in them. They were shooting women and children in the back from Apache helicopters while they were running.’

  Rabiah and her children spent three months on the run in Afghanistan before escaping across the desert border into Iran, where they were detained under house arrest by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Finally, in 2003, they gave themselves up at the Australian embassy in Tehran, and were flown home to Australia. Rabiah’s passport was cancelled and she was branded a threat to national security. According to the assessment from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO): ‘There is a strong likelihood that further travel by Rabiah Maryam Hutchinson will involve participation in, or support and preparation for acts of politically motivated violence (and) conduct that might prejudice the security of Australia or a foreign country’.

  Condemned as a would-be terrorist and placed high on ASIO’s watch-list, Rabiah became a virtual prisoner in her home in Sydney’s southwestern suburbs, where she remains in 2009. She can occasionally be seen striding along the streets of Lakemba, a solitary figure swathed in a black abaya and niqab, only her eyes visible behind a slit in the fabric. Despite the scrutiny of the Australian authorities, she remains fiercely committed to her beliefs, and dismissive of the reputation she has acquired.

  ‘I’m just a 55-year-old granny with diabetes and arthritis on a disability pension’, Rabiah insists. ‘What are they so worried about? They’ve got it wrong. I’m not important. I am absolutely nobody. I just happened to be there.’

  But her protestations of insignificance belie the extraordinary life she has lived—twenty years on the frontlines of an ideological war that has reshaped our world. Over the course of those two decades she has been a witness to—and participant in— some of the epochal episodes of our time. She was there in Indonesia during the Islamist uprising against the Suharto regime in the 1980s. She was there at the now infamous Ngruki Islamic boarding school in Java, the crucible for the Indonesian militant group Jemaah Islamiyah, led by her mentor Abu Bakar Ba’asyir. She was there in the mujahidin camps of Pakistan during the Afghan holy war in the 1990s. And she was right there in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan at that moment in history when the September 11 attacks on the United States signalled the cataclysmic struggle that has defined our age.

  So who is this mysterious black-veiled woman with the broad Australian accent and fiery Scottish temperament, who has Western governments so unnerved? And how did a former Mudgee girl and surf-loving backpacker who set out in her teens on the hippy trail end up at the heart of the global jihad? Clearly, this is no ordinary granny.

  I first met Rabiah Hutchinson in August 2007, in a coffee shop in Bankstown in the south-western suburbs of Sydney. I was waiting at the pre-arranged meeting place when her black shrouded figure appeared, the face concealed behind a veil, the hands encased in black gloves. All I could see of her was her piercing blue eyes—glaring at me with bald hostility.

  ‘I will never trust you’, she snapped when we were introduced. I knew full well the reason for her animus. Nine months earlier, I had written an article that was featured on the front page of the the Australian newspaper under an ‘exclusive’ caption in bold red print and a prominent headline: ‘Australian Woman Married to Al-Qa’ida Boss’. The story revealed her marriage in 2001 to the al Qaeda strategist Mustafa Hamid, also known as Abu Walid al Misri, a member of Osama bin Laden’s advisory shura. It also disclosed her association with bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, and how he had chosen her to take charge of his hospital project.

  An intensely proud and private woman with—I quickly learned—a fearsome temper, Rabiah was furious at my report. Apart from the public opprobrium it generated, it had caused her only sister to finally sever contact with her. ‘I’ll never trust you’, Rabiah repeated, to make quite sure I understood.

  It was an inauspicious beginning to a meeting I had been working towards for four years. I had first heard about Rabiah in 2003, while making a program for ABC TV’s Four Corners on the Australian connections of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), and later while researching my book, In the Shadow of Swords, on JI and the Bali bombings. JI insiders had described a gregarious former hippy who had been married to the group’s Australian emir, the Indonesian Abdul Rahim Ayub. Stories abounded of how, in the 1980s, she had been desperate to join the jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan, but the conservative menfolk of JI would not allow it. She had finally gone off and done
it anyway.

  For the next four years I tried to track the elusive Rabiah down. I sent her letters and a copy of my book, in which she was briefly mentioned. I knocked on the doors of flats and houses where she had lived, only to find each time that she had moved on. (She has never lived in one place for more than three years.) I contacted her friends and acquaintances and asked them to pass on messages. It was all to no avail. She had no wish whatsoever to speak to me, or to any journalist for that matter. By the time we finally met at the coffee shop in Bankstown, her view had scarcely softened. She was there under sufferance, at the urging of a friend who believed it was time she told her side of the story.

  For my part, I was sure it was a story I wanted to tell. I had spent the past four years reporting on terrorism; or, more precisely, the violent struggle being waged worldwide by Islamic militants, some of whom have resorted to terrorism. But what compelled my continuing interest was not the phenomenon of terrorism itself or the appalling details of the individual terrorist acts. What held me fascinated—and still mystified—were the personal stories of the people who have become involved in the jihadist movement, either on its periphery or at its core. Who are these people? Where do they come from? What is it they believe in? And what do they want? Rabiah’s story intrigued me. Here was a woman as Australian as me, who had become a footsoldier in the global jihad. Why? It seemed to me that unravelling Rabiah’s story might provide some answers to these confounding questions, and perhaps help us understand the magnetism of the Islamist cause, which has made it among the most momentous religious and political movements of our time and spawned some of the most intractable conflicts on the planet. My task now was to persuade her to tell her story.

  After venting her hostility, Rabiah relented enough—still under sufferance—to agree to meet me again. Eventually we began meeting once or twice a week, which we did for well over a year. Finally she agreed to co-operate in the writing of this book, which could not otherwise have been written. She agreed because I persuaded her I would tell her story honestly and with integrity, in a way that was faithful both to her life and convictions, and to my journalist ethics. Her condition was that it had to present her side of the story. Mine was that it had to be true, warts and all, and rigorously factual. It was an uneasy relationship at first. We argued often, about world politics, the ‘war on terror’, the tenets of the Islamic faith (about which I knew nothing, she hastened to point out). She sometimes shouted and harangued me, occasionally wept, tried continually to convert me, and once or twice hung up the phone in my ear. Eventually, she began to trust me, and I began to admire and respect her, not only for her dogged resolve and unflinching conviction, but for her personal qualities as well. I found her funny, warm and compassionate, a great storyteller with an enormous memory for detail, a wry sense of humour, and a strong streak of self-deprecation. She can also be obstreperous and intimidating. The hundreds of hours we spent together were certainly never dull.

  I have endeavoured as far as possible to corroborate Rabiah’s story, and to ensure that its crucial historical and political context is accurate and factual. I traipsed around her hometown of Mudgee and her teen haunts on Sydney’s northern beaches to find relatives, schoolmates, old boyfriends and former neighbours who could illuminate her story. In June and July 2008, I travelled to Indonesia and Afghanistan to visit the locations that feature in her journey and seek out colleagues and mentors who witnessed her role in the Islamist movement. Notwithstanding my efforts, parts of Rabiah’s story are impossible to verify; in some instances I have omitted details I could not confirm; in others I have relied on her account. There are also gaps in her story; facts and details that she has not told me, either to guard her own privacy or that of family, friends and colleagues, or to protect people whom she fears might suffer from the exposure, or for other reasons of her own. I have changed some names throughout the book, either at Rabiah’s request, or that of individuals, or at my own discretion. These are explained in the notes at the end.

  As a journalist, it has at times been a difficult line to walk, between honouring my professional obligations—truth, fairness, rigour, the pursuit of facts ‘without fear or favour’—and honouring the leap of faith she made by entrusting me with her story. Rabiah is a controversial figure. Some of her views are confronting and extreme. They are her views, not mine, but I have chosen to present them as they are, and not to judge her for them. That I leave to readers. Some readers may find me too sympathetic. If I seem so, it is because I respect her right to hold beliefs and opinions that are alien to mine, and admire her tenacity in doing so. It is also because I felt that the normal imperative of journalistic objectivity was less compelling than my undertaking to present an account that is true to Rabiah’s experience and beliefs. And finally it is because I believe that such a remarkable story is best allowed to speak for itself.

  PART 1

  ROBYN

  1

  ROBIN MERRY HOOD

  Mudgee, New South Wales, 1953–1965

  Sunday 2 August 1953 was a day of noteworthy events, chronicled faithfully as always in the Mudgee Guardian.

  Another atomic weapons test to be held at the Woomera rocket range. Three men charged with sedition after a raid on ‘red haunts’ in Sydney including the printery of the Communist Review. Man tells the divorce court that his bride of eleven days knocked him out with a pot of rabbit stew.

  And there on page two, tucked between the district cricket results and an advertisement for Kellett’s Ironmongery, was a small but eagerly awaited item of news: ‘A bonny baby daughter has come to brighten the home of Mr and Mrs Jim Hutchinson of Mudgee’.

  Jim and Bessie had been trying for years, since the birth of their son George, now aged seven. Bessie had had four miscarriages and another son, Wayne, born with a hole in his heart, who died at four months. Herself an only daughter, Bessie had longed for a baby girl.

  ‘What do you want to call your sister?’ Bessie asked George, who was turning somersaults on the front lawn as his parents arrived home from Mudgee district hospital with their precious bundle.

  ‘Robin Merry Hood’, replied George, whose hero was the dashing brigand of Sherwood Forest. Bessie laughed. ‘Why Mary?’ she asked, not realising that George meant Merry, as in merry men.

  ‘So everyone will know she’s a girl.’

  In keeping, more or less, with young George’s suggestion, the baby was named Robyn Mary Hutchinson. The story of how her name was chosen is a favourite and oft-told anecdote. ‘I always loved Robin Hood’, she says. ‘The principle of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor—not the stealing part, but just the idea of the rich having to give to the poor—really appealed to me.’

  Like the legendary Nottinghamshire of mediaeval times, Mudgee in the 1950s was a community of haves and have-nots. Pegged out in the 1830s by the colonial planner Robert Hoddle, and enriched by the New South Wales gold rush, it was a town of wide streets, stately Victorian buildings and leafy parks. When the gold was exhausted, the district’s mineral-rich soils and the completion of a rail line to Sydney ensured that it continued to flourish as a producer of fine wool, fat lambs, vegetables, dairy products and wine. By the turn of the century, Mudgee was a bastion of the squattocracy, lorded over by a clutch of wealthy families such as the Loneragans and Kelletts who ran stores, mines and hotels. The divide was keenly felt by working-class folk like the Hutchinsons. ‘There was a right side of the tracks and a wrong side, and we lived on the wrong side’, Robyn would later recall.

  Her first recollections were of playing in the yard of the family’s home at 51 Horatio Street, a lemon-coloured, cement-rendered bungalow with a Hills Hoist and a treehouse built in a huge old eucalypt out the back. Thursdays were washdays, when Bessie would light a fire under the big copper tub set in bricks in the laundry, and stir the household linen in boiling water and Sunlight soap until it was spotless.

  ‘If I close my eyes I can still the see the house and the white
sheets flapping on the clothes line, and Maggie swinging back and forth on the sheets’, Robyn remembers. ‘Maggie’ was her magpie, the first of many wild animals she tamed as pets. ‘I have this thing with animals. I think I’ve always liked animals more than humans, and I got this magpie when I was two years old. It had a damaged wing and we nursed it back, and then it wouldn’t leave. I used to dress him up and put little hats on him, and play cowboys and Indians with him.’

  When Bessie came out to unpeg her clean linen from the washing line, she would often find a row of dirty claw marks along the bottom of the sheets, and Maggie dangling like a feathered trapeze artist, swinging back and forth in the breeze.

  Jim worked two jobs to provide for his young family. By day he was a salesman in the drapery department at Loneragan’s department store on a salary of eight pounds a week, and by night a ‘steward’—the term used then for a bar tender—pulling beers in the Neptune Bar at the Hotel Mudgee. He was fond of a beer himself and would often stagger home to Horatio Street three sheets to the wind, after a night of bowls at his regular haunt, the Soldiers Club. Jim and a mate were champions in the men’s pairs, in which they played ‘like infuriated soldier ants’ to take the trophy, the Mudgee Guardian reported.

  Jim and Bessie had married in Sydney in June 1945 at the tail end of World War II, as Lord Mountbatten was declaring victory in Burma and US B-29 bombers were bombarding Osaka in Japan, a prelude to the atomic bombings that would end the war. Bessie was a dark-haired, high-spirited Mudgee girl who had left school in sixth grade and got a job in the coal town of Lithgow. She worked on the production line at the small arms factory, which made Bren machine guns during the war. Jim hadn’t been Bessie’s first choice. At the height of the war she had fallen in love with an American officer whom she’d met at a dance hall in Sydney while he was on shore leave. They’d become engaged, and at war’s end he had bought her a ticket to fly home with him to the United States. But Bessie’s mother, Lurline, was bed-ridden with heart disease and Bessie had to choose between leaving with her young fiancé and staying with her dying mother. She chose to stay, nursing her mother until her death at the age of forty-nine, four years after the war. From then on, she wore the air of a woman whose hopes had been dashed.