The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  The foreign jihadists in Afghanistan still called themselves ‘Afghan-Arabs’, the term coined in the 1980s for those who joined the jihad against the Soviets. They regarded bin Laden as their emir. But according to Rabiah, most were there simply because they wanted to live in an Islamic state. ‘I don’t want anybody to read this book and think, who’s she trying to kid— they’re just nice, sweet, innocent people who reach out to the stars. People like me went through hardship that you can’t imagine simply to live under Islam. The picture that’s painted of Afghanistan is one of a seething mass of deranged people who went there because they wanted to take over the White House or stop people wearing bikinis on Bondi beach. It’s absolutely ludicrous. We were normal people who lived normal lives and did normal things. Going to Afghanistan was not some diabolical plan to take over the world. It was simply a choice.’

  In rural Jalalabad, which was populated largely by ethnic Pashtun accustomed to an austere tribal lifestyle, the transition to Taliban rule had been relatively calm. Unlike in cosmopolitan Kabul, there were no cane-wielding zealots from the Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice squad patrolling the streets, lashing out at men caught with Western-style haircuts or women who rode in taxis unaccompanied by a mahram (husband or male relative) as chaperone. In Jalalabad a more benign order prevailed. While the international community was denouncing the Taliban over practices the West deemed barbaric, in Rabiah’s view it was just as an Islamic state should be. ‘You walked out on the street, and there was nothing that offended you as a Muslim—no nakedness, no music, nothing that was forbidden. When you walked out on the street you were respected and men would avert their gaze. If there was a group of men talking on the street and they saw a woman approaching, they would move out of the way. It was where a Muslim belonged.’

  Using a rudimentary kit she had brought from Australia and medicines imported from Pakistan, Rabiah set up a makeshift clinic in her friend Umm Sofia’s home. Word got around that a new ‘doctor’ had arrived and women began turning up for treatment. As a result Rabiah was offered a house by the local Taliban leadership and work in the city’s hospital, a Saudi-built facility that had been handsomely equipped but had long since run out of funds for maintenance or staff wages.

  But Rabiah had no intention of making her Afghan home in Jalalabad. With no husband to support her, she needed to earn an income. The relatively affluent foreign population of Jalalabad was too small to support her, and the native Afghans could not afford luxuries such as penicillin and anti-malarials. Moreover, the summer heat in Jalalabad was severe, and there was no school. On coming to power the Taliban had shut down schools across the country—boys’ and girls’ schools—claiming they had to introduce a segregated system and educate a new generation of teachers with proper Islamic training. The Afghan-Arabs had begun to open their own schools but there were none in Jalalabad and home-schooling the children was occupying most of Rabiah’s time. Mustafa and Ilyas attended Quran lessons but spent most of their days swimming in the river, riding bikes and hunting snakes with their air rifles. To Rabiah, Jalalabad felt like a backwater, remote from the real work of building an Islamic state, which was being done in the political capital Kabul and the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in the country’s south.

  Seeking guidance on how she could be most useful, Rabiah composed a letter to the emir of the Afghan-Arabs—her former benefactor in Pabbi, Osama bin Laden:

  Dear brother, (she wrote)

  I don’t know if you remember me. My name is Umm Mohammed Australie. I used to live in Pabbi. I have now returned to Afghanistan and would like to continue my work in the medical field. I don’t know whether it would be more beneficial for me to be in Kabul or Kandahar and I ask for your guidance.

  Your sister in Islam,

  Umm Mohammed Australie.

  By 2000, when Rabiah penned her missive, bin Laden was no longer a mere humble supporter of the Afghan cause. Shortly after arriving in Afghanistan he had announced his Declaration of Jihad against the United States, followed in 1998 by the formation of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders. In February of that year he declared a fatwah decreeing it was the duty of all Muslims ‘to fight and kill Americans and their allies, whether civilians or military’. He instructed his followers: ‘Tear them to shreds. Destroy their economy, burn their companies, ruin their welfare, sink their ships, and kill them on land, sea and air.’ Nine weeks later al Qaeda staged its first major attack, when simultaneous truck bombs destroyed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and injuring hundreds. In November 1998 bin Laden was indicted by a US Grand Jury on terrorism charges and a US$5 million bounty was placed on his head.

  Rabiah claims that when she composed her letter to bin Laden, she was offering her services not to the accused terrorist, but to the benefactor and financier who had the funds and wherewithal to facilitate the creation of an Islamic state. ‘The reason I wrote to Osama was because he was known as the leader and organiser of the Afghan-Arabs, it’s as simple as that. It wasn’t a case of “Osama, you are my leader, direct me to where I have to go”. It was a case of how can I be most useful.’

  She says she can’t recall being aware at this stage that bin Laden had been blamed for the African embassy bombings. However, she does recall the cruise missile attacks carried out in retaliation by the United States, which killed sleeping villagers in Afghanistan and wiped out a medicine factory in Sudan, helping to transform bin Laden from a little-known jihadist into a popular hero throughout the Muslim world. Rabiah shared the widely held view of bin Laden as a courageous champion of oppressed Muslims, standing up to the West. ‘There is a hadith that says the greatest jihad is speaking the word of truth to a tyrannical leader—that’s how I saw the declaration of war that Osama made. I saw it as a warning to the United States.’

  Rabiah gave her letter to a ‘sister’ in the Afghan-Arab community whose husband presumably arranged for it to be forwarded to Kandahar. A fortnight later, bin Laden’s response arrived. She doesn’t recall whether it came in the form of a letter or simply a message, but the gist of it was this:

  Yes, sister. I remember you. Welcome to Afghanistan. My advice to you if you want to open a clinic is that you will probably find Kabul is the best place for you to go, because the majority of Afghan-Arabs are there and would benefit from what you want to do.

  Within days of receiving bin Laden’s reply, Rabiah and the children were in another battered taxi lurching along the treacherous gash of highway carved through the peaks of the Hindu Kush. In the 1970s when Afghanistan was a leg on the hippy trail that took Western backpackers from India to Europe, the journey from Jalalabad to Kabul took two and a half hours. But two decades of war had pounded the route to rubble, and in 2000 the trip took five times that long. Old men and boys with shovels waited by the roadside to heap mounds of gravel into the gaping holes in the road, in return for a few coins thrown from the windows of passing cars. ‘That’s a journey I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy’, Rabiah recounts. ‘It’s not a road with potholes, it’s potholes with a road—and I’m talking about craters. The road was as wide as this carpet (indicating a modest rug in her Lakemba home) and if you looked out the window, the door of the taxi was almost level with the edge of the cliff, and there was a drop of thousands of metres to the bottom of the valley. That was scary. That’s when you know if God has written that you are going to die—because if he hasn’t, then you survive that road.’

  Their destination in Kabul was the home of an Iraqi family whom Rabiah had known in her Pabbi days when their children had been classmates at Abdullah Azzam’s Al Ansar school. They stayed with this family until they found what passed for a home of their own; a vacant house in the relatively new suburb of Karti Parwan that had been evacuated and apparently ransacked amidst the civil chaos in Kabul. The windows had been smashed and the doors jemmied off their frames. There was no electricity or running water but there was a well in the yard, and Rabi
ah sent the boys out to collect discarded plastic sheets and hessian bags that she used to seal the windows. For Rabiah it brought back fond memories of her dirt-floored childhood home at Wollar, but her children found little to relish in their new circumstances. Petite Aminah was distraught, recalling later, ‘If it was left to me I’d just sit in a corner and cry till someone took me out of here’.

  Their street in Karti Parwan was home to a cluster of foreign families who had congregated in Kabul since the Taliban’s takeover. Among them was an Egyptian-Canadian aid organiser, Ahmed Khadr, known by his kuniya as Abu Abdurahman al Kanadi (‘the Canadian’). Khadr was a well-known figure in jihad-ist circles, and now became Rabiah’s patron in Kabul.

  Khadr had grown up in Egypt but migrated to Canada in his twenties to study computer programming at the University of Ottawa, where he obtained a masters degree. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan he travelled to Pakistan to work as a volunteer in the Afghan refugee camps, joining a Canadian-based charity in Peshawar, Human Concern International. In the mid 1980s Khadr and his wife Maha Elsamneh moved their family to Peshawar, but returned regularly to Canada to raise funds for their projects, which included a hospital in Afghanistan, seven medical clinics in the refugee camps and an orphanage for 400 children called ‘Hope Village’.

  In Peshawar, Khadr worked with al Qaeda co-founders Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden, and became a close friend and ally of bin Laden’s eventual deputy, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al Zawahiri, who was working at the Red Crescent hospital where Khadr’s wife also worked as a volunteer. Khadr would later be described as a ‘founding member’ of al Qaeda. However, most accounts suggest the politics of the jihad was not his first interest. A journalist who met Khadr at this time described him as ‘a man of respect’ who seemed ‘entirely humanitarian and not ideological at all’. Khadr was arrested in 1995 after his son-in-law was linked to a bombing at the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan. Khadr was charged with aiding terrorism but investigators admitted they ‘did not have much evidence’ against him, and under pressure from the Canadian government Pakistan dropped the charges and released him.

  Rabiah had first met the Khadr family in Peshawar while she and they were living in Hayatabad in 1994, and their children were all attending Abdullah Azzam’s school. Inspired by Umm Mohammed Azzam’s ‘house of sewing’, Khadr’s wife, Maha, had set up her own charity for Afghan war widows, providing sewing machines and fabric so they could earn an income making quilts and clothing.

  After the rise of the Taliban, the ‘Kanadis’ shifted to Jalalabad where Khadr established an orphanage for Afghan boys. His family moved into the bin Laden compound where Khadr’s daughter Zaynab played with bin Laden’s girls while their brothers rode horses. Khadr’s sons were later sent for military training in an al Qaeda camp; one of them, Abdurahman, testified in a subsequent court case in Canada that the intention was not to ‘go after America’ but to defend Islamic countries from attack.

  When bin Laden moved to Kandahar, the Khadr family shifted to Karti Parwan in Kabul, from where Khadr ran his new charity, Health and Education Projects International, which built wells, schools and orphanages. Rabiah was especially drawn to the Khadr women, who were oddities like herself. ‘None of the Arab women worked. The only ones I knew who worked were me, the wife of Ahmed Khadr, and Zaynab, his daughter.’ Zaynab was a strong-willed twenty-one year old who wanted to study medicine and wouldn’t leave men’s work to the men, by Rabiah’s account. ‘I remember once in Kabul we were trying to light the bukhar (stove), and we didn’t know the pipe that takes the smoke out was blocked. Zaynab threw petrol in, and the fire exploded outwards and burned off her eyebrows.’

  Rabiah’s family often visited the Khadr family’s home. On one occasion the Khadr boys invited her sons to watch a DVD of the Hollywood blockbuster King Kong, which would certainly not have been deemed halal (permissible) by the Taliban.

  ‘Why are you letting your children watch that rubbish?’ Rabiah demanded of Ahmed Khadr.

  ‘Give me an Islamic reason why they shouldn’t’, Khadr replied.

  ‘Because it’s shirk (disbelief). What is this—a giant gorilla saves the world? It should be Allah that saves the world!’

  Ahmed Khadr laughed. ‘Yeah, yeah, Umm Mohammed. It’s just imagination. It’s not reality. If they’re not allowed to use their imaginations, how can they tell the difference between what’s real and what’s imagined?’

  Rabiah couldn’t fault his explanation, but in her household King Kong remained haram (forbidden).

  Under the auspices of Khadr’s Health and Education Projects International (HEP), Rabiah began work on a range of proposals, such as the construction of wells for fresh drinking water and a medical clinic to be set up in a new girls’ school that the Khadrs were planning to open near Kabul, despite the Taliban’s objections.

  Khadr gave Rabiah a letter of introduction; or, to be more precise, he gave her a blank letterhead and she later filled it in herself:

  To whom it may concern,

  Subject: Employment with HEP

  This is to certify that Ms Rabiah Hutchinson is working as a medical officer in HEP’s Afghanistan Program. Her duty includes:

  co-ordinating HEP Medical Programs

  liaising with other NGOs and government departments

  representing HEP in all designated tasks, e.g. Public Education, Fund Raising, etc.

  We request that you extend all possible assistance to facilitate her assignment.

  (Signed:) Mr A Khadr, Director

  Ahmed Khadr was by this stage well known to the international authorities, because of his connections with al Qaeda and his channelling of funds to Afghanistan. In 1999 the British government urged the United Nations to add Khadr’s name to a list of individuals believed to finance terrorism. American prosecutors would later allege that some of the money raised in Canada—which Khadr’s son estimated at C$70 000—was used to support military facilities such as al Qaeda’s Khalden training camp. Abdurahman Khadr testified that clothes and medicine bought with donated money were sent to the Khalden camp, but denied his father’s charity financed military training.

  Ahmed Khadr was killed in the aftermath of September 11 when Pakistani security forces attacked a safehouse where he was staying in the tribal zone of South Waziristan in October 2003. One of his sons, Abdul Karim, was shot in the spine and paralysed. Another son, Omar, was captured in a separate raid by American forces and accused of throwing a grenade that killed a US serviceman, although documents released by the Pentagon showed there was no proof that it was he who threw the grenade. Fifteen years old when he was captured, Omar Khadr was later transferred to Guantánamo Bay where he was detained for more than six years, charged with war crimes and supporting terrorism. At the beginning of 2009, he was reportedly the youngest detainee still being held at Guantánamo Bay.

  Rabiah rejects the assertion that her patron Ahmed Khadr was an ‘al Qaeda financer’ as accused. ‘I had access to that money. It was not “al Qaeda financing”. It was for building orphanages and clinics and wells. Anyone who had a project, they would finance it.’

  In late 2000 the Khadrs were about to leave on an extended trip to Peshawar, and invited Rabiah and her family to stay in their Karti Parwan home in their absence. Rabiah and the children moved in after Khadr and his wife Maha left for Peshawar. Their daughter Zaynab was still in the house, preparing to travel to Peshawar separately with her daughter Sofia, who was about ten months old. However, their plans were thrown into confusion when Rabiah noticed that the child had a serious medical problem.

  ‘As soon as I saw the little girl I knew there was something wrong’, she says. ‘She had an enlarged head. The family didn’t know there was anything wrong with her. The grandmother said, “It’s hereditary, big heads run in the family”. But I could tell by the circumference of her head that the actual growth was above the eye sockets. It wasn’t just a big head, it was abnormal growth in particular areas of the hea
d.’

  Rabiah believed Sofia had either a tumour or fluid on the brain. She knew that neither tests nor treatment for these were available in Afghanistan. The child would have to be taken abroad. On her advice, Zaynab took the baby to a Peshawar paediatrician who diagnosed fluid on the brain and recommended extensive tests, a biopsy and surgery.

  ‘When the family got back, we spoke about it and I decided I thought it would be better for them to take the child to Canada’, says Rabiah. This was problematic as Zaynab and Sofia would have to fly to Canada alone without a mahram (husband or male relative) to escort them. Zaynab was divorced from her husband, and the family now feared that Khadr and his sons might be detained if they set foot on Canadian soil. Normally Zaynab would be forbidden from travelling alone. But the family believed the urgency of the child’s condition warranted an exception and resolved to seek a ruling from an Islamic cleric to that effect.