The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  For Rabiah, the hardships of life under the Taliban were simply part of the sacrifices required to build an Islamic state. The restrictions that others found unbearably oppressive were for her a minor inconvenience at worst. She was quite comfortable going about veiled, and as a ‘medical officer’ she was exempt from the ban on women working. She regarded the regime’s brutal enforcement as the somewhat overzealous application of means to a worthy end.

  ‘There are many things the Taliban were doing that were wrong, for example walking around with bamboo sticks and if they saw someone smoking giving them a good whack—that was not practised in the time of the Prophet. Some of the Taliban were illiterate farmers who couldn’t read or write; they were just Afghans who put on black turbans, and often what was implemented was the footsoldiers’ interpretation. That’s what the Western press picked up on—people who did things that were unacceptable. But it was not something I saw as a major problem because it was temporary.’

  Rabiah saw the Taliban’s Afghanistan as the embryo of an Islamic state, which would necessarily be perfect once it was in place. To that end, she had no problem with the severe hudud laws, which provided for the stoning of adulterers and severing of the hands of thieves. She believed simply that these were punishments prescribed by God and therefore must be enforced. And she saw definite upsides to the Taliban’s rough justice and its enforcement of women’s ‘rights’.

  ‘What was evident in the time of the Taliban was how much safer it was, and how much more women were respected. Previously women couldn’t even walk from A to B without fear of being raped or kidnapped or killed. They wouldn’t even go to the markets. In the time of the Taliban, all that disappeared.’ She was not alone in this view. A Swedish aid worker reported to a conference on Afghanistan held in Stockholm in 1999: ‘The majority of Afghans south of Kabul would most probably agree that the Taliban, although not as popular today as when they came, are better for the people, their security and welfare, compared to what was there before them and that there is no real alternative but anarchy’.

  However, after five years of Taliban rule, Afghanistan remained a humanitarian disaster zone. It had the largest refugee population in the world with 3.6 million people displaced. Renewed fighting and a long drought had destroyed 70 per cent of the country’s livestock and half its arable land, leaving people in some areas reportedly eating grass and rats, or selling their daughters for food. Its plight was compounded by sanctions imposed on the Taliban for harbouring bin Laden. The United Nations and many Western NGOs had shut down or curtailed their aid programs in protest at the Taliban’s policies towards women. Islamic NGOs such as Ahmed Khadr’s Health and Education Projects were left to fill the void—which they did with unconcealed disdain for the UN.

  ‘They used to live in air-conditioned compounds and drive around in $40 000 four-wheel drives which they had trucked in’, says Rabiah. ‘Their wages were astronomical. They had a whole street of shops—they called it Supermarket Street—where they sold Rice Bubbles, Worcestershire sauce, toilet paper and bottled water. With the amount of money the UN had, you could have rebuilt Afghanistan fifty times.’

  Rabiah worked closely with the Taliban regime, mainly through the Public Health Minister Mohammed Abbas, an English-speaker whom she met in hospital while having her appendix out. Like many of his government colleagues, Abbas had little time for his ministerial work. The Taliban was still fighting to defeat Ahmed Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance, and Abbas was a member of the military shura (council) and thus was needed on the battlefield. The aid workers who dealt with him found he would disappear on military duties for months at a time, then return to resume his supervision of the country’s appalling health system. Rabiah proposed to Abbas that she would teach English to the female hospital staff, and then enlist them in voluntary literacy programs to promote the education of women and girls. She says the curriculum she began devising drew Abbas’s enthusiasm because it would also include a course in Islamic studies, based on the Taliban’s preferred Hanafi school of jurisprudence. Rabiah says her role as an ‘honorary doctor’ gave her easy access to the powers that be. ‘I could see the directors of hospitals whenever I wanted to, and through them I could submit proposals to the Taliban. I would initiate projects, raise funds, try to get support for them. I didn’t actually work “for” the Taliban—I didn’t work for anybody. There were lots of aid agencies doing projects. If you put up a proposal and a plan you could get funding.’

  Despite the withdrawal of most Western NGOs in protest at the Taliban’s policies, there were still funds available from other sources. The Saudi charity Al Haramein—which was later listed by the UN as an affiliate of al Qaeda—approached Rabiah to establish a state-of-the-art medical clinic. Separately a Libyan group proposed that she help set up a new hospital. However, both projects were for the Afghan-Arabs rather than the Afghan people, and Rabiah opposed the idea of a two-tiered service that would provide superior health care for the well-heeled immigrants while leaving the Afghan system destitute. She calculated that if every Arab family donated US$10 per month, they could raise enough to transform the standard of care for foreigners and Afghans alike. ‘Instead of the Arabs having their own hospital, which was what tended to happen, I wanted to have them pay their money to utilise the existing facility, so they would be entitled to a better standard of care, but the money would then go back into the hospital and would raise the level of care for the Afghans too. Otherwise, what were we giving back to Afghanistan? Sure, we were maymon (guests), but were we going to remain guests forever? And isn’t it one of the principles of setting up an Islamic state that it belongs to all Muslims regardless of race, colour or economic disposition?’

  For Rabiah, Afghanistan was not a desperate basketcase, but a perfect society in the making. She had finally found the place where she felt she truly belonged and could play a useful and valued role. She was so sure of this that she planned to apply for Afghan citizenship as soon as the Taliban started issuing passports to foreigners.

  Little did she know that life in Afghanistan was about to be turned upside down. In these months before September 2001, Rabiah and her cohorts lived an insular life, largely cut off from the outside world, and either oblivious or in stubborn denial about the historic tide that was about to overtake them. ‘It was very easy to shut out the outside world—we had no television, no internet, no telephone. We used to get an English newspaper once a week from Pakistan, and sometimes the Times magazine. It was really your own world. It was easy to forget about all the hostility to Afghanistan, that there were people who’d like nothing more than to wipe it off the face of the Earth. We were always aware Afghanistan could be attacked at any time, my son was always reminding me, but I chose to forget it.’

  In March 2001, Rabiah was at home in Karti Parwan when an unexpected visitor showed up. It was mid morning and she had gone next door to a neighbour’s house to listen to a favourite CD of Quran recitations. The rhythmic chanting was suddenly interrupted by a loud voice in the street outside: ‘Yeah, I think this is the one!’ a man with an unmistakeable Australian twang was calling out.

  ‘I thought I was going mad—I could hear this Aussie accent’, Rabiah recounts. ‘And I thought, I know that voice.’

  The house’s windows were painted white on the inside in keeping with a Taliban edict to ensure women could not be seen through the windows of their homes. Rabiah scratched a hole in the white paint and peered down at the street. There, conversing loudly with an Afghani taxi driver, was Jack ‘Jihad’ Thomas, the husband of her Indonesian friend Maryati.

  ‘I looked out through this little bit of paint I’d scratched off, and there was Jack in one of those hats, singing out at the top of his voice— I could not believe my eyes.’ Thomas was wearing an Afghani pakul, the large flat cloth hat that had once been de rigueur for aspiring mujahidin. ‘In the first jihad everyone wore them. But in the time of the Taliban they were the hats that Ahmed Shah Massoud and the No
rthern Alliance wore, and no one in their right mind would wear one in Kabul. How he didn’t get himself killed I’ll never know.’

  Rabiah went up to the rooftop to find her sons.

  ‘Mustafa, Aamu (uncle) Jihad is outside!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know, Aamu Jihad—Maryati’s husband. And you’d better get him off the street because he’s got a Massoudi hat on and he’s screaming at the top of his voice.’

  When they brought him inside, Thomas explained that Maryati and their baby daughter were waiting in Pakistan. His plan was to go back and get them and bring them to stay with Rabiah and her family in Kabul. (Thomas had stopped on his way in Jalalabad and met Rabiah’s patron Ahmed Khadr, who presumably provided directions to her house.)

  ‘You can’t stay with me because I’m a woman alone’, Rabiah told Thomas.

  ‘What are you talking about? We’ve come all this way to show you the baby!’

  ‘OK, go back and get Maryati and I promise I’ll find you somewhere to stay.’

  When Thomas returned with his wife and daughter, Rabiah arranged for them to stay at a Turkish guesthouse nearby. Thomas was still offended that after travelling across the world from Australia they were seemingly not welcome in their friend’s home. ‘Jack didn’t get it. He wasn’t impressed. He thought I’d disrespected them’, says Rabiah.

  A naive adventurer from the western suburbs of Melbourne, Thomas was eager to fight with the Taliban, to help fortify the new Afghan Islamic state. At this stage the Taliban controlled 90 per cent of the country but Massoud’s Northern Alliance, which was bolstered by Western backing, had stubbornly clung to its stronghold in the Panjshir Valley, north of Kabul, where fighting continued. Rabiah wrote a letter to vouch for Thomas and introduced him to one of her neighbours, who Thomas says was a commander with the Taliban at Bagram and ‘seemed to know Osama bin Laden’. Thomas was dispatched to al Qaeda’s Camp Faruq near Kandahar for the three-month beginners’ training course, which was mandatory for foreign volunteers. His wife and daughter stayed with Rabiah while he was away. After completing his training, Thomas visited Kandahar to seek assistance with accommodation and living costs for his family. He met with bin Laden’s lieutenant, Dr Ayman al Zawahiri, to ask his advice on obtaining work in Afghanistan. Zawahiri suggested he apply to Ahmed Khadr for a job at his orphanage.

  During their meeting, Zawahiri took the opportunity to ask Thomas about his friend Umm Mohammed Australie. The al Qaeda deputy and chief physician had an important project, which he needed to delegate to a skilled and trusted woman.

  ‘They wanted to organise a women’s hospital’, Thomas later explained, and Zawahiri wanted Rabiah to run it. The first Rabiah learned of this proposition was when she received a message from her friend Umm Fatima, Zawahiri’s wife.

  ‘She sent a message for me to come and visit her. When I got there she said they wanted to build a hospital in Kandahar, and her husband had said he would like me to be involved, and that I should apply in writing.’ She subsequently received a letter from Zawahiri himself, setting out his idea for a ‘state-of-the-art facility’ in Kandahar, with Rabiah to be assigned the position of director.

  However, Rabiah was unenthusiastic about Zawahiri’s plan. Like the earlier concepts put forward by Al Haramein and the Libyans, the idea was for a top-flight health service for the relatively well-off foreigners in al Qaeda’s circle, while providing nothing for the more needy Afghans. Moreover, Rabiah was reluctant to move to Kandahar because there was no school there. She says she didn’t reply to Zawahiri’s letter and the hospital never eventuated because the September 11 attacks occurred about three months later.

  The job offer from Ayman al Zawahiri was powerful evidence of Rabiah’s status as a trusted confidante of the al Qaeda leadership, and would later make her a high-priority target of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. (The Australian authorities learned of it from Jack Thomas during his interrogation in Pakistan after his arrest there in January 2003.)

  Around the same time as Zawahiri’s job offer, Rabiah received another proposal, of the marital kind. In keeping with the custom, the proposition was not made to her directly but relayed by a neighbour through her son.

  ‘Someone’s interested in marrying your mother’, the intermediary announced.

  Mustafa knew already what Rabiah’s response would be. ‘No thanks, she’s right’, the boy replied.

  But her wooer proved persistent, sending the intermediary back, until finally she agreed to entertain his proposal.

  Rabiah’s suitor was a legendary figure in jihadist circles— a veteran mujahidin commander, strategist, author and intellectual who had risen to become a senior adviser to the al Qaeda leadership. His name was Mustafa Hamid but he was universally known as Abu Walid al Misri. (Al Misri means ‘the Egyptian’.) Hamid was born in 1945 in Minya al-Qamh, Egypt, joined the Muslim Brotherhood Youth Scouts as a six year old, and graduated as a mechanical engineer from Alexandria University. He worked as a Mercedes Benz mechanic in Kuwait, flirted with Marxism, turned his hand to journalism, and then had his epiphany when Israel attacked Lebanon in 1978, which prompted him to join the fight for a Palestinian state. He later said he ‘did not feel very religious’ at this time. His religious awakening came the following year after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when he became one of the first Arabs to join the Afghan mujahidin. As he put it himself, he ‘dreamt of jihad spreading from Afghanistan to the rest of Islamic and Arabic countries’.

  While fighting with the mujahidin in Afghanistan, Abu Walid styled himself as a war correspondent, filing regular reports for Islamic magazines in the Middle East on the Afghan struggle. He said later he saw it as a ‘great opportunity to spread the word of jihad in Afghanistan around the Islamic countries’. A conscientious diarist, he later turned the extensive notes and diaries he kept in the trenches into a series of books chronicling the history of the mujahidin. His writings provide an invaluable insider’s account of the jihad. Unlike many of his cohorts, Abu Walid refused to romanticise their struggle, providing a rigorous and often scathing commentary on the mujahidin groups’ leadership and strategic direction, or lack thereof. He had little time for self-serving warlords such as Hekmatyar and Sayyaf and considered the movement ‘full of worthless characters, outlaws, hypocrites and opportunists’.

  In the 1980s Abu Walid was a senior commander and respected military strategist under the mujahidin warlord Jalaludin Haqqani, and worked closely alongside Osama bin Laden and his military deputy, Mohammed Atef (aka Abu Hafs al Misri), a fellow Egyptian and close comrade. In the 1990s, while bin Laden was in Sudan, Abu Walid was left in charge of al Qaeda’s remaining infrastructure in Afghanistan, principally its network of training camps, and became the emir of Camp Faruq. By 1998, three years before Rabiah met him, he had been made a member of the governing shura (council) of al Qaeda, a committee of senior leaders who advised bin Laden. He continued to play a key role in the organisation’s training program, which included a ‘political course’ he supervised in February 2001. Maintaining his secondary career as a media commentator and writer, Abu Walid also held the position of director of the Kandahar bureau of the Qatar-based television network, al Jazeera, perhaps explaining the easy access to al Qaeda for which the broadcaster became known.

  When Rabiah learned the identity of the man seeking to marry her, she could hardly help but be impressed. ‘Everybody knew Abu Walid al Misri. He was well known, he was famous. His advice especially on matters of strategy was sought constantly.’

  He was also extremely personable—‘well-mannered, relaxed and amusing’, according to someone else who knew him. He spoke fluent English and was extremely well read, referring in casual conversation to items from Western culture or articles he had seen in the New York Times or on the BBC. Jack Thomas had met him and reported back to Rabiah that he was ‘a really nice guy’. Thomas found Abu Walid humble and soft-spoken and thought he would be a ‘calming influence’
on the ‘fiery’ Rabiah. The al Qaeda leadership apparently considered them a good match. Abu Walid told Rabiah later that it was his friend Abu Hafs, bin Laden’s military chief, who suggested they wed, though it’s unclear what he knew of her as Rabiah says she did not meet either Abu Hafs or his wife.

  In any event, they struck up an easy rapport when they met at Rabiah’s home, she on one side of a curtain, he on the other.

  ‘Abu Walid was the type of person that most people who knew him liked him’, Rabiah says. ‘He was extremely intelligent and very easygoing. He was also very liberal—very much a modernist.’ Rabiah had been under pressure to choose a husband since arriving in Afghanistan, and there were good practical reasons to marry—the need for financial support, the requirement for a mahram so she could travel, not to mention that she was lonely. Abu Walid was an impressive candidate all round, not least because he was unlikely to get in her way. ‘I thought that because he was a journalist and an intellectual, and because his first wife was known to have more freedom than a lot of other Arab women, I just thought it wouldn’t be restrictive’, she says.

  Abu Walid already had a wife, to whom he was still married. She was his cousin, Wafa, with whom he had seven children including a son who was killed at fourteen when their home at Camp Faruq was bombed by Soviet forces. Wafa was herself a well-known figure in jihadist circles. There were stories of how Abu Walid used to leave her behind in a tent with guns and grenades to defend herself and the children while he went off to fight the Russians, with the parting advice: ‘Allah will look after you’. Herself an educated woman, Wafa had refused to stay in Afghanistan under the Taliban, instead relocating with her children to Iran so they could go to school. In her absence, Abu Walid had decided to marry again, and evidently liked what he had heard about the spirited mujahidah from Australia.