The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  Bin Laden’s determination to attack America had been the subject of increasingly heated debate and vocal opposition within the al Qaeda shura, of which Abu Walid was a member. It was known that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was working on a project known as ‘the planes operation’, and in late August bin Laden formally notified the shura that a major attack against the United States would take place in the coming weeks. Taliban leader Mullah Omar was known to oppose such an attack, and a bitter split now emerged within al Qaeda’s top leadership. According to testimony given by the principal architect of September 11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a majority of shura members—including Abu Walid and his son-in-law, Saif el Adel—opposed the attacks, on both strategic and ideological grounds. Bin Laden was dismissive of their qualms, remarking at one point, ‘I will make it happen even if I do it by myself’. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said later that he would have disobeyed and carried on, even if the shura had ordered bin Laden to call off the attacks.

  Whether or not Abu Walid knew the details of the forthcoming operation is unclear. If he did, Rabiah says he didn’t share this knowledge with her.

  ‘I want to make it clear I have absolutely no knowledge of 9/11 before it happened’, she says. ‘I don’t know if Abu Walid knew. He never said. If he did he never told me. I can’t imagine he would have agreed to it, because the one thing Abu Walid and I had in common was that both of us really wanted to see Afghanistan succeed.’

  On 11 September 2001, Rabiah was watering the garden in the courtyard of Abu Walid’s home in Kandahar. He had gone off to the Ministry of Information for a meeting.

  ‘I was in the yard watering the garden, and I heard all the gunshots’, Rabiah remembers. ‘The whole place erupted. There was gunfire and people screaming and yelling out “Allahu Akbar!” and blowing their car horns in the streets, and great excitement.’ Next, Abu Walid came running through the gates.

  ‘They’ve attacked the twin towers!’ he shouted.

  ‘What twin towers?’ she asked, amid the din and confusion.

  ‘In New York—they’ve flown planes into the World Trade Center!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who else?’

  Abu Walid ran back out the door of the al Jazeera house, saying he was going to watch the satellite television coverage of the event. He returned two hours later.

  ‘He came back and he was really white, really pale. And he looked really, really sad’, says Rabiah.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she asked him.

  ‘The shabab (young men) have flown two planes into the World Trade Center in New York.’ He paused and added, ‘This is a disaster’.

  Then Abu Walid put his face in his hands and wept, repeating over and over, ‘Y’Allah (Oh God), what have they done?’

  13

  FUGITIVES

  Afghanistan, 2001

  In the days after the September 11 attacks, an atmosphere of chaotic excitement and creeping dread prevailed in Kandahar. There was jubilation on the streets, but inside the al Jazeera house Abu Walid’s sorrowful despair turned to anger.

  ‘Over the next couple of days, everybody else was excited, everybody was talking about it, saying how good it was. But Abu Walid was devastated, he was angry, he didn’t approve—his reaction shocked me’, says Rabiah. ‘Through the course of those days we had many conversations about it and he said, “You know, this is just what America was waiting for. Any excuse. The people here are not realists. America will wipe Afghanistan off the face of the map”.’

  Rabiah’s own reaction was a mixture of confusion, shock and amazement. She still hadn’t seen the televised images of the devastation in the United States, but was tuned in to the blanket coverage on BBC radio, which conveyed the enormity of the attack. On the streets of Kandahar the conspiracy theories had started—the Jews had done it, or the CIA. But Abu Walid’s response left her in no doubt that this was the work of al Qaeda. ‘It was all rather surreal. At first it was a sense of disbelief, and just confusion. The fact that these men had done this was unbelievable—twelve men who were supposedly from Afghanistan, with box cutters—that these simple people had carried out this thing was amazing.’

  She saw it as an act of war, but doubted whether it was legal under Islamic law because of the huge civilian death toll. She claims she felt not elation, but a sense of foreboding about what would follow. ‘Obviously I knew what was coming—there was no way America would let that pass. I don’t think there was anyone who, the reality of what had happened didn’t hit them. As soon as everyone got over their initial surprise it was like OK, they’ll be coming after us.’

  Abu Walid’s superiors at al Jazeera were pressing him to get an interview with bin Laden, who was still in Kandahar. But Abu Walid was stalling. ‘They wanted him to interview Osama. He was making excuses—he didn’t want to interview Osama because he was so angry. He actually said he wouldn’t be able to sit face to face with him. He believed the Afghan-Arabs had brought about the destruction of an Islamic state.’

  ‘I am surrounded by idiots’, Rabiah recalls Abu Walid muttering furiously. ‘I can’t believe the stupidity of these people, wanting to fight America.’ Bin Laden reportedly hoped the attacks would lure the United States into an unwinnable ground war in Afghanistan. But Abu Walid knew better. ‘There’s no way the Americans are going to come to the ground’, he told Rabiah. A devotee of the Chinese military sage Sun Tzu, who coined the adage ‘know your enemy’, Abu Walid knew that the war that was to follow would be fought from the air, where the Taliban and al Qaeda were powerless.

  Six days after September 11, US President George Bush named bin Laden as the ‘prime suspect’ in the attacks and began readying for a counterstrike. The United States had plans in place already to oust the Taliban by force, and President Bush now issued a final ultimatum: ‘They will hand over the terrorists or they will share in their fate’.

  As bin Laden and his colleagues prepared to flee Kandahar, an order went out from the al Qaeda leadership that all the families had to leave.

  ‘They were saying all the Afghan-Arabs had to evacuate and go to the mountains’, says Rabiah. ‘And I was saying, “What are you talking about? I’m going to Kabul. I want my kids”.’

  Apart from her eldest son in Afghanistan, 15-year-old Mustafa, who had accompanied her to Kandahar, Rabiah’s remaining children—Ilyas, aged thirteen, 11-year-old Aminah, and granddaughter Huda who turned nine a week after September 11—were still in Kabul. The Afghan capital was in the grip of rising panic. The remaining Westerners were being airlifted out, while Rabiah’s friends such as the Khadr family and Umm Fatima, the wife of Dr Ayman al Zawahiri, were packing up and leaving with their children. Northern Alliance troops, who had rallied after the assassination of their leader Ahmed Shah Massoud by al Qaeda agents on 9 September, would soon be advancing on the capital, backed by US and British Special Forces.

  ‘We’ll have to go and get the children’, Rabiah said to Abu Walid.

  ‘We can’t. No one can go back to Kabul. Allah will take care of your children.’

  ‘That’s when I thought he was a raving lunatic’, says Rabiah. ‘And I thought, well OK, I’m on my own. No one is going to go and get my children and I won’t be able to go and get my children, so I have to find a way.’

  She persuaded an Afghani driver named Hamid who worked in the al Jazeera office to take a taxi to Kabul to get the children. With the ruinous state of the roads and people fleeing in all directions, his return trip to the capital would take three days. In the meantime Abu Walid convinced Rabiah it was too dangerous to stay put in Kandahar, as a US attack could come any day and the key Taliban and al Qaeda southern stronghold would be a prime target. He insisted they had to leave and told Hamid the driver to meet them with the children in three days’ time in Afghanistan’s westernmost city of Herat, near the Iranian border.

  Before leaving Kandahar, Rabiah rang her daughter Rahmah in Sydney on the al Jazeera satellite phone. It was almost a year since she had l
ast seen Rahmah in Peshawar after the birth of her son, when they had argued over Rahmah and her husband Khaled’s refusal to travel with the family to Afghanistan. Now she feared she might not see them again.

  ‘I told her I loved her and asked her—if I never see her again—to forgive me, and to ask Allah to unite us in paradise’, Rabiah recalls. It was the last Rahmah would hear of her family for another two years.

  As Hamid the driver set off northwards for the capital, Kabul, Rabiah and her son Mustafa boarded a mini-bus with Abu Walid to join the exodus out of Kandahar. ‘It was crazy, people were going in all directions, busloads of women and children, nobody knew what they were doing. There weren’t any preparations, no one knew what was going on. We had to leave everything behind—fridges, washing machines, furniture, computers, my whole library, all my medical equipment—it just got left behind. We were only allowed to take one bag per family.’

  Their trip to Herat was a 560-kilometre journey on a narrow ribbon of highway that skirts the northern edge of the Dasht-e-Mango, the ‘Desert of Death’, one of the hottest and most waterless wastelands in the world. The road built by the Soviets in the 1950s had been pulverised for a decade by Russian tanks and was pitted with bomb craters, which made it impossible to travel faster than 40 kilometres per hour.

  ‘The bus trip took a day and a night, or maybe two nights’, she remembers. ‘It was shocking. For a start you’re running and you don’t know where you’re going. Fourteen hours at a stretch in a mini-bus with no food, climate changes from 50 degrees to below zero, and you don’t know if you’re going to see your family again.’

  Their destination in Herat was the Uzbek markaz (headquarters), the main base of the large Uzbek jihadist contingent allied with al Qaeda and the Taliban. Abu Walid had special ties to the Uzbeks. During the 1990s when he was running al Qaeda’s training program, he had been responsible for training volunteers from the former Soviet Central Asian countries, including members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. They remained loyal to their former mentor and were happy to shelter him and his family. The day after their arrival, the al Jazeera driver Hamid arrived in a taxi with Rabiah’s children, Ilyas, Aminah and granddaughter Huda, each carrying a single bag, and Huda clutching her constant companion Beniah, the sex-change teddy bear. Their flight from Kabul had been a nerve-racking affair. Anti-American demonstrators had taken to the streets to protest in advance against the looming US counter-attack, and the US embassy had been set on fire. Taliban troops were bolstering their defences as the Northern Alliance prepared for its assault on Kabul. The children said they’d been up on the roof watching the distant rocket fire as Northern Alliance forces moved towards the capital.

  On the evening of the day Rabiah was reunited with the children, the US and allied bombardment of Afghanistan began. The city of Herat, which was the site of the largest Soviet-built airbase in the country, now controlled by the Taliban, was targeted in the first wave of US bombings.

  ‘I can remember waking up and the walls were shaking’, says Rabiah. ‘They were dropping 500-kilogram bombs. We went outside to get a better look, but the US planes were so high you couldn’t see them.’ The Taliban were firing at the incoming jets with Soviet-era anti-aircraft guns mounted on legs. ‘I said, “Why are they wasting their ammunition? There’s no way they’ll hit them.” And so you’d watch the bombs explode. And that went on all night.’

  There were three waves of bombings on the night of 7 October 2001, carried out by twenty-five strike aircraft launched from carriers in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, and fifteen B1, B2 and B52 bombers dispatched from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Fifty Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired from US and British warships and submarines. As the bombing continued, the airbase at Herat was obliterated, electricity supplies in Kabul severed, and al Qaeda and Taliban training camps and communications facilities destroyed. The aerial bombardment provided cover for ground offensives by anti-Taliban fighters at strategic sites around the country, supported by CIA and US Army Special Forces.

  Civilian bystanders were among the casualties. The Reuters news agency interviewed a 16-year-old ice-cream vendor from Jalalabad who was injured when a cruise missile hit an airfield near his home.

  ‘There was just a roaring sound, and then I opened my eyes and I was in a hospital’, said the boy named Assadullah. ‘I lost my leg and two fingers. There were other people hurt. People were running all over the place.’

  A resident of Kabul gave this account to the BBC: ‘The street next to my home was bombed, and eighteen were killed and twenty-three injured. Everything was destroyed there. The doors and window glass of our homes were broken. I have a baby child, one and a half years old. Even she is afraid of the plane sounds and bombing. The planes are going up and down and who knows what might be their goal and what disaster might happen again to the poor and innocent people.’

  The next day in Herat, the Uzbek fighters constructed an underground shelter for the women and children in their encampment. They dug all day from fajr (dawn) until the light began to fade, then ordered the women to gather up the children and a pile of blankets and take shelter for the night.

  ‘We went out and we walked around the back of the markaz’, says Rabiah. ‘We could see a tarpaulin with light coming out of it. I said, “What’s that?” And someone said, “That’s the air raid shelter”. There was this dirty big hole in the ground, about as big as a kitchen, but not quite as deep. The entrance was at ground level and there was no roof on it, just wooden beams with a tarp across it.’

  The Uzbek women and children were already inside the bunker but Rabiah baulked. ‘I’m not getting in that. There’s no roof on it.’

  ‘We’re gonna do the roof tomorrow’, replied her sons, whose hands were soiled and bloodied from helping to dig without tools. But Rabiah was adamant.

  ‘Go and tell the men I’m not getting in.’

  ‘Mama please, we can’t tell the men that’, her sons pleaded.

  ‘No way, that’s not an air raid shelter—it’s a bloody pit. If there’s an attack we’ll be trapped. We’ll be sitting ducks.’

  ‘There was a big drama because I wouldn’t get in’, Rabiah says. ‘It was a horrific embarassment to my sons because women don’t give orders.’

  But the Uzbek men had no choice but to relent. ‘Sometimes it had its advantages to be known as the crazy Australian woman. They’d just go, “Oh yeah, that’s the crazy Australian woman”.’

  The following day the men constructed a skeletal timber roof over the pit and that night Rabiah, Aminah and Huda retreated to the bunker with the Uzbek women and children, while her sons stayed inside the markaz with the men. The women had blankets and weapons to defend themselves in case they were overrun. The bombing resumed at dusk. ‘The attacks would start at maghrib (sunset) and they’d go all night’, says Rabiah.

  After five days in Herat, Abu Walid decided it was too dangerous for them to stay there any longer. The city’s predominantly Persian-speaking population had no love for the Pashtun Taliban and their Arab allies and were ready to take up arms against them. The Uzbeks were evacuating women and children, and Abu Walid announced they must return to Kandahar. They travelled in a mini-bus, which broke down in the desert in the late afternoon. The US bombings raids would resume at dusk, and once night fell the roads would be prowled by the dreaded khatta aturk, highway bandits.

  ‘Isn’t this exciting?’ Rabiah remarked to Abu Walid as they waited by the roadside.

  ‘Are you really stupid or are you just pretending to be?’ said Abu Walid. ‘Don’t you realise that when the sun sets this road will be swarming with the kind of people you don’t want to meet in your worst nightmare. Do you have any idea what could happen to you and your daughters?’

  After a hasty repair job they made it back to Kandahar by sunset and went to stay with a friend of Abu Walid, a Taliban commander who worked in the Ministry of Religion and lived in a fortified compound. They were instructed that
when the bombing resumed they should take shelter in the corners of the house, so there would be less chance of the roof caving in on them.

  ‘It was just continuous carpet bombing from sunset till dawn’, says Rabiah. ‘They bombed only at night. It was like watching a fireworks display. For the first few days the boys would climb out on the roof and watch the bombing, then we became so used to it we just went to sleep. Sometimes the bombs came so close that the force of them would blow open the windows.’

  One night a bomb landed two houses from where they were staying. The impact shook the walls, burst open the windows and killed an Afghan family. Thirteen-year-old Ilyas had a narrow escape when another bomb exploded on the roadside while he was going to fetch bread, throwing him off the back of a motorcycle.

  A week after the US bombing raids started, the Times of India reported more than 300 civilians had been killed or injured and charged that the US strikes were in violation of the United Nations charter allowing the use of force in self-defence. A mosque in Jalalabad was reported to have been hit during prayer time, killing seventeen people. As neighbours scrambled to the rescue, a second bomb reportedly dropped, killing at least another 120. Kandahar came under sustained bombardment, prompting its residents to flee en masse. A Kandahar merchant later told of how he escaped to his family’s ancestral village 40 kilometres to the north, arriving just as it was attacked by US warplanes. ‘I brought my family here for safety’, he told the New York Times. ‘Now there are nineteen dead, including my wife, my brother, sister, sister in law, nieces, nephews, my uncle. What am I supposed to do now?’