The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  It was now December 2001. Rabiah and her family had been on the run for three months—but they were running out of places to go. The Taliban had been defeated, Mullah Mohammed Omar and his loyalists finally abandoning the desert city of Kandahar and retreating into the mountains. The battle of Tora Bora had ended with the deaths of some 200 al Qaeda fighters and the underground cave complex overrun. Bin Laden and his senior aides had evaded the dragnet and vanished across the border into the tribal lands of north-west Pakistan.

  Rabiah’s family found refuge in a fortified Pashtun compound with a handful of other families. Also there was Rabiah’s old patron Ahmed Khadr and his family from Kabul. They too had been on the run since September 11, and had also narrowly missed being trapped in the bombed safehouse where Umm Fatima and their other friends had been killed. Rabiah says the Khadrs were planning to attempt the border crossing into Pakistan. But she and her family had tried it once and failed, and considered it too dangerous to try again. Nor did she want to head the other way to Iran, where Abu Walid was now in hiding.

  ‘I didn’t want to leave Afghanistan’, she says. ‘Everyone else could do whatever they wanted, but I still didn’t believe we’d have to leave. To me, I would survive somehow or die.’

  At this point the men in the fortress received word that Taliban leader Mullah Omar had issued an order for the remaining ‘Arabs’—foreigners aligned with al Qaeda—to leave Afghanistan. Rabiah recalls being told that their presence ‘was being used as an excuse by the Americans to kill Afghans day in and day out’, so Omar had decided ‘everyone had to leave’. Still, she resisted.

  ‘I’m not going and you can’t make me. The only one who can order me to go is Abu Walid, and unless he tells me, I’m not going.’

  The men in charge of the Arabs came back to her two days later.

  ‘If Abu Walid orders you to leave, will you go?’

  ‘Well, I won’t have a choice. I’ll have to obey him.’

  The men had brought a satellite telephone, which they wouldn’t use at the compound because they knew the Americans could track the signal.

  ‘Umm Mohammed, we’re going to take you into the desert and Abu Walid’s going to talk to you on the phone’, they told her. ‘And if the Americans don’t get you, we’ll come back for you later.’ Rabiah says they then drove for an hour into the desert, let her out of the car, and drove off, so that if the Americans picked up the signal and dispatched a bomber they would be a safe distance away when the bomb was dropped.

  ‘They left me there with the satellite phone, and it rang and I picked it up and it was Abu Walid.’

  Abu Walid was reasonable as always. ‘I think you have to be realistic. I think it’s time for you to leave.’

  ‘Are you advising me or ordering me?’

  ‘I’m ordering you.’

  ‘After the conversation it was surreal’, she recounts. ‘I still felt like it was the worst nightmare that anyone could ever have, and I was going to wake up. It felt like my life stopped, mine and my children’s lives stopped.’

  For her, the significance of that moment was this: ‘I gave up. I gave up to the Americans. Because that’s what they wanted— they wanted to expel the Muslims from the only dawlah, the only Islamic state on the face of this Earth.’

  The men hadn’t bargained on nine-year-old Huda also refusing to leave without a fight. ‘I’m not going. If you’ve all decided to run away, then off you go, I’ll be fine here’, Huda announced. One of the boys had to pick her up bodily and put her in the car. As they drove away from the fortress she was still muttering in Arabic, ‘I swear by Allah, I’m not doing this of my own free will’.

  Rabiah later heard that a few days after they left, the Pashtun compound where they had been given shelter was destroyed. ‘The Americans came back and they flattened the village, killed every man, woman and child. They said it was a lesson—that’s how they would be dealt with, anybody found helping the enemy.’

  In late December 2001, Rabiah and her family set off and crossed Afghanistan again, this time continuing on past the westernmost city of Herat, which had been reclaimed by its long-time ruler, the warlord Ismael Khan, in the name of the Northern Alliance. Herat had received a relentless pounding. Unexploded cluster bombs littered the desert landscape, and children were scouring the rubble for food packages dropped by the Americans, which by some disastrous coincidence were the same yellow colour as the unexploded bomblets.

  Their destination was a smugglers’ post beyond Herat, a few kilometres from the Iranian border. It was just a cluster of houses in the desert where someone could facilitate payment to an official at the border crossing to let people through. When they arrived, there were two other families already there, one Moroccan, the other Egyptian, waiting to make the crossing. The instructions were straightforward: the women and children would go separately because if the guards started firing they would shoot the men first; the truck carrying them would stop a few hundred metres short of the wire fence that marked the boundary; from there they would have to run.

  ‘So we were driving across the desert, on our way to the border’, says Rabiah. ‘And suddenly the truck left the road and we were driving through tumbleweeds and desert plants. Then the driver put his foot on the accelerator and it took off— we were being chased by the border guards, bouncing across the desert.’

  The driver managed to lose the border police and kept driving till they could see the boundary. He pulled up in the desert and pointed them towards the barbed wire fence, about 300 metres away. ‘All right, out you get’, he ordered, then drove off. An elderly woman from one of the other families took off first, running towards the wire. Another woman had a suitcase on wheels, which she was dragging across the sand. Next they heard firing, and someone yelled ‘Leave your bags behind and run!’

  They made it to the wire and wriggled under on their stomachs.

  ‘I was crawling under and all of a sudden I saw a big army boot right in front of my face, and I thought, “I’m going to die like a dog in Iran”’, Rabiah remembers. But the man in the army boots was the guard who had been paid to let them through. ‘Get up! Quickly!’ he snapped. They were taken to an open-backed pickup truck waiting nearby. They scrambled in, the guard threw a tarpaulin over them, and the truck took off. Huda was inconsolable. In the mad scramble her beloved teddy bear, Beniah, had been left behind, and no one was going back to get it.

  14

  HOUSE ARREST

  Iran & Australia, 2002–2009

  After crossing the Iranian border they were driven to a smugglers’ safe-house on the outskirts of the capital, Tehran. Rabiah and the four children crowded into a small room where they cleaned themselves up as best they could. They had lost their luggage and passports, and were carrying virtually nothing. The safehouse proprietor sent in bread, tea and yoghurt, and told them to stay put and not make any noise.

  The next day they were to take a bus to Tehran, but the smuggler was nervous that Rabiah would be spotted as an illegal immigrant. She had been given an Iranian chador, a full-length gown with a head cover that the wearer has to clutch tightly around her face, usually leaving one eye showing. But she was unused to the billowing garment, which constantly got tangled around her arms. And the smuggler worried that the police who frequented the route on the lookout for illegal border crossers would notice her fair skin and blue eyes. ‘I looked like this foreigner trying to act like an Iranian, so they wouldn’t let me out of the house’, she remembers. The smuggler came up with what he thought was an ingenious plan—brown contact lenses to disguise the colour of Rabiah’s eyes, which he handed to her just before they boarded.

  ‘We were put on the bus and told, “Don’t talk, don’t make a noise, don’t draw attention to yourself”. We were supposed to be inconspicuous. I was wearing these cheap, nasty brown contact lenses—it was ridiculous, every time I closed my eyes they’d move.’

  The heat and motion of the crowded bus lulled Rabiah to sleep. F
ourteen-year-old Ilyas, jammed in beside her, dozed with his head bouncing on her shoulder. When they woke, Ilyas shrieked in terror. ‘While I was sleeping the contact lenses had moved, so it looked like I had four eyes—two brown and two blue. Ilyas had woken up and looked up at my face and thought I’d turned into some sort of alien, and he screamed like someone had cut his throat. Everybody in the bus turned around. I refused to wear them after that, I threw them out the window. I said I’d tell people my mother was a foreigner.’

  At the end of the bus ride they were delivered to a house in Tehran that was sumptuous by the standards they’d grown used to—air conditioning, television, two bathrooms and thick Persian carpets underfoot. But this was to be no holiday. They were here as virtual prisoners of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

  ‘It was effectively house arrest’, says Rabiah. ‘We were monitored twenty-four hours a day, not allowed access to phone or internet and not allowed to contact our family. We were not allowed to move from one place to another; that was where we had to stay. We could go to the shops or to the doctor and carry on with a normal daily routine, but we had no ID documents so the risk was that we could be picked up. You see there’s two systems in Iran. There’s the official government authorities, and then there’s the Revolutionary Guards. So we were there with the knowledge of the Revolutionary Guards, but not there officially according to the state of Iran.’

  Their strange confinement was not unique. In the months after September 11, hundreds of foreign fighters and families had fled across the Afghanistan border into Iran, among them some of the leading figures in al Qaeda. The exodus to Iran was later documented in US media reports and in a study by the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy at West Point. The Iran contingent included two of Osama bin Laden’s sons and between eighteen and twenty-five significant al Qaeda leaders; among them Rabiah’s husband Abu Walid and his son-in-law Saif el Adel, who was now described as al Qaeda’s third-ranking official. Saif outlined details of their Iranian sojourn in a published memoir. They were assisted in relocating by the veteran Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had gone into exile in Iran himself after the Taliban came to power. The Iranian authorities, who for years had sponsored Islamic militants engaging in terrorism, tolerated their presence and initially allowed them to operate as they wished. But by early 2002 when US President George Bush branded Iran part of an ‘axis of evil’, amidst evidence that some of the fugitives—chiefly Saif el Adel—were using their Iranian base to plan terrorist attacks in other countries, the reformist regime of President Khatami came under growing international pressure to curtail them. As the pressure mounted, some of the most senior al Qaeda fugitives were rounded up and placed under house arrest, in villas and guesthouses in and around Tehran, where they still enjoyed relative freedom, but now under the watchful eye of the Revolutionary Guards.

  ‘There were people who crossed over who were important— in the sense of being on an international list of wanted people— and people who were not important’, says Rabiah. ‘If they were important al Qaeda people they would be treated very well—they were under house arrest but very well cared for. The unimportant people were put in jail—men, women and children. The reason I wasn’t put in jail is because I was married to Abu Walid, even though he didn’t particularly want me any more. I think the reason I was looked after was that I was married to him and I just turned up. They didn’t know what to do with me—they couldn’t let me go and they didn’t want to keep me.’

  After three months on the run in Afghanistan, house arrest in Iran was at first a comfortable novelty. ‘For the first couple of months, because we had been through so much, it was a relief just to be able to shower and wash your clothes and go out and buy food’, says Rabiah. ‘And just the fact that we were still together and relatively safe was a very pleasant change. We weren’t sleeping with rats and mice and all sorts of animals; and to be able to go to a toilet and shut the door, and turn on a tap and have clean water. For my sons it was a relief after being on the run, where any day their mother or sister or niece could be raped, and they would be unable to protect them.’

  They were able to cook and eat three meals a day. They had radio, television and a computer, although they were barred from using the internet. Huda began studying English and the boys devised a daily physical fitness and martial arts routine to keep themselves occupied. (Mustafa was now sixteen years old, Ilyas fourteen, Aminah twelve, and Huda nine.)

  A few days after their arrival, Abu Walid came to visit— accompanied by his first wife, Wafa. Rabiah’s appearance in Tehran had clearly caused consternation in their household. Abu Walid had hoped that she would return to Australia and had suggested as much to her earlier, while Wafa had apparently only just learned of her husband’s second wife.

  ‘I can’t say she was overjoyed to meet me’, says Rabiah. ‘I guess she just wanted to see who her husband had married.’ After an awkward reunion, Abu Walid left his two wives alone to talk woman to woman. Rabiah says Wafa confided that she felt betrayed by his having taken a second wife without consulting her, after all the sacrifices she had made for him and his career. However, she accepted that it was now his responsibility to care for his second family. ‘She was a lovely woman’, Rabiah says. ‘She said I was her sister in Islam, and she felt for my kids. She said that Allah does as he pleases and this was just another test, because she was a woman who had sacrificed a lot for her Islam.’

  The upshot of their meeting was that Wafa agreed, in effect, to share Abu Walid. Thereafter, he spent half the week with his first wife and half with his second in their separate homes. As Rabiah and the children settled into the disconcerting domesticity of life under house arrest, the novelty soon wore off.

  ‘We never saw anybody; we had no social interaction, no contact with other Sunni Muslims. The kids didn’t go to school. We were allowed to go out to the market, but apart from that we spent twenty-four hours a day inside the house. Of course we felt like prisoners—we were prisoners.’

  As Rabiah understood it, they were ‘unofficial’ guests of the Revolutionary Guards, but if Iranian state security got its hands on them there was no telling what might happen. As a result, she rarely left the house because she was too conspicuous to risk being seen. ‘You could tell I was a foreigner. I always had trouble with the chador and I never picked up Iranian Farsi. It was always a trauma for the boys to take me out because for a start I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, and I didn’t look the part. Most of the time they refused to take me out, and quite rightly, because if we were caught we would have been put back over the border and that would have meant Guantánamo Bay.’

  The Iranian newscasts were full of stories of the continuing US-led bombardment of Afghanistan. In March 2002 the United States and its allies launched a new phase of their offensive, code-named Operation Anaconda, to wipe out Taliban and al Qaeda forces holed up in the mountainous Shahi-Kot region of Paktia province near the Pakistan border. Over seventeen days nearly 3500 bombs were dropped on an area of some 165 square kilometres. An estimated 400 Taliban and al Qaeda fighters were killed, a US army spokesman announcing: ‘It’s a great step, the major fighting is over’. But even as the pounding continued, several hundred more jihadists evaded the US dragnet and slipped across the border into the tribal wilderness of Pakistan, among them Osama bin Laden and his deputy Dr Ayman al Zawahiri. By now the air war on Afghanistan had reportedly claimed more than 3000 civilian lives. They included the passengers in a vehicle destroyed by two US fighter jets in Paktia province on 6 March. Islam Online reported that fourteen men, women and children were killed. ‘The personnel in this vehicle were believed to be linked to al Qaeda activities’, said a statement issued by the US military’s central command. Meanwhile hundreds of suspected Taliban and al Qaeda supporters were being captured. About 750 detainees—most lowly footsoldiers—would be sent to the US detention centre at Guantánamo Bay.

  ‘It was very personal for us and still is
’, says Rabiah. ‘The people in Guantánamo Bay—those people were our neighbours. Maybe I delivered that man’s son, maybe they were the fathers of children my children had played with. The fact that it was OK to invade and massacre thousands of people who didn’t even know about September 11 until they saw it on CNN or the BBC, and the justification for killing those people was because of September 11. How can they justify that? Men and women were put in cages, raped, tortured, humiliated … How was it all right to come and kill civilian non-combatants who had nothing to do with September 11? How in the name of Allah can that be justice?’

  Abu Walid was angry too, but his ire was reserved for Osama bin Laden, whom he blamed for Afghanistan’s misery. ‘He was very depressed and very moody’, says Rabiah. ‘His dislike for Osama became greater. He used to say, “These Wahhabis have destroyed the Islamic state, they are kha’in—traitors. They have betrayed Mullah Mohammed Omar. He gave them a place of refuge and they took an oath of allegiance to obey him, and now they have destroyed the Islamic state of Afghanistan.”’

  A news report one day about the ongoing military operation in Afghanistan prompted Rabiah to remark to Abu Walid, who was lying on the bed: ‘Don’t forget to say duah (a prayer) for Sheikh Osama and the brothers’. Abu Walid’s face darkened.

  ‘Why would I say a prayer for those mujrimin (criminals)— look what they did to Afghanistan.’

  Rabiah just glared at him. ‘I was disgusted because he was talking about our brothers who were being hunted, and saying he wasn’t going to say a prayer for them because they were criminals. Who did he think he was?’