The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  Abu Walid was working on a major treatise entitled The Story of the Afghan-Arabs from the Time of Their Arrival in Afghanistan until Their Departure with the Taliban, which would later be serialised in a leading London-based Arabic newspaper. In this and other writings, Abu Walid continued his excoriation of his erstwhile leader. ‘Bin Laden left Tora Bora disheartened by the wounds of defeat and collapse, the very wounds that broke the Taliban and brought down the Islamic Emirate’, Abu Walid opined. It was, he said, ‘a tragic example of an Islamic movement managed in an alarmingly meaningless way. Everyone knew that bin Laden was leading them to the abyss and even leading the entire country to utter destruction, but they continued to bend to his will and take his orders with suicidal submission.’

  When Abu Walid showed Rabiah what he was writing, it invariably prompted an argument. ‘I was vehemently opposed to that book’, she says. ‘I told him it was haram, he shouldn’t publish it. I said, “I don’t care who’s made mistakes, they are your Muslim brothers”. Islam says you have to make seventy excuses for your brother if he makes a mistake.’

  Abu Walid’s bitter criticism and Rabiah’s continued loyalty to bin Laden became a source of growing tension beween them. Rabiah had also grown suspicious about Abu Walid’s faith, particularly about his apparent sympathy for the Shia creed followed by the Iranians. Abu Walid had always been dismissive of the Sunni–Shia divide, which has polarised Muslims since the Prophet Mohammed’s death, when the original Shiites (the ‘followers of Ali’) believed that Mohammed’s cousin Ali should have succeeded him as caliph. Abu Walid had close connections with Iran. He had visited the country numerous times and was an admirer of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, whose 1979 revolution had spawned Iran’s Islamic state. After settling in Tehran, Rabiah says Abu Walid even renamed one of his sons ‘Ali’. But Rabiah began to suspect that his affiliations with the Iranians went even deeper. Whenever Rabiah made comments critical of the Iranians or their Shia practices, she noticed that Abu Walid was quick to defend them. He was surprisingly conversant with the finer points of Shia teachings, and she thought she noticed him following Shia rituals when he prayed.

  ‘I’m not sure if I suspected yet that he was a Shia, but something was wrong’, she says.

  Rabiah had made her own inquiries into the foundations of the Shia faith, a move inspired by her newfound admiration for the Iranian people. Against her expectations—because she believed that Shia were not real Muslims—she found them exceedingly courteous, self-disciplined and uncommonly charitable. Donation boxes were placed along public thoroughfares in Tehran and she frequently saw Iranian citizens stopping to place zakat (alms) in the boxes, which she noticed were always full. Her regard for the Iranians and their pious akhlaq (behaviour) provoked in Rabiah a full-blown crisis of faith. Salafi dogma brands the Shia apostates who have abandoned the true path of Islam, and Rabiah found it shocking to contemplate that this might not be the case.

  ‘I went through a crisis. It was one of the most shocking periods in my life. I was confused, I was actually doubting my most fundamental beliefs.’

  Desperate to resolve her doubts, Rabiah delegated one of her sons to buy a pre-paid internet card, in defiance of the ban on internet use that was a condition of their house arrest. She logged onto the computer in their house and after a few hours of research her questions were answered, and she had reassured herself that the Shia were not correct and that their beliefs were indeed, in her view, ‘outside Islam’. Her internet outing was somehow detected and prompted a stern warning from the Revolutionary Guards, but at least her crisis of faith was resolved.

  The issue over her husband’s beliefs came to a head when Abu Walid took both of his families on vacation to the Caspian Sea coast, north of Tehran, accompanied by their minders from the Revolutionary Guards. (The Caspian coastal town of Chalous was one of two locations where it was later reported that important al Qaeda captives were held under house arrest. Rabiah says she doesn’t know if this was where they stayed.) Abu Walid was to spend one week with Rabiah and her family and another week with his first wife Wafa and hers.

  Rabiah resolved to get to the bottom of her doubts over his faith. Instead of confronting him head on, however, she decided to do so by stealth, pretending that she too had been won over to the Shia creed. She had downloaded a book on Shiism from the internet, and presented it to Abu Walid that evening.

  ‘I’ve been reading this book and it seems to be the truth’, she said.

  Abu Walid smiled broadly. ‘Ah, so you have seen it too.’

  Rabiah says that Abu Walid now recounted to her how he had been persuaded years before of the Shia view. ‘He said that in 1990 he was in the United Arab Emirates on assignment for the newspaper he was working for, and someone had given him that book. He said he had read it for a week, and then had spent the next week crying, because it proved to him that the Shia were right and Sunnis were wrong.’

  Rabiah was staggered. ‘So you believe Ali should have been the rightful caliph after the Prophet died and they stole it from him?’

  ‘Yes, that is correct.’

  Rabiah believes her assertion that Abu Walid is a Shia will prompt consternation in the jihadist world, and that Abu Walid’s allies will assume it was a ruse to ingratiate himself with the Iranian regime. But she is adamant it is the truth. ‘I know nobody will believe me. People will say it was just a tactic. But he was a Shia—he came out and admitted it to me.’ The implications of this were far-reaching: ‘For me, it meant I couldn’t stay with him (because) as far as I was concerned, he had ceased to be a Muslim’.

  ‘You are not a Muslim and you have no rights over me’, she recalls announcing to a stunned Abu Walid. ‘I’ll see you on Judgement Day and I’ll stand witness that you have left Islam.’

  ‘You’re crazy’, Abu Walid replied.

  ‘That’s alright, I’d rather be crazy than be what you are. You’re a liar.’

  Rabiah and the children returned that night to Tehran. Abu Walid left separately in the mini-bus with the Revolutionary Guards, and she says she never saw him again.

  Without Abu Walid’s patronage, Rabiah’s family was left in an even more precarious position. It was unlikely the Revolutionary Guards would have deemed her and the children important enough on their own to warrant keeping them under house arrest, and just as likely they would be handed over to the secret police, which would have meant a far more uncertain fate.

  Rabiah decided they were no longer safe in Iran. So they packed up their few belongings and left Tehran, travelling hidden under a tarpaulin in the back of a smuggler’s truck to the country’s southern border with Pakistan. However, they got there only to find the border crossing closed. They considered heading west and crossing into Iraq but decided that was too dangerous. Instead they turned around and headed north again, ending up in the north-eastern Iranian city of Mashhad, 900 kilometres east of Tehran, which they had passed through when they first arrived in Iran from Afghanistan.

  Iran’s second-largest city, with a population of 2.5 million people, Mashhad was an easy place in which to hide. It is one of the holiest cities in the Shia world, housing the mausoleum of the sainted Imam Reza, and thus a magnet for pilgrims. Close to the borders with Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, Mashhad is also a major stopping point on the main east–west highway that carves through the mountains of Central Asia. Its strategic location makes it a hub for smugglers engaged in moving drugs, weaponry and people, including—in the aftermath of September 11— fugitives from the ‘war on terror’. In August 2002, the Washington Post reported that dozens of al Qaeda fighters were being sheltered in hotels and guesthouses in Mashhad and another border town, Zabol, further south.

  But the hitherto safe haven for al Qaeda sympathisers in Iran was no longer guaranteed. Under mounting US pressure, the Iranian regime had begun rounding up the international fugitives within its borders. In 2002, sixteen detainees described as ‘al Qaeda operatives’ were handed over to Saudi Arab
ia, in an attempt to rebut the long-standing assertion that Tehran was harbouring terrorists. The Washington Post reported that the wives and children of some al Qaeda figures were being turned over to their home governments ‘in a display of solidarity with the United States and its allies’.

  Rabiah and her family rented a house, kept their heads down and managed to remain undetected in Mashhad for about six months. But in mid 2003 the Iranian secret police came knocking on their door. Whether it was a random check or they had been reported was not clear. The police were courteous but wanted to know who they were, where they had come from and why they had no passports. They left after questioning Rabiah and the boys, but she knew they would be back. So that night they packed up again, paid double the usual rate to a people smuggler, and ‘made a run for it’ back to Tehran.

  ‘We had come to the end of the road’, says Rabiah. ‘We didn’t have any money left. And after the secret service apparatus became aware of us, I was afraid they would put us over the border.’

  The following morning, Rabiah and the children took a taxi with their luggage to the Australian embassy in Khalid Istambuli Avenue, Tehran. Rabiah presented herself at the reception desk where an Iranian secretary greeted her from behind the counter.

  ‘I want to see the consul’, said Rabiah.

  ‘No, I think you want the immigration section’, the secretary replied.

  ‘No I don’t, lady. I want the consul.’

  The secretary picked up a phone, dialled a number, then handed the receiver to Rabiah.

  ‘Yes, how can I help you?’ a male voice with an Australian accent inquired.

  ‘My name is Rabiah Hutchinson. My family and I crossed the border illegally from Afghanistan into Iran and we’ve been here illegally for over two years. We don’t have passports and we want to go back to Australia.’

  By Rabiah’s account, the embassy staffer was unimpressed.

  ‘Do you, now? Well I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do for you. You have broken Iranian law so I suggest you turn yourselves in to the Iranian authorities.’

  Rabiah would do no such thing. She left Ilyas, Aminah and Huda with the luggage in a waiting room at the embassy and took a taxi with Mustafa to the telephone exchange, from where she rang her daughter Rahmah in Sydney. It was the first time Rahmah had heard from her mother since Rabiah had called from Kandahar in the days after 11 September 2001. For the two years since then, Rahmah had had no way of knowing if her family was alive or dead.

  ‘I need the name of a solicitor, I’ll ring you back in fifteen minutes’, said Rabiah. Rahmah found her the name of a lawyer in Sydney, whom Rabiah then rang from the Tehran exchange.

  ‘Just refuse to leave the embassy’, the lawyer advised.

  ‘We were gone about an hour and a half, and by the time I got back to the embassy I’d become VIP of the month’, Rabiah recounts. ‘They were calling me Ms Hutchinson and saying “Can you step this way?” … and I was escorted up to the consul’s office and asked if I would like a drink or a coffee. Apparently they had been in contact with Canberra and obviously Canberra had said: “We want her back here”.’

  The Australian authorities had been eager to get their hands on Rabiah Hutchinson for quite some time. In January 2003, Jack Thomas had been arrested in Pakistan as he was about to board a plane to return to Australia. Under intense interrogation by the CIA, Pakistan’s ISI and ASIO, Thomas provided hours of information about his movements in Pakistan and Afghanistan. His account included details of how ‘Umm Mohammed’ had been his first contact in Afghanistan and how she had provided an introduction to the Taliban commander who sent him for training at al Qaeda’s Camp Faruq. Thomas also revealed Rabiah’s marriage to the al Qaeda strategist Abu Walid al Misri, and the invitation from bin Laden’s deputy Dr Ayman al Zawahiri to start up a women’s hospital in Kandahar. It was enough to arouse the interest of intelligence agencies all over the world—and to ensure that once the Australian embassy staff in Tehran had been hastily briefed, Rabiah and her children received special attention. ‘Instead of being sent to the nearest immigration office, they put us in the Australian embassy car with Australian flags on the front. The kids and I—after being in the backs of trucks under tarpaulins, and driving over cliffs—suddenly we’re in this humongous black car with Australian flags on it, and the driver’s calling me Ms Hutchinson. It was funny actually—I didn’t realise the joke was on me.’

  They were escorted to the Tehran Apartment Hotel—‘the plushest hotel I’ve ever been in’—where, according to Rabiah, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade booked a room, paid the bill and vouched for their identities, as they had no passports. She still has the embossed leather key ring she kept as a souvenir of their extended stay there.

  Rabiah and the children were granted new Australian passports, issued in August 2003 and valid for just three months. But the Australian authorities seemed to be in no rush to bring them home. ASIO was eager to glean what intelligence it could from her, and had a better chance of doing so while she was still potentially at the mercy of the Iranian authorities than once she had returned home.

  After their passports were issued, Rabiah says she was summoned to the embassy and ushered into the head of mission’s office where the ambassador and consul were waiting to see her. She says the ambassador’s tone was apologetic.

  ‘This has got nothing to do with us, and we’re not telling you that you have to talk to them, or that you should or shouldn’t, but ASIO is here and they want to talk to you.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to them’, Rabiah replied. But the female ASIO officer dispatched to interrogate her was there already. Rabiah’s version of their conversation is the only one available, as neither ASIO nor the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) would comment on these events, other than DFAT confirming that its staff ‘provided extensive consular assistance to Ms Hutchinson and her children’. By Rabiah’s account, the ASIO agent gave her an ultimatum:

  ‘I can’t force you to talk to me. But I am telling you that the government is currently considering your case and your returning to Australia is under review. And it could have an adverse effect on you if you refuse to talk to us.’

  ‘What do you mean? I’m an Australian citizen. Are you saying they’re going to cancel my citizenship?’

  ‘I can’t say they will, and I can’t say they won’t’, Rabiah recalls the ASIO agent telling her.

  ‘They purposely gave me the impression that me and my children would become stateless if I didn’t talk to them’, Rabiah claims. ‘And I really honestly thought I could have my citizenship revoked. I thought we were gonna be put over the Pakistani border, or put in jail in Iran, or sent to Guantánamo Bay.’

  Rabiah says she was interrogated for several hours. After the first session, the ASIO agent told her that head office ‘wasn’t happy’ with the results so far: ‘Canberra reckons all you did was do dawah (proselytising) on me’. She was interrogated again; about her marriages to Abdul Rahim Ayub and Abu Walid; her activities in Indonesia, Pakistan and Afghanistan; her connections with Jemaah Islamiyah, Abu Bakar Ba’asyir and al Qaeda; her knowledge of Dr Ayman al Zawahiri, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden.

  ‘What do you think of suicide bombing?’ the agent asked her.

  ‘It’s haram (forbidden)’, Rabiah says she replied.

  ‘So you don’t agree with what they’re doing in Palestine?’

  ‘Look, I will fight to my last breath to defend the rights of the Palestinians, but if you’re asking am I going to go and lob a grenade out of a bus in Lakemba or strap on a bomb on the Manly ferry, then the answer is “No”.’

  Two months after the issuing of their new passports, Rabiah and the children were still waiting in Tehran, puzzled at what was causing the delay. On 22 October 2003, Rabiah was handed a Deed of Undertaking obliging her to repay the sum of $5464.23 to DFAT, to cover the cost of their accommodation and expenses in Tehran and their one-way tickets
back to Australia. Their departure was finally approved the following day.

  ‘George Bush has left—you can go home now’, Rabiah recalls an embassy staffer telling her. The US President had just completed a 21-hour visit to Australia with an entourage of 650 advisers and security staff, escorted by a fleet of FA-18 fighter jets, and protected by more than 450 Australian Federal Police, backed up by Air Force Black Hawks, Navy Squirrels, the Tactical Assault Group and other specialist forces. Rabiah couldn’t tell if the embassy staffer was joking, or if the Australian government seriously believed she might pose a threat to the heavily guarded President Bush.

  On the day of their departure, 27 October 2003, two air marshals were assigned to accompany Rabiah and the four children on the flight to Australia. Rabiah describes the pair—an Egyptian man and a Pakistani woman—‘as two humongous, gorilla-like people’. ‘He looked like he had taken so many steroids he could hardly turn his neck, and she was the biggest Pakistani woman I’ve ever seen in my life. They wanted to make me pay for them. I told them, “Yeah, in your dreams, you can carry me on kicking and screaming, gagged and in handcuffs, but I’m not paying”.’

  The air marshals were given custody of their tickets and positioned themselves at either end of the row of seats occupied by Rabiah and the children. When 11-year-old Huda got up to use the bathroom, the female air marshal rose to accompany her.

  ‘I’m going to the toilet’, said Huda indignantly.

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to handcuff me then, because there’s no way in the world you’re coming in there with me.’

  Their strange-looking party caused a commotion during a stopover in Dubai, when a nervy Englishman travelling with his wife and toddler noticed the two beefy air marshals escorting a woman fully veiled in black, with two girls in hijabs, and a pair of swarthy teenagers in shalwar kameez.

  ‘Excuse me, I have a child’, said the Englishman, manoeuvring his way to the front of the queue when boarding commenced.