She seemed unafraid to be on her own in a strange land, though the workers remember how isolated she could be. At meals in the cafeteria she sat with the social workers. “We worried about that a little bit. We said, ‘It will only increase the gap between you and them.’ ” But Ayaan didn’t seem to care. “She had political ideas, and she had the idea that she wanted to make a career, and she wanted money. She had a very clear vision of what she wanted to achieve.”
Even before she left the center, she agreed to appear on a television program that the Dutch Muslim network was making about asylum seekers. Plumper than she would be later, and dressed in a puffy purple down jacket, she looked nothing like the diva that Dutch couturiers would later beg to model their clothes. But her smile dazzled the TV crew as she showed them around, and the social workers thought she enjoyed the experience. “We noticed that she likes publicity.”
At first she was shocked to learn that the Dutch had no objection to homosexuality. One staff member recalls her crying out, “You can’t mean it!” Being Ayaan, however, she wanted to know more. “She was very curious about how it developed that way.” She asked a lot of questions about how Dutch women behaved. “Can you choose your own partner?” one social worker remembers her asking. She wanted to know about soccer—what it was, how it worked, why people liked it so much. She wondered how much money the Dutch earned and who belonged to the upper class, and why. Above all, she wanted to know how she could earn a degree and find a career.
Back in Eastleigh, Ayaan’s sister Haweya had opened a post office box, perhaps to receive the letters that Ayaan had promised to write if she managed to run away. Ayaan wrote Haweya the good news as soon as she received asylum, a month after leaving Germany. Haweya wrote back, as Ayaan has described, saying that Ayaan’s new husband and the family had been looking for her. Haweya also asked for “clothes and a passport so that she, too, could get out.”
Osman Musse Quarre, Ayaan’s husband in Canada, had been waiting for her to arrive in Toronto ever since leaving Nairobi and their big clan wedding. When he didn’t hear from his bride, he feared for her safety. But soon word got back to Nairobi that Ayaan was alive and well in the Netherlands.
Her relatives Fadumo and Muddah had known where she was from the start. Clan leaders in Holland quickly got the news from them. A young prince of the Osman Mahamud lineage who lived in the Netherlands with his wife and family, Yassin Musse Boqor, had received asylum there in 1991. As the highest-ranking fellow clansman in the country, it was his duty to concern himself with new arrivals. He heard that Ayaan was in Lunteren, and he went to see her. “I told her, ‘You are welcome in Holland.’ ”
Yassin, twenty-five, was only a few years older than Ayaan. Like her, he was slim and fine-boned, with smooth dark skin. He was living at the time in Den Helder, on the north coast, but he began traveling south a couple of times a month “to talk, to help.” He knew nothing of Ayaan’s marital problems. One of the things they talked about was the United States’ decision to intervene in Somalia.
If the Islamists feared that President George H. W. Bush would make good on his promise to create a “new world order,” the American press was afraid he wouldn’t. For months, editorials had been reminding him of his promise made during the Persian Gulf War. Now they mocked him for failing to act in Bosnia and Somalia. Late in the summer of 1992, the United Nations sent military observers to Somalia to protect relief deliveries to the starving. When they failed to stop clan militias from stealing donated grain and attacking aid workers, Bush announced in December that he would send U.S. troops to stop them.
The same month the Americans entered Somalia, Ayaan’s father wrote to her at the reception center. She says he asked for $300 for an operation on his eyes. A few days later, her husband, Osman, telephoned her from Toronto. Ayaan says she stalled for time. “Again I lied. . . . I pretended I had never really disappeared, just gone to Holland for a few weeks to be with my dear friend Fadumo.” She says she promised to go back to Germany and asked Osman to send her father the $300. Osman’s account of her letter adds that she asked him to come live in Holland with her rather than in Canada.
In January 1993, he surprised her by appearing at her trailer in Lunteren. He was shocked to find her with short hair and no hijab. Ayaan later said that she asked if he had come to take her to Canada. “I’m not going to take you if you don’t want to go,” she said he answered, “but I want an explanation.” Ayaan excused herself and rushed outside. She seems to have feared that Osman might report her to the Dutch immigration authorities. Bumping into one of her social worker friends, she confessed to the woman that she had lied about her asylum request. She told the social worker she had been supposed to marry a man she didn’t want to marry and to live in Canada, and that the man was in her trailer.
According to Ayaan, the social worker told her not to worry. How she had gotten asylum was her business. And if the man tried to force her to go with him to Canada, the social worker would call the police.
Ayaan returned to the trailer. This time she told Osman that she had decided to stay in the Netherlands without him. Osman went off to telephone Ayaan’s father.
A few days later, the clan elders in the Netherlands held a meeting with the newlyweds. Ayaan told them she didn’t want to live with Osman. After that, he returned to Canada alone. Ayaan says she offered to repay the money he had given her, but he refused.
Ayaan’s relative Faduma Osman remembers what a scandal erupted when the story of Ayaan’s desertion got back to Nairobi. “Her father got really upset. We all thought she took [Osman’s] money and used him, and that’s why we were talking about it. Her husband was a relative, and he didn’t deserve to be treated like that.”
Faduma’s son Mahad heard that Osman and his family had spent $4,000 on Ayaan’s ticket and other travel expenses. Her sister Haweya wrote Ayaan that Hirsi’s fellow clansmen were all blaming the sisters’ mother, Asha, who they thought must have plotted Ayaan’s escape in order to get revenge for Hirsi’s leaving her and moving in with his first wife, Maryan. The whole clan remembered that Asha had refused to attend the wedding. Some of Osman’s relatives began shunning Asha.
Ayaan wrote her father, asking for his forgiveness. Hirsi scrawled his angry reply on the top of her letter and mailed it back to her. Cursing her and calling her a “Deceitful Fox,” he told her not to bother ever writing him again. When Ayaan telephoned her mother, Asha asked, “Do you know how I am being treated here?” But with the Dutch state behind her, Ayaan no longer had to rely on her clan. “I had a right to stay in Holland, and I knew I had other rights, too. Nobody could force me to go anywhere I didn’t want to go.”
Chapter Thirteen
In Boston, Aafia Siddiqui was hanging up posters for Al-Kifah and raising money for its Bosnian widows and orphans fund. In New Jersey, where Al-Kifah’s new spiritual leader, the blind sheikh Omar, lived, the Al-Kifah men who had gathered around the Pakistani Ramzi Yousef were building a bomb.
There is no reason to believe that Aafia was in touch with Yousef while he was in the United States. But Yousef, too, was involved with Bosnia, and he and Aafia moved in some of the same circles. His uncle KSM was fighting there in the same battalion as the Lebanese Bassam Kanj, the husband of Aafia’s Boston friend Marlene. Ramzi Yousef regularly phoned KSM in Bosnia. Once KSM wired $660 to another Al-Kifah member to help finance Yousef’s new project.
Ramzi Yousef had set himself an ambitious goal. Armed with a fatwa from Sheikh Omar, he wanted to kill 250,000 Americans. Later he would say that he chose that figure because the United States had killed 220,000 people in the space of three days at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet the United States still called the Palestinians who were fighting Israel for their homeland “terrorists.” Only carnage on an even greater scale, Ramzi Yousef said, would force the Americans to acknowledge their error.
In the hadiths it was written that when the Dajjal appeared, the Jews would be his allies. Sheikh Omar and his f
ollowers spoke of the United States as the epicenter of “Dajjal civilization,” dominated by Jews and opposed to Muslims. And of all the symbols of the Dajjal, the tallest was clearly visible from the mosque where the blind sheikh preached in Jersey City: the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Yousef calculated that it would take a bomb weighing almost 1,500 pounds to bring them down. By February 1993, he and his crew were ready.
On February 23, Yousef bought a first-class ticket back to Karachi on a plane that would be leaving three days later. At lunchtime on February 26, he and one of his comrades drove a rented truck containing the bomb into the B-2 parking garage beneath the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Yousef himself lit the fuse before jumping into a waiting getaway car. The explosion that followed could be felt throughout lower Manhattan.
Yousef made his flight to Pakistan. He also made his connection to Quetta, in his family’s ancestral homeland of Baluchistan. But to his great disappointment the North Tower did not buckle at the bottom and crash into the other tower as he had hoped. Only six people were killed, and more than a thousand injured. And investigators in New York soon discovered that Brooklyn’s Al-Kifah Refugee Center was involved.
Mohammed Salameh, the Palestinian who had rented the truck that had delivered the bomb, was arrested on March 4. News reports quickly identified him as a proponent of jihad and a follower of the blind sheikh Omar. Salameh was also a friend of El Sayyid Nosair, the Egyptian janitor who had shot Rabbi Meir Kahane in Manhattan, and the police announced that they were reexamining that case and two other killings. Soon they arrested several Palestinians and Egyptians.
The first World Trade Center bombing was the worst international attack on the U.S. mainland since the War of 1812, and, for anyone who knew anything about Al-Kifah, the connection was clear.
Yet the commitment of Al-Kifah’s Boston branch, and of Aafia in particular, did not waver. The day after the arrests of the Al-Kifah members in New York, the banner headline in Al-Hussam, Al-Kifah’s newsletter, read, “Boston Sends More Martyrs.” The accompanying article praised the life and death of Morabit Yahya (aka Al Layth Abou Al Layth), a twenty-six-year-old Moroccan immigrant who had arrived in the United States in 1990. Yahya had first worked at a Dunkin’ Donuts. Then, in Boston, he had “met some [people] who loved and worked to support jihad. He joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1991, where he went to training camps and later fought different battles.” The article identified this man as the fourth recruit from Boston to die in Afghanistan.
A few days later, the Boston Globe and other papers reported extensively on the arrests of Al-Kifah members in the New York area. The report mentioned the anti-Semitism they displayed and the “trail of strife” that Al-Kifah had blazed through mosques and Muslim gathering places. The negative publicity appears not to have dented Aafia’s loyalty. She sent Muslim newsgroups an e-mail the following day asking them to sponsor a Bosnian orphan or widow for Al-Kifah. “Please keep up the spirit and motivate others as well!!!” she wrote on March 15, 1993. “The Muslims of our umma need ALL the help we can provide. Humbly, your sister, aafia.”
Chapter Fourteen
The word that Ayaan most often used in her autobiography to characterize the Dutch she met during her first years in Holland is “innocent.” When an administrator at Lunteren told her that women from the Hawiye clan would have to share their camper with her, Ayaan considered it “such innocence” to think that murderously hostile clans from Somalia could live together peacefully in the Netherlands. She wrote that Ellen, a Dutch friend, “very innocently” did not understand why virginity should matter so much to Muslims. Ayaan decided that the Dutch didn’t know much about what went on outside their beautiful little country. And her friend, the Lunteren volunteer Leo Louwé, agreed that they had “been fooled by many stories.”
Every refugee had a story, even if it wasn’t the same as the one the authorities heard. Some refugees had escaped terrible danger at home but could not make themselves understood or believed. One desperate Iranian refugee at Lunteren set himself on fire after being denied asylum. This terrifying act took place on Ayaan’s twenty-third birthday. “I was lucky and felt guilty for getting refugee status so quickly, on false pretenses, when so many people were being turned down.”
But with everyone lying at least slightly in order to sway the authorities, the asylum seekers maintained a code of silence about the stories they told the Dutch. Ayaan, for example, met a woman on the train to Lunteren who claimed to be Somali but really came, Ayaan could tell, from the neighboring country of Djibouti. She knew that her Somali friend Yasmin wasn’t really underaged and that Yasmin had asked for asylum in Holland only after her false papers had failed to get her into the United States. Ayaan didn’t tell her new Dutch friends about that, and the Somalis who met Ayaan didn’t tell the authorities that she had actually been raised in Kenya and not Somalia.
The Dutch system of evaluating asylum applications was in chaos. The combination of the period’s post–Cold War conflicts and mass air travel had hit the Netherlands hard. In four years, the number of asylum applications nearly quadrupled, to more than twenty thousand. It would be years before the government understood the system of agents—or human smugglers, as immigration officials preferred to call them. But as early as November 1991, the Dutch ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs issued a directive that Somalis who had refugee status in Kenya be sent back, since Kenya wasn’t at war and their lives weren’t threatened. Ayaan was just such a person, but she got in anyway and was never sent back.
A Dutch official later told me that most Dutch did not understand that many of the new asylum seekers were professionals at home. “It was the elite from all those countries. It was really a brain drain.” Especially for older people, reception centers like Lunteren usually represented the first step toward a new life near the bottom of the social heap. Unable to speak Dutch, all new arrivals were steered toward menial work. For many of them, it was a terrible comedown.
The social workers at Lunteren didn’t ask Ayaan how she had come to the Netherlands. They knew she had been married, but they didn’t know the details. By the time she arrived, they had given up trying to learn the truth about any single refugee.
Ayaan, busy with her new life, tried to ignore the uproar in Eastleigh over her decision to abandon her new husband. The social workers warned her that there was more to getting along in Holland than learning to speak Dutch. Perhaps the hardest thing for Ayaan to learn would be how to deal with money. She wrote later that for most Somalis getting into the Netherlands “meant, above all, material gain.” But she soon learned that amounts of money that would have been huge in Nairobi disappeared fast in Europe.
She and Yasmin applied to the city council for a two-bedroom flat in Ede. While they waited, the U.S.-led peacekeeping effort in war-torn Somalia was stumbling badly. Even before the troops reached the country, a bomb went off in an Aden hotel where some U.S. arrivals were staying. In June, the Hawiye militia of General Mohammed Farah Aidid attacked the Pakistani contingent of UN troops in Mogadishu. The Somalis castrated the Pakistanis they captured and gouged out their eyes. Some of the Pakistanis were also skinned. “We never expected this from our Muslim brothers,” a Pakistani officer told me angrily months later.
The United States bombed a meeting that Aidid’s subclan was holding in a hotel. The mob outside promptly murdered four Western journalists who rushed in to cover the scene. Some observers in the West began wondering if the United States knew what it was doing. By the time Ayaan and Yasmin got permission to move in July, the fighting between Somali militias and the foreign soldiers of what the United States called Operation Restore Hope dominated the news again. But that was all behind Ayaan. The violence, the poverty, the incessant demands of family and clan, even the refugee center—she had escaped them all.
Chapter Fifteen
The FBI put Ramzi Yousef on its Most Wanted list in April 1993, and the New York Times published a long artic
le on the links between the suspects in the World Trade Center bombing and the Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn. A few days later, the Brooklyn office of Al-Kifah closed and the officers of the Boston branch—Aafia Siddiqui’s friends Emadeddin Muntasser, Mohamad Akra, and Samir al-Monla—set up a corporation they called Care International. The group’s founding documents stated that Care International would “provide assistance to war refugees and war victims around the Muslim world.” But federal prosecutors later maintained that Care (not to be confused with the huge aid organization CARE) was in fact a continuation of Al-Kifah. They would also charge Aafia’s friends with trying to conceal its real mission: “the solicitation and expenditure of funds to support the mujahideen and promote jihad.”
The FBI had quickly traced Ramzi Yousef to the jihadi underworld of Peshawar. The bomber had flown back to Pakistan on a passport issued in his real name, Abdul Basit Karim. From there he was tracked to his twin brother’s house in Quetta. With the help of the Pakistani police, the FBI raided both that house and also the house of Yousef’s uncle in Peshawar, Zahid al-Sheikh, an older brother of KSM who was the head of Peshawar’s Islamic Coordination Council. But the men had vanished. The Pakistani police told the Americans that their targets probably had friends in the ISI who tipped them off.
In Zahid’s house the raiders found a copy of an application form for another Pakistani passport in the name of Abdul Basit Karim. They also found photographs of Zahid with General Zia ul-Haq, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and General ul-Haq’s son Ijaz ul-Haq, one of the family friends whom Aafia had interviewed the previous summer. Bizarrely, though, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry insisted that Ramzi Yousef was not Pakistani, and the confusion over his origins would last for years.
Wanted Women Page 9