Wanted Women

Home > Other > Wanted Women > Page 22
Wanted Women Page 22

by Deborah Scroggins


  After Ayaan and Marco left, Holman gave a little speech to van Dijk’s camera about how conflicted he felt. On the one hand, he considered it news that this candidate had not told the truth on her asylum application. On the other hand, he was afraid that if Ayaan lost the election, she would lose her bodyguards, which allowed her to keep speaking out against Islam. Finally he decided that his duty was to keep silent. “It is a duty that she goes to the Chamber, that she gets protection for her situation,” he said. “For me to endanger this would be the beginning of the end. It would be to give up free speech, to submit to this diplomatic terror. For me, it would be to say that the Netherlands is no longer tolerant.”

  The leaders of the Liberal Party evidently agreed. Frits Bolkestein, the former Liberal Party leader, who had first sounded the alarm in 1991 about Islam’s threat to Dutch values, gave a speech making Ayaan’s themes those of the party. “Those who fail to see the discrimination against Muslim women that is going on are simply refusing to face facts,” he said. “Why should we not be allowed to criticize Islam and the Koran? Do we live in a free country or not? Let us not mince our words.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Ever since Aafia had been a little girl, she had excelled at practically everything. But in the fall of 2002, at the age of thirty-one, she was reeling in the face of failure.

  While she and Amjad were still married, her mother had told him over and over that he would never find another woman on Earth like Aafia. But he had divorced her anyway, and now he was married to some stranger from his own extended family. Aafia could tell herself he was a weakling and a hypocrite, but that didn’t change the fact that she was now that scorned and lonely creature, a divorced woman in Pakistan.

  Was she already entangled with al-Qaeda at that point? She later told the FBI that she was not. If she wasn’t, she certainly became so within months of her divorce.

  She told agents that she had come under the influence of Mufti Abu Lubaba Shah Mansoor, a fanatical Karachi cleric who was the ideologue of the al-Rashid Trust.

  The al-Rashid Trust was founded by Mufti Rashid Ahmad, one of Karachi’s original fire-breathing preachers of jihad, to support the Taliban. Abu Lubaba Shah Mansoor was Rashid Ahmad’s deputy. Prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Asia Times reported that, among Karachi’s divines, only Abu Lubaba and Mufti Rashid had direct access to Osama bin Laden.

  Aafia told the FBI that when Mufti Abu Lubaba had learned of her scientific background, he had given her a fatwa ordering her to conduct research on germ warfare and other unconventional weapons against the United States. Yet in the fall of 2002, she seems to have concentrated on furthering Abu Lubaba’s cause in another way: by working with KSM’s al-Baluchi clan.

  She said her involvement began late in 2002 when her mother decided to divide her house into two apartments and rent one out. The al-Baluchi family answered Ismat’s advertisement and became her tenants for a few months. Who and how many of the al-Baluchi came to stay is unknown. Aafia herself admitted that the family had houses of their own in the Karachi area. Assuming that Ismat and Aafia had joined the network of women providing shelter for jihadis on the run, it seems likely that only some of the al-Baluchi stayed with Ismat.

  Whether some or many, Aafia became friendly with the grown daughters of KSM’s older sister Maryam, and these daughters introduced her to their twenty-five-year-old brother, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, who also went by the name Ammar al-Baluchi.

  Despite his youth, this handsome young man was one of his uncle KSM’s agents even before 9/11. It’s also possible that Aafia had known him before fall 2002. Ali had been in touch with Jose Padilla and Adnan Shukrijumah the previous spring, when Aafia had been questioned about e-mailing Shukrijumah. U.S. deputy attorney general James Comey later testified that it was Ali who had given Jose Padilla $10,000, a cell phone, and his e-mail address before he left Karachi for Chicago.

  Clean-shaven, with close-cropped dark hair, Ali had the same wiry build and heavy-lidded gray eyes as his cousin Ramzi Yousef. He was born in Kuwait in 1977 and spent most of his teenage years in the Iranian part of Baluchistan. Somewhere along the way, probably in English-language schools, he picked up an easy fluency in English. He wore slick Western clothes and introduced himself as a businessman, though in fact his uncles and cousins had groomed him since boyhood to join their clandestine war. Ali felt comfortable enough with Western ways that KSM assigned him to teach some of the 9/11 hijackers how they should buy clothes and food in America.

  Starting in the spring of 2000, Ali helped at least nine of the 9/11 hijackers prepare for their mission. He sent for a Boeing 727 flight simulator program to train Marwan al-Shehhi, the twenty-three-year-old suicide pilot from the United Arab Emirates who would crash United Airlines flight 175 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Between June 29 and September 17, 2000, Ali wired a total of $114,500 to Shehhi and the lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta. Later, Ali organized hotel reservations and travel documents for eight other hijackers who passed through the United Arab Emirates en route to the United States. Eventually he admitted having helped Shehhi and others, but he claimed he’d had no idea they were planning a terrorist operation.

  According to the 9/11 Commission, Ali asked his uncle KSM for permission to join the hijackers on their mission. U.S. immigration records show that on August 27, 2001, he applied in Dubai for a visa to the United States. His application was turned down, and on September 10, he left Dubai for Karachi, where he was reunited with KSM.

  After the 9/11 attacks, Ali helped KSM find safe houses in Pakistan for al-Qaeda operatives and their families. His uncle also put him in charge of communicating with men who were about to undertake missions in the United States, such as Padilla and the “shoe bombers” Richard Reid and his friend Saajid Badat. Ali’s e-mail exchanges with Badat, revealed at Badat’s trial, give a sense of the jaunty tone Ali maintained. “Hey, what’s up, where are you?” he wrote when Badat seemed to be avoiding him.

  One of the operatives Ali ran for KSM in the fall of 2002 was a young Pakistani computer programmer named Majid Khan. Khan was twenty-one and chubby. His family lived in Baltimore. It was a favor Ali asked Aafia to do for Majid Khan that put her on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

  Khan had moved to Baltimore from Karachi at the age of fifteen after the United States had given his family political asylum in 1996. (His mother had claimed they were being persecuted because she belonged to a political party of Mohajirs, or Pakistanis who had migrated from India.) The family owned and operated several gas stations in the Baltimore area.

  As a teenager Khan liked hip-hop music and baggy jeans, but his aunt says he became more religious after his mother died. Early in 2002, he and his brother returned to Pakistan to find brides.

  As with Aafia and the al-Baluchi clan, there was a Deobandi connection in Majid Khan’s family. His grandfather had been a Deobandi religious scholar in the Sindh town of Tando Allahyar. His aunt Khadija Arshad still ran a madrassa for girls there. She told me that Khan asked her to find him a wife. “Majid’s insistence was that he wanted to marry with a woman who was a religious scholar,” Arshad said, sitting on a floor cushion in her nearly bare Karachi apartment. So Arshad arranged a marriage in February 2002 between her nephew and one of her students, eighteen-year-old Rabia Yaqoob. A month later, Khan returned to Baltimore and his job. But he returned to Pakistan later in the year; his family says he wanted to be with his wife while he waited for his U.S. citizenship to come through. (The U.S. government claims he returned to work for KSM, whom they say he met on his previous trip through his aunt’s husband and son.)

  KSM has told his U.S. interrogators that, for him, the most important quality in a recruit is his willingness to carry out a suicide operation. According to a secret assessment of Khan prepared at Guantánamo in 2008, KSM tested Khan by asking him to strap on a vest he believed to be filled with explosives and go to a mosque where he said Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf would be visiting with
the intention of detonating the vest. Khan passed, and then KSM asked the programmer to travel to Singapore in the fall of 2002 to deliver $50,000 to an associate of his old comrade Riduan Isamuddin, aka Hambali, the head of Jemaah Islamiah, al-Qaeda’s Indonesian affiliate. Hambali had orchestrated the killing of 202 people in the suicide bombings of two Bali nightclubs. The money that Khan delivered was used to bomb Jakarta’s Marriott Hotel, killing 12 and injuring 150. KSM said Khan had also given him the names of other potential operatives in the United States, such as Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver who had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan and would later be sentenced to twenty years in prison for helping Khan and KSM.

  By late 2002, KSM seems to have settled on a scheme to send Khan back to the United States to begin preparing the ground for a spectacular new attack.

  But Khan had made a mistake when he left the United States that was hampering his return. He had failed to obtain a travel document from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) that he needed before he would be allowed to reenter the country. According to U.S. military prosecutors—and to Aafia’s statements to the FBI—that was how Aafia entered the plot.

  She told the FBI that Ali had described Khan to her as a friend who needed her help to get back into the United States. KSM’s nephew evidently knew that Aafia would have no difficulty entering the United States because she still had a U.S. visa that Amjad had obtained for her the year before. Ali therefore arranged several meetings among Aafia, Khan, and Khan’s wife and sister. Since Khan was an unrelated man, Aafia sat behind a partition at the meetings while Khan’s female relatives did the talking.

  Khan explained that he needed an address in the United States from which to mail his application for the travel document. He offered to pay for her to fly to the United States and open a post office box for him in the suburban Maryland town of Gaithersburg; then he needed her to collect the refugee travel document from the same box when the INS mailed it to him and carry it back to him in Pakistan.

  Aafia told the FBI that she had agreed to do part of this job because Khan was “a family friend.” She agreed to open the box but not to wait around to collect his papers. Khan supposedly agreed.

  Thus she left her three-month-old, Suleman, and two other children in Karachi with her mother, and on Christmas Day she flew to the United States, the country she had been desperate to leave only a few months earlier.

  Her sister, Fowzia, says she made the trip to interview for jobs at Johns Hopkins University and the State University of New York. “She was all set to go back to the U.S. because Pakistan was too traumatizing for her,” Fowzia wrote me in an e-mail. But both universities were closed that week for the winter holiday, and university spokespeople could not verify that she had had any interviews. Aafia testified at her trial that she had gone looking for work but then returned to Pakistan early because her mother was ill.

  Given Aafia’s intense fear of the FBI, the journey must have been stressful. In fact, though she didn’t know it, the FBI had placed her on an airline watch list after she and Amjad had left the United States without attending their second FBI interview. Now the FBI was alerted as soon as she entered the country. Yet she moved about freely, and on December 30 she entered the Gaithersburg post office and asked to rent a box.

  Michael O’Hora, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the U.S. Postal Service, was the clerk on duty that day. He later testified that Aafia was “well dressed” in a woolen scarf and coat. (There’s no mention of a head scarf.) When O’Hora asked her for identification, she showed him her Massachusetts driver’s license and the Tufts University health insurance card that she had been given under Amjad’s plan with the Tufts New England Medical Center.

  She told O’Hora that the post office box was for her and her husband, whose name was Majid Khan, and that Khan would stop by later to show his identification. She said she was staying with friends in Gaithersburg, and she gave her telephone number as 301-529-9363 and her address as 18529 Reliance Drive. After signing the application and paying 29 dollars, she left with a receipt and two keys to P.O. box 8642.

  At about 3 p.m., Aafia entered a second Gaithersburg post office about a mile and a half away. There she purchased a money order payable to the INS for 110 dollars and a large envelope. She placed the money order in the envelope with an application for a refugee travel document that Majid Khan had signed and dated December 20, 2002, and mailed it to the INS in Lincoln, Nebraska. She listed Khan’s return address as the post office box she had rented.

  Three days later, on January 2, 2003, she returned to Karachi.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Holland’s elections took place on January 22. The front-runners for prime minister were Jan Peter Balkenende of the Christian Democrats and Job Cohen, the Labor mayor of Amsterdam whom Ayaan had called an ayatollah. Labor came in second behind the Christian Democrats, but together with the conservative Liberals and the small left-leaning D-66 party, the Christian Democrats won enough seats to form the first governing coalition in a decade that excluded Labor.

  It was a tremendous setback for the Left, and Ayaan, number 16 on the Liberals’ ballot, got the sixth largest number of votes in her party. She wasn’t just in; she was a power in the land.

  Ayaan and her new colleagues exulted. But even in the photos taken on election night, there’s something incongruous about the spectacle of this gorgeous young Somali woman popping champagne corks amid so many pale Dutchmen in dark suits. Ayaan stands out like a beautiful leopard in a herd of cattle. And the Liberals were about to learn that she had claws.

  The newspaper Trouw had an unusual feature. One of its reporters, Arjan Visser, regularly asked politicians and other public figures to discuss what the biblical Ten Commandments meant to them. In the United States such a question would probably elicit solemn homilies, but Holland is different. Pim Fortuyn, for example, when asked about the commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” had talked about the pleasures of having sex with men in the back rooms of Rotterdam’s gay bars. On January 25—only three days after the election—Trouw published Visser’s interview with Ayaan on its front page. The headline said, “Hirsi Ali: Muhammad Is a Perverse Tyrant.”

  She had been asked to comment on the commandment “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” Among other things she asserted that in Islam criticism of the Prophet Muhammad was a capital offense. She went on to describe how the Prophet had married Aisha, the daughter of his friend Abu Bakr, when she was nine years old. Ayaan added, “In other words, Muhammad teaches us that it is fine to take away your best friend’s child. By our Western standards, Muhammad is a perverse man. A tyrant. He is against freedom of expression. If you don’t do what he says, you will end up in hell. That reminds me of those megalomaniacal rulers in the Middle East: bin Laden, Khomeini, and Saddam. Are you surprised to find a Saddam Hussein? Muhammad is his example. Muhammad is an example to all Muslim men. Why do you think so many Islamic men use violence?”

  The words Ayaan used in this interview have probably sparked more resentment against her than anything else she has done. As she has noted many times, devout Muslims consider Muhammad to be the most perfect human being ever, and they use the Sunna, or stories about his life, as a guide to how to live today. Because Salafists, for instance, in Saudi Arabia believe the Prophet wore an ankle-length gown rather than a longer one, they wear ankle-length gowns today. Because Ayatollah Khomeini believed the Prophet married Aisha when she was nine, he reduced the legal age of marriage for girls in Iran from sixteen to nine. Saudi Arabia executes some criminals by chopping off their heads: that is what the Prophet is supposed to have ordered. The point Ayaan wanted to raise—and she has raised it many times since—was a serious and important one: is the exact way the Prophet led his life the best guide to behavior in the twenty-first century? But the way she said it ensured that no believer would listen.

  The Dutch tend to treat religious sensitivities far less seriously than
Americans do, and, in general, the Liberals were remarkably careless when it came to Muslims’ feelings. But even that party’s leaders realized when they read her interview that, by inviting Ayaan to represent their party, they had gotten more than they bargained for.

  The article appeared on a Saturday. The Netherlands had a law banning hate speech, a law usually used to prosecute anti-Semites. By midday, hundreds of Muslims were heading for police stations to demand that she be punished for insulting Muslims.

  Someone phoned the house she had shared in Leiden and threatened to blow up the building. More restrained critics spoke out about how Ayaan was smearing Muslim men, that her statements about the Prophet’s life and marriage were incorrect, and that she had failed to mention his modesty, kindness, and generosity. What made Muslims especially angry was that Ayaan wasn’t just a private citizen but an elected member of Parliament.

  She went on in the same interview to offend a good many Christians, saying she doubted that most intelligent people who claimed to be religious really believed in God. She didn’t believe, for example, that the new prime minister, Balkenende—a Christian Democrat and the leader of her own party’s coalition—was himself truly a Christian. “He is an academic, a man who has learned to use well-reasoned arguments to find certain truths. Can he believe that the world was created in six days? That Eve was created from Adam’s rib? That simply cannot be true. Scientists are unbelieving.”

  She failed to note that many Christians do not believe in the literal truth of the Bible, yet they remain Christians, or that many scientists accept various religious ideas yet remain scientists. For her, it seemed, Christians who not did accept every word of the Bible were not Christians, and religious scientists were not real scientists.

  Gerrit Zalm and his Liberal colleagues, as the Dutch journalist Alies Pegtel later wrote, were “not amused.”

 

‹ Prev