Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  Other Liberals complained that she refused to submit to the apprenticeship and party discipline that everyone else observed. She also paid little attention to other members’ bills on meat-and-potatoes issues such as education and social security. She had her own media contacts, besides. “She became a kind of one-man party within the party,” said Fadime Örgü.

  One of Ayaan’s new Liberal friends was an outspoken member of Parliament with a helmetlike bleached-blond hairdo named Geert Wilders. Wilders had been elected in 1998. Before that he had been an assistant to Bolkestein, the former party leader. He had always been fascinated with the Middle East, and he often spoke of his admiration for Israel, which he had visited several times as a young man. From the moment he arrived in Parliament, he began pounding on Islam.

  On April 12, 2003, a day after U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld waved away televised reports of looting and disorder in Baghdad by remarking, “Stuff happens,” Ayaan and Wilders published an article in the NRC Handelsblad titled “It Is Time for a Liberal Jihad.”

  In it she and Wilders argued that the radicalization of Dutch and European Muslims demanded a more punitive reply. Once again, they jeered at the “naive and cowardly” policy associated with Amsterdam’s popular mayor, Job Cohen, and his Moroccan-born deputy, Ahmed Aboutaleb, of “holding it together.” The way Cohen and Aboutaleb went around meeting with Muslims “exudes weakness,” they said, and would only make Muslims regard the Dutch with “scorn.” Calling on the government to shut down two notoriously intolerant mosques and an Islamic school, they warned that, in order to protect freedom of religion in the long term, Holland must limit it in the short term.

  “To maintain a tolerant and liberal Netherlands,” Ayaan and Wilders argued, “we must put aside basic rights and laws to address people who abuse them and who then want to remove them as the foundation of our society.”

  The article affirmed basically what Bush and his people were saying to justify their handling of the “war on terror.” But the sheer speed with which two supposed Dutch champions of Enlightenment were ready to dump “basic rights and law,” which they themselves conceded were the “foundation of our society,” was breathtaking. The United States had been under attack by the jihadis since 1993. But not a single act of Islamist terrorism had yet taken place in Holland.

  The left-wing opponents of Ayaan and Wilders naturally criticized their willingness to deny Muslims equal protection. But the Dutch intelligence service, the AIVD, worried about the article for a different reason.

  Only a few dozen Dutch Muslims were preparing for jihad, according to the AIVD’s estimates; two-thirds of the country’s one million Muslims were not religiously observant, and only about 5 percent of those who were observant felt drawn to radical Islamist ideologies. The intelligence agency believed that Ayaan and Wilders were playing into the hands of the jihadis when they whipped up fear and anger against the Muslim community as a whole.

  With its surveillance power, the AIVD knew just how paranoid and isolated Holland’s very few jihadis really were. They knew that al-Qaeda and its supporters sought to stage symbolic confrontations identical to those that Ayaan was proposing—confrontations that would polarize society and alienate Muslims from the West. The intelligence agency’s 2002 report concluded, in fact, that one reason the 9/11 attacks had furthered the interests of radical Islam was that Western governments “were successfully provoked to make generalizing statements or even generalizing acts toward Muslims and ‘Islam.’ ” They worried that remarks like Ayaan’s made the moderate majority of Muslims less likely to cooperate with the government in tracking down the jihadis.

  In any case, liberal Muslims noticed the fear and suspicion hanging over the whole Muslim community. It seemed, especially to young Muslims of both sexes, to vindicate the radicals’ claims that the West talked about universal values but would never accept Muslims as equals.

  Karima Belhaj, a counselor at Amsterdam’s largest center for Muslim women, noticed that the women her center dealt with were starting to wear veils and head scarves as a symbol of defiance against Ayaan and her allies. “Because she attacks Islam,” Belhaj said, “they are becoming more fundamentalist. She attacks their values. We are losing women over her. They are wearing more and more veils. This frightens me.”

  Belhaj despised the jihadis. “These crazy dangerous people—we are the biggest victims of them.” But she insisted that what was turning some young Dutch Muslims against their country wasn’t so much Islamism as Islamophobia. “The problem is that hatred against Arabs and Muslims is shown in the Netherlands without any shame.” She didn’t know Ayaan, but she wanted to tell her, “Don’t create hate. When you are teasing people, you create monsters.”

  The AIVD had recently spotted a clique of “these crazy dangerous people.” Mohammed Bouyeri was the twenty-five-year-old son of a Moroccan man who had washed dishes for thirty years at Schiphol Airport before retiring. Shy, short, and with a scraggly beard, young Bouyeri was a loner frustrated by the world’s failure to recognize his importance.

  The police were first called to his house in 2000, after he locked his sister in her room. He had accused her of fouling the family’s honor by having a secret affair with a local boy. His sister managed to phone the police, and the incident was resolved without charges being filed.

  A few months later, Bouyeri pulled a knife on his sister’s boyfriend. That time he ended up in prison, where he got interested in religion.

  When he was free again, he began attending the El Tawheed Mosque in Amsterdam West. The 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and other members of KSM’s Hamburg cell had visited El Tawheed before embarking on their attacks.

  Bouyeri shaved his head, grew a beard, and began wearing a long cotton caftan and knit skullcap. His new costume got him attention. So did the articles and religious treatises he started writing for a local newsletter. At the neighborhood center where he worked, he refused to shake hands with women or allow mixed gatherings.

  In early 2003, he wrote in the center’s newsletter that “the Netherlands is our enemy because they support the invasion of Iraq.” He threatened a female staff member who disagreed with his interpretation of the Quran. The staff reported him to the police, and the police reported him to Dutch intelligence. His own sister and father began to avoid him.

  Possibly at El Tawheed, Bouyeri met a Syrian preacher who called himself Abu Khaled. This preacher had appeared in Europe claiming political asylum in 1994, and he had a certain sinister charisma. Abu Khaled claimed to be an Islamic scholar. At the refugee centers where he lived, he laid down fatwas that his followers enforced down to the smallest detail. Men stopped shaking hands with women. People stopped drinking alcohol.

  It was under the influence of this cult figure that Bouyeri decided in 2003 that even the El Tawheed mosque was too liberal for him. He began downloading jihadi videos from Dan Klinker’s Web site, www.ogrish.com. The beheading of Daniel Pearl became a special favorite.

  He and other followers of the strange Abu Khaled would gather in Bouyeri’s neat two-story semidetached house outside Amsterdam to listen to their guru and watch the Pearl film and similar fare. Abu Khaled’s Surinamese wife, her grown daughter, and other women followers attended, sitting behind a curtain at the meetings. Bouyeri’s elderly Dutch neighbors would pull back their lace curtains to stare when the women arrived in their long black veils, niqabs, and gloves.

  A childhood friend of Bouyeri, Abdellatif el-Morabet, went to some of the meetings and was terrified. Abu Khaled talked about occult Quranic meanings based on numerals and prophecies, and he claimed that murder and bloodshed were forms of prayer. “I saw the Devil in him,” Morabet said. Morabet also told police that Abu Khaled and his followers “enjoyed” videos of infidels being tortured and beheaded. “Mohammed Bouyeri was even aroused by them,” Morabet said.

  Much later some women from the group gave two Dutch reporters, Janny Groen and Annieke Kranenberg, a CD that they said Bouye
ri had made. In a file called “Slaughter of Allah’s Enemies” it contained twenty-three films of Westerners and Iraqis being murdered by jihadis. As Groen and Kranenberg wrote in their book Women Warriors for Allah, “no fewer than twenty-eight men’s throats are cut or chopped with a machete and more than ten victims are executed in other ways. . . . All the beheadings appear to follow the same pattern. The throat is cut while the perpetrators shout ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘Allah is great’).”

  The women told the reporters that the first few beheadings were terrifying to watch, but they got used to them.

  Abu Khaled’s circle claimed to abhor pornography. The murder films, however, appeared on a porno site. And just as mirror neurons stir many people watching pornography to share the sensation of having sex, so they seem to have stimulated this group to discover pleasure in murder.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Aafia didn’t know it, but she was under surveillance well before Uzair Paracha arrived in New York on February 19, 2003, with instructions to collect Majid Khan’s mail. Because the FBI had put Aafia’s name on its aviation watch list when she failed to show up for her meeting with them in 2002, Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency informed the bureau as soon as she boarded her flight to the United States in December, according to the Pakistani newspaper Daily Times. FBI agents visited the Gaithersburg post office the day after she left the United States for Pakistan and questioned postal clerk Michael O’Hora about her. Within a few months of her return, moreover, U.S. and Pakistani officials announced the arrest of the 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and everyone else allegedly involved in his plot to blow up American gas stations—except for Aafia.

  The arrests began on March 1, when Pakistan announced that it had captured KSM and another 9/11 planner, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, in a 3 a.m. raid in Westridge, a suburb of Rawalpindi, the army garrison town near Islamabad. U.S. officials later said that an informant had been paid $25 million to finger the al-Qaeda operations chief.

  Within hours, newspapers and broadcasters around the world were reporting the capture of the man the White House now admitted was the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. A photo showing the previously dapper KSM looking fat and disheveled in a wrinkled undershirt was splashed across the front page of every newspaper in Pakistan. Ali took one of those papers to Saifullah Paracha’s office and showed Paracha the photo of the man he knew only as “Mir.”

  Paracha was alarmed; he later told military investigators that he’d had no idea how important KSM had been to the global jihad. Worried, he called his son in New York to ask if he’d seen the news and to warn him to be careful with Majid Khan’s documents.

  Aafia, for the time being, seemed quite calm. That very morning she sent another e-mail to her former adviser at Brandeis, looking for a job. “I prefer to work in the United States,” she wrote, adding that Pakistan had no positions in her field.

  Perhaps she hadn’t heard about KSM’s arrest when she wrote to Sekuler. Or maybe, as she told the FBI, she had never met him and did not understand the implications of the news for her. Certainly it would have frightened her if she had. The Pakistani police said they had found KSM at the home of Malaqah Khanum, a middle-aged leader of Jamaat-e-Islami’s women’s wing.

  The Siddiquis may have known Khanum’s family. Her husband, Abdul Qadoos, was a bacteriologist who had worked for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Zambia at the same time Aafia’s father was a doctor there. Ismat Siddiqui and Malaqah Khanum were both among Pakistan’s early female Islamist activists. Police would later accuse one of Khanum’s sons, a Pakistani army major serving in the border town of Kohat, near the tribal areas where many al-Qaeda fighters were hiding, of having concealed KSM and helped Arab jihadis find Jamaat-e-Islami’s underground trail to safety in Pakistan.

  The CIA found handwritten documents in the Qadoos household, plus files on a computer, that made them think al-Qaeda’s biological weapons program was further along than they had believed—and that KSM himself had been plotting to use it. With the help of Pakistani scientists the group had made plans and obtained materials to manufacture two biological toxins, botulinum and salmonella, and the chemical poison cyanide. They also found a document directing operatives to purchase Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax disease, and other evidence suggesting that al-Qaeda could produce a form of inhalable anthrax that would kill three-quarters of the people exposed to it even if they received treatment.

  Investigators soon followed up on what they had learned at the Qadoos house and from KSM’s interrogation.

  Majid Khan was arrested on March 5. He was allowed to see his brother on March 13, and Khan “looked terrible and seemed very, very tired,” as his father later testified. Khan told his brother that the Americans had beat him, tied him painfully to a chair for eight hours at a time, and deprived him of sleep. When he wasn’t being questioned, Khan said, he was held in a coffinlike cell so small that he couldn’t lie down.

  On March 10, the FBI appeared at the door of Aafia’s sister, Fowzia, in Baltimore. She phoned her brother in Houston later that day and told him that the FBI was looking for Aafia. The brother called Annette Lamoreaux, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union then based in Texas, for advice and Lamoreaux agreed to represent him if the authorities contacted him.

  The news that the FBI was looking for her evidently sent Aafia into a panic. Against Ismat’s wishes, she announced that she was leaving the house. Ismat cried and screamed for her to stay, but Aafia left anyway, in a minicab. Ismat later said that her daughter had taken all three children with her.

  Aafia told Ismat that she and the children were going to Islamabad to stay with her uncle S. H. Faruqi. They planned to stop on the way and visit friends in Rawalpindi whom Ismat didn’t know. She said Aafia had called her from what she believed was the Karachi train station—but then she had never arrived at Faruqi’s house. Aafia’s uncle said she had gone underground after learning she was wanted by the FBI.

  It seems that rather than going to her uncle’s house Aafia went into hiding with the al-Baluchi clan. That, at least, is what she told the FBI, and what members of the al-Baluchi family confirmed to Pakistani reporters. (Aafia’s lawyers, however, later said that she repudiated all the statements the FBI attributed to her. They also pointed out that she had been recovering from surgery and under sedation when FBI agents questioned her.)

  Her intimacy with KSM’s family did not end there. Aafia told the FBI that because she could not live in the same house with an unmarried male—namely Ali, KSM’s handsome young nephew and protégé—Ali, through his sister, proposed that they marry and she accepted.

  She said she and Ali were married in the inner courtyard of his family’s house. “His female family members were present for the wedding, and provided her with some nice clothes,” notes the FBI’s report of her interrogation in 2008. Members of the al-Baluchi family have said the ceremony took place in Hub Chowki, a grimy industrial area outside Karachi on the main road to Baluchistan.

  It was a far cry from her first marriage, yet Aafia may actually have loved Ali. She told the FBI that she had spent the next few weeks in the house, partly because she was hiding “but also because her husband was a very strict Muslim and wanted it that way.” She said she had not minded because he was very kind to her. As an example of his kindness, she said, once, when they had been praying, a baby had started crying. Ali, she said, hadn’t gotten angry but instead had picked up the baby to soothe it and continued with his prayer.

  She also said she didn’t believe Ali belonged to al-Qaeda: “He is a good man who is wrongly accused.” But Ali himself later told U.S. investigators that he told Aafia that al-Qaeda had set up a biological weapons lab. He had asked her advice on how long it would take to develop such weapons and whether the man in charge was capable of it. He said she had been willing to participate but that he had never asked or considered allowing her to work in the laboratory.

  While Aafia
was enjoying her surprise honeymoon, the FBI was tracking down her friends and relatives in the United States. On March 17, agents showed up at her brother’s house in Houston. The agents rudely demanded that he answer their questions immediately. When Ali phoned his lawyer and she asked to speak to the agents, they shouted into the cell phone that Ali had no right to legal counsel.

  The FBI posted pictures of Aafia and her ex-husband, Amjad, on its Web site the next day, in a new “Wanted” category it had set up for people associated with terrorism but not facing criminal charges. The Web site said the FBI was merely seeking information about the couple and had no information connecting them to “specific terrorist activities.” But with her black hair pulled severely back and her mouth set in an uncompromising line (the photo was a retouched version of the one on her Massachusetts driver’s license), the diminutive Aafia looked distinctly menacing.

  Majid Khan’s friend the truck driver and former mujahid Iyman Faris was arrested in Ohio on March 19, and on March 20 the FBI announced a global manhunt for Adnan Shukrijumah, the Saudi man about whom Aafia had been questioned the previous May. Five days later, the bureau’s Baltimore office put out a worldwide alert for Aafia and Amjad, and on March 26 the U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia issued a warrant for Shukrijumah’s arrest. The Washington Post quoted unnamed FBI authorities in the Baltimore office as claiming that Aafia and Amjad were both suspected of having ties to Shukrijumah. The article quoted the same FBI sources as saying without elaboration that Aafia had visited the Baltimore area in late December or January.

  Amjad and his parents read about the FBI’s hunt in the newspapers. Frightened, they sought advice from a family friend who had worked in Pakistani military intelligence. The friend arranged for Amjad to meet with the ISI. The intelligence officers asked him what he knew about Aafia’s activities. Did she have contacts with the Taliban? With Osama bin Laden? Amjad told them that he and Aafia were divorced and that he knew nothing about her contacts. The ISI let him go.