Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  On March 28, FBI agents went to see Uzair Paracha at the office Uzair’s father shared with his business partner in Manhattan. When Uzair agreed to let them search the bags he had left where he was staying in Brooklyn, agents found Majid Khan’s Maryland driver’s license, Social Security card, and bank card and the receipts that Aafia had signed for the rental of the Gaithersburg post office box. As for the key to the box, they found that on Uzair’s own key ring.

  After two days of round-the-clock questioning, Uzair admitted that he had agreed to help Majid Khan and Aafia’s new husband, Ali, even though he had suspected they belonged to al-Qaeda and were planning a chemical attack on the United States. Uzair said he had never met Aafia Siddiqui. But when the agents asked him if he thought she was the kind of person who would agree to receive anthrax through the mail, he told them he thought she was.

  His admissions seemed to shock the agents. He was arrested and taken to New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center.

  The very next day, March 29, 2003, Pakistani and U.S. news media began airing a confusing series of on-again, off-again reports that Aafia had also been arrested—reports that to this day have led some people to believe that she was captured during that period, handed over to the Americans, and then held in a secret prison for the next five years. Others (and I count myself in this group) believe that she may have been arrested but was probably released soon afterward.

  The mysterious Aafia reports began on March 29 when the Pakistani newspaper Dawn wrote that police had picked her up the day before at the Karachi airport. Unnamed FBI officials in Washington were quoted as saying she was the first woman suspected of being an al-Qaeda operative in the United States. Other news reports claimed that she had been captured and was being interrogated by the FBI.

  On March 31, Pakistani and Indian newspapers again reported that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies had detained her in Karachi. But the following day, Pakistan’s interior minister denied having her in custody. “You will be astonished to know about the activities of Dr. Aafia,” the minister told a press conference, adding to the haze.

  (In 2011, lawyers from the International Justice Network, representing the Siddiqui family, released what they said was a transcript of a secretly recorded conversation in which Imran Shaukat, the superintendent of police of Sindh Province, told an unnamed witness that he had been present at Aafia’s arrest in 2003. According to the transcript, Shaukat said Aafia had been on her way to Islamabad when she was arrested wearing a veil and gloves. He described her as a “minor facilitator” for al-Qaeda who had been “hobnobbing with clerics.” He said the police had turned her over to the ISI.)

  For months after that, Aafia’s mother gave contradictory statements about her daughter’s whereabouts. But in later years she would single out March 30, 2003, as the day that Aafia and her children had supposedly disappeared into the hands of Pakistani intelligence agents. (Aafia herself, of course, eventually told the FBI that she had gone into hiding with the al-Baluchi family then.)

  In the United States, the FBI gave every indication that it was still looking for her. The Washington Times reported that the bureau had intensified its search and thought she might be linked to Jose Padilla and Adnan Shukrijumah.

  Yet the Pakistanis continued to view Aafia’s whereabouts as more complicated. On April 9, for example, the Pakistani newspaper the News reported that Ismat said her “missing” daughter—the newspaper itself put the word in quotes—had left her house in Karachi during the last week of March and was now being held either by the FBI or the Pakistani government. “The matter of Aafia’s ‘arrest,’ ” the newspaper said, “became a mystery as no one, including the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has claimed responsibility for holding Aafia at any forum.”

  Ismat also told the News that the government had denied her daughter’s arrest and that “recently an unknown man came to her house and informed her that her daughter was safe and sound. He told her not to make a fuss about her daughter’s disappearance, if she wants safe recovery of her daughter. He also threatened that if she made the matter public, her daughter would meet the same fate as Asif Bhuja met.” The article went on to say that sources in Pakistan’s intelligence agencies suggested that “militants” had taken her away to prevent “information being provided by her.”

  Asif Bhuja was a suspect in the Daniel Pearl murder case who was found dead when police arrived to question him. To an American reader, the reference was almost incomprehensible. But sophisticated Pakistanis were used to reading between the lines. They read the News as suggesting that the same nexus of Pakistani and Arab jihadis who had killed Pearl had also hidden Aafia and that both they and the ISI had warned Aafia’s mother not to talk about it.

  The next mention of Aafia suggested that U.S. officials were still pressing Pakistan to arrest her. The Indian newspaper the Hindu quoted Pakistan’s interior minister as saying, after a meeting of the U.S.-Pakistan Joint Working Group on Terrorism and Law Enforcement, that Pakistan would extradite Aafia to the United States if she were arrested, despite its rule against extraditing its own nationals, because she had become a U.S. citizen.

  Ismat quickly called reporters to correct the minister, telling them that Aafia had never become a U.S. citizen. She also denied reports that Aafia was a fanatic. Ismat claimed that it was Aafia’s ex-husband, Amjad, not Aafia, who had wanted to send their children to Islamic schools and that Ismat had their custody agreement to prove it. The Siddiqui family also told U.S. News & World Report that Amjad had abused Aafia and the children and that he might have kidnapped them.

  In Boston, the FBI interviewed her friends the “Care brothers.” In New York, they found the Saudi man who had once sublet Amjad and Aafia’s apartment, yanking the man from an airport line and showing him pictures of Aafia. But he didn’t know where she was, either.

  On April 21, the NBC Nightly News reported that Aafia had been detained in Pakistan. “Senior U.S. officials say Siddiqui definitely has ties to very radical individuals in Pakistan and may be working as a fixer for al-Qaeda,” NBC’s investigative reporter Lisa Myers said.

  Ismat told reporters in Pakistan who called her about the NBC report that Aafia had disappeared from her “hiding place in Karachi” about ten days earlier. She seemed frantic with worry. Yet the following day, U.S. officials backed off, saying they were “doubtful” that Aafia was in custody. They offered no explanation for the bizarre and continuing confusion. Aafia’s picture remained on the FBI’s Web site, and on April 24 the bureau issued another warning that al-Qaeda might start using women in its attacks.

  Amjad read about Aafia’s serial “arrests”—and about the Siddiquis’ added accusation that he had beaten her before their divorce—with growing alarm. Aafia’s mother still refused to take his calls about the children. In April, an FBI agent from the Baltimore office interviewed him. The agent asked about Aafia’s trip to Gaithersburg in December. To Amjad’s relief, he could honestly say he knew nothing about it. The agent wondered if Aafia knew anyone who could give her a false identity. Amjad replied he had no idea. He asked the agent if the FBI knew where his children were. The answer was no. The agent gave him a card and told him to get in touch if he ever wanted to come back to the United States. He never heard from the man again.

  That FBI agent wasn’t the only person present at Amjad’s interview. Agents from Pakistan’s ISI were also there, and they took Amjad aside afterward. They suggested he contact Aafia and tell her she needn’t fear talking to the FBI; the Pakistanis would guarantee her security if she would just sit down with the Americans for a meeting.

  But Amjad replied that he had told the FBI the truth. He didn’t know where she was.

  After the FBI arrested Majid Khan’s friend the truck driver Iyman Faris in Ohio, he was taken to a Virginia safe house and told to stay in touch with his Pakistani contacts. Perhaps it was through Faris that the FBI managed to close in on Aafia’s new husband, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. On April 29, A
li was arrested in Karachi along with Khalad al-Attash, a Yemeni accused of plotting al-Qaeda’s 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Two days later, on May 1, Faris pleaded guilty to scouting out the Brooklyn Bridge and other potential sites for al-Qaeda terrorist attacks. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

  In the seven weeks since his uncle’s arrest, young Ali had been busy. He had married Aafia, and U.S. officials say he had taken charge of a series of new attacks that were still being planned. One was a scheme to hijack airliners and crash them into London’s Heathrow Airport. But apparently Ali had put off that plot in order to plan the bombing of multiple Western targets in Karachi, including the U.S. Consulate.

  U.S. military officers later testified at Ali’s combatant-status review in Guantánamo that he and Attash had been captured in a Karachi apartment while awaiting delivery of the explosives they needed to blow up the consulate. Pakistani newspapers reported that the truck Ali was waiting for contained three hundred pounds of fertilizer—the kind that Ali’s cousin Ramzi Yousef had used to build the first World Trade Center bomb. The truck also reportedly contained sulfur, gunpowder, ammunition, pistols, submachine guns, and AK-47 rifles. Ali’s own possessions were said to have included a letter to Osama bin Laden from some scholars in Saudi Arabia, a computer disk containing a draft of a letter to bin Laden, and a container of perfume spray containing a small dose of cyanide.

  But since Ali was unknown to the public, the news that another nephew of KSM had been arrested was lost in the jubilation over the capture of Attash, a militant long on the FBI’s Wanted list.

  Years later, Amjad heard that a woman had been in the apartment where Ali and Attash had been caught. A retired Pakistani federal investigator told Aafia’s ex-husband that when the police had arrived at the apartment, in the early morning of April 29, the militants inside had begun firing at them immediately. But after half an hour they had asked for a cease-fire so that a woman could get out. The police agreed. Soon a woman had come downstairs, completely veiled, and had been taken into FIA custody.

  The woman said her name was Zainab. She refused to remove her veil and began shrieking at the officers that if they dared to touch her she would have them arrested and beaten. Then she asked to call her mother.

  According to the officer who placed the call, the person who answered the phone at the number the veiled woman gave the police said her name was Ismat Siddiqui. Soon after that, the police began getting calls from headquarters ordering them not to harm the woman or question her. Within an hour, ISI agents appeared and took the woman away. The FIA agents were told they would be fired if they mentioned the incident to anyone.

  I have no way of verifying this account of Aafia’s presence at her husband, Ali’s, last shoot-out. But if it’s true that Aafia left the al-Baluchi family compound with Ali and proceeded to a Karachi apartment, that might explain why Ismat told reporters that her daughter had left her “hiding place.” Moreover, Aafia’s special relationship in the story with the ISI sounds a theme that often reappeared in the rumors that swirled around her subsequent disappearance. Of course, some elements of the ISI have been tight with Deobandi militants and even with al-Qaeda for decades.

  One of KSM’s uncles, Mohammed Hussein, offered what may be a reason for the newlyweds’ departure from their hiding place. According to him, despite the conspirators’ intense activity and despite the added drama that the authorities were closing in on their secret world, Aafia found time to quarrel with Ali’s family and perhaps even with Ali himself.

  Hussein said the short marriage was on the verge of breaking up before Ali was arrested. He claimed that Aafia’s “liberal way of life” had put Ali off.

  Aafia described the family’s tensions differently. She told the FBI that Ali’s relatives had been “very upset” when he was arrested and that she had left their house. She also said the family had told her that Ali had divorced her while he was detained. Perhaps Ali was as startled as Aafia’s first husband was to learn how willful this pious young woman could be. Or perhaps the inbred family of terrorists simply didn’t trust her.

  Whatever the facts, at the end of April, the reports of Aafia’s arrest ceased. Both the Pakistani and U.S. authorities now said that she was still at large. But almost everyone else involved in KSM’s Baltimore plot had been captured.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Liberal Party asked Ayaan to write a policy statement summarizing her specific proposals on the integration and emancipation of Muslim women. With the help of two University of Amsterdam sociologists, Paul Scheffer and Abram de Swaan, she came up with a twelve-page statement. She proposed abolishing Article 23 of the Dutch Constitution, closing down existing Muslim schools, and refusing to finance new ones. She wanted to reduce unemployment benefits—dramatically—and abolish the minimum wage.

  She got a pilot project under way that required police in two of the country’s sixteen districts to register suspected honor killings. The results shocked the country: in a six-month period, eleven Muslim girls were killed in the two regions.

  Ayaan’s supporters were thrilled by the way she was forcing Holland to pay attention to the suffering of Muslim women. “She has an un-Dutch way of making policy, but in more than twenty years, she is the only one who has succeeded in putting this pretty sharply on the agenda,” said Margreet Fogteloo, an editor of the left-wing magazine De Groene Amsterdammer, who was frustrated and mystified by the increasing number of veiled women in The Hague. “We tried to help them, but in the end their position was getting worse.”

  Ayaan argued in speeches and articles that the country’s Islamic schools isolated Muslim children from the rest of society and were breeding grounds for radicalism. But the ruling Christian Democrats weren’t about to stop funding religious schools, and their coalition partners in Ayaan’s Liberal Party weren’t prepared to make it an issue.

  To show how wrong they were, Ayaan took a camera crew from the TV program Nova to an Islamic school in Amersfoort. “What is higher to you, Allah or the Constitution?” she asked a classroom full of twelve-year-olds sitting on mats, boys separated from girls. “Allah,” the children answered. “So Allah is higher than the Constitution,” Ayaan repeated in a voice heavy with meaning.

  The school’s principal protested that it wasn’t fair to single out Muslim children and ask them to choose between God and the Constitution. “The children at any strong Christian or Jewish school would answer the same way,” he told Nova.

  Some of Ayaan’s Liberal colleagues agreed. Surely one great lesson of two world wars, not to mention the Holocaust, was that citizens have to remember that there is a higher morality than a government’s orders. Nor was the Constitution quite as sacred to the Dutch as Ayaan seemed to think. The latest version had been written only twenty years earlier, in 1983. As one of her party colleagues put it, “Ayaan did not really understand the Dutch sensibility.” Muslims, meanwhile, were furious that Ayaan, as one Moroccan woman told Nova, had “humiliated small children on national television just to further her own agenda.”

  Ayaan admitted she had never been inside an Islamic school in Holland before she visited the one for the TV show. Yet she refused to consider the studies that Dutch experts had done showing that the country’s Muslim schools varied widely. There were liberal ones and conservative ones. Students at some scored highly on national exams, while others had dismal records. The fact that a school was Islamic didn’t tell much about whether it provided a good education.

  She seemed to regard it as appeasement when Dutch politicians and intellectuals sympathized with Muslims’ unwillingness to reject their religion and families as harshly as she had rejected hers. “All this talk about respect for the identity of immigrants and their culture,” she said, is “nothing but thoughtlessness, laziness and fear of openly addressing human rights violations.” But many Dutch people, when they stopped to think about it, realized that they could never cut themselves off from their culture as fully as she had done. />
  Ayaan initially asked the government to cut funding for every Muslim organization in the country, including Muslim women’s shelters and Muslim gay and feminist groups. Muslim feminists protested. They charged that despite her claim to be an advocate for Muslim women, Ayaan had never belonged to any Muslim women’s organization in the country. Now she wanted to shut down neighborhood groups that actually did the work she claimed to support, such as rescuing girls threatened by their families. Ayaan changed her mind—but not before she had alienated many progressive Muslim women.

  Holland had a substantial number of Muslim women in politics. In addition to Fadime Örgü in Ayaan’s own party, Khadija Arib was a power in the Labor Party and Fatima Elatik was an up-and-coming young Amsterdam city councilwoman. Karima Belhaj was one of those running shelters and women’s centers. Many of these capable Muslims were the first in their family to attend university. (Often their mothers had been illiterate.) Some had spoken out about the battles they had waged with their families to gain the right to make their own decisions. Most felt that Ayaan, by telling the world that women had to choose either Islam or liberation, was forcing them into a false and impossible choice.

  Ayaan dismissed such colleagues as “proxies put forward to get subsidies from the government.” She brushed their reservations aside by saying she would be gone by the time they were assertive enough for her to bother working with them. Nor did she want to hear from Dutch teachers, social workers, and police officers who worked in the Muslim community. Instead she accused them, too, of dismissing the rights of Muslim girls. “I called it the paradox of the left,” she said. “On the one hand they support ideals of equality and emancipation, but in this case they do nothing about it; they even facilitate the oppression.”