Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  Ayaan’s accusatory style put off those who might have been her natural allies in fighting for women’s liberation. “Hirsi Ali has the idea that the liberation or the support of women’s rights of Muslim women should be forced by public means, and in doing so, she neglects the processes going on inside the women’s movements in the Muslim community,” said Gijs von der Fuhr, a spokesman for the Amsterdam Migrant Center, who advised several liberal Muslim groups. “We support totally the goals she sets, but her confrontational way of talking and acting alienates exactly that kind of woman she wants to influence.”

  The Somali immigrant novelist and television personality Yasmine Allas knew and liked Ayaan and had demonstrated on her behalf when Ayaan first went into hiding. But as people grew polarized over Ayaan’s provocative statements, Allas found the atmosphere in Holland “more and more suffocating.” She was Somali and Dutch, and she felt like a child whose parents were divorcing. “How can someone be forced to choose between a mother and a father?” she asked.

  Chapter Eighteen

  After Aafia’s second husband, Ali, vanished into a secret CIA prison in April 2003, Aafia seemed to vanish, too.

  Her family claimed that the United States had imprisoned her. Her mother told Aafia’s American lawyer that she had read in the Urdu press that Aafia had been taken away in a Gulfstream jet like the ones the CIA used for “high-value” prisoners. “My daughter is lost in the U.S.,” Ismat sobbed to Hamid Mir, a talk show host for the Geo Television network and the biographer of Osama bin Laden.

  Aafia’s sister, Fowzia, in Baltimore, had been subpoenaed. Family lawyers later claimed that in a closed hearing related to her case, an FBI official had assured her that Aafia was alive and well.

  With her green card, Ismat could travel to the United States, and in May she flew to New York. Landing at JFK, she was surrounded by agents from the Department of Homeland Security and the Joint Terrorism Task Force. The tiny grandmother rounded on the men and demanded, shrieking, that they tell her what the United States had done with her daughter. The Americans insisted that they didn’t know where Aafia was. For nearly four hours they questioned Ismat, who was now “crying and breaking down . . . hysterically weeping,” according to Elaine Whitfield Sharp, the Siddiquis’ American lawyer.

  Fowzia was outside the terminal waiting to meet her mother. Eventually she drove Ismat to Baltimore. But “after about two or three days, the FBI was banging on Fowzia’s door again,” Sharp said. “They were very aggressively serving a subpoena for Ismat Siddiqui to appear before a grand jury here in Boston.” That was when a friend of the family suggested to Aafia’s brother in Houston that they hire Sharp, a trial attorney from the pretty Massachusetts seaside town of Marblehead.

  Sharp wears horn-rimmed glasses and has a comforting manner that puts clients at ease. She works out of a home office in a house decorated with cat knickknacks and needlepoint pillows. Ismat, Fowzia, and Ali drove up to Marblehead from Baltimore and checked into a bed-and-breakfast down the street.

  Ismat was distraught by the time they met Sharp, and the lawyer got her excused from testifying before the grand jury in Boston by finding a psychiatrist to attest that she was mentally incompetent. But Sharp did agree to let the FBI and Michael Riciutti from the U.S. Attorney’s Office talk with Ismat.

  “You’ve got my daughter!” Ismat told the men at the meeting. The men said it wasn’t so.

  Her son took her to his house in Houston. There they met again with their lawyers, the FBI, and an Urdu translator the agents brought along. The agents asked Ismat about KSM and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. Sharp said later that Aafia’s mother strenuously denied that Aafia knew either man.

  The FBI also asked about Aafia’s mood at the time of her disappearance. They wanted to know about her trip to Gaithersburg and the post office box she had opened for Majid Khan. They inquired about her donations to Benevolence International and Global Relief and about her ex-husband, Amjad’s, purchase of night-vision goggles and manuals for working with C-4 explosives.

  Ismat just kept telling them that her daughter had been a straight-A student who loved America and could not possibly have broken the law. “We think she has another life that you don’t know anything about,” an FBI agent replied, according to a lawyer who was present. Ismat told them they were wrong.

  Pakistan’s ISI also acted as if Aafia was still at large. In the middle of May, intelligence agents made Amjad go with them to the Karachi airport, saying they had heard a report that she might be arriving by plane and they needed him to identify her. Amjad saw a woman who looked like Aafia, except that her nose seemed thinner and her hips looked unusually heavy. She was with a boy who looked like their seven-year-old son, Ahmad. Amjad recalled Aafia telling him that she had read in one of her books, The Fugitive, that putting a small pillow around the hips was a good disguise. He decided to pretend he hadn’t seen her. He wasn’t certain it was Aafia, and anyway he didn’t want to hand her over to intelligence agents.

  Ismat was still in the United States that June when Newsweek published a sensational cover story about KSM that for the first time laid out parts of the plot into which U.S. officials said the al-Qaeda operations chief had drawn Aafia and Majid Khan. Alarmed by the publicity, Aafia’s uncle S. H. Faruqi sought help from the famous Pakistani politician and ex–cricket player Imran Khan, who had publicly defended Amir Aziz, an orthopedic surgeon from Lahore whom the CIA had accused of supplying al-Qaeda with anthrax. (After Khan’s intervention, Aziz was released by Pakistani authorities without charge.) Faruqi told Khan that Aafia had said in March that she was taking a train to see him but then had never shown up.

  On Hamid Mir’s TV program, Capital Talk, Imran Khan confronted Pakistan’s interior minister with various reports about Aafia. He demanded that the minister tell the public where she was. But the minister, Faisal Saleh Hayat, insisted he didn’t know.

  The grand jury in Boston subpoenaed Ismat again in July. Elaine Sharp, the lawyer, got the subpoena quashed on the grounds that Ismat was ill, and Ismat and Fowzia decided to return to Pakistan. Fowzia told Sharp that the FBI had harassed her so much at the hospital where she worked in Baltimore that she had lost her job, and that two other hospitals had withdrawn their job offers.

  For months, meanwhile, the FBI had been investigating young Uzair Paracha’s statements. His father’s bank records showed deposits of hundreds of thousands of dollars that matched the dates when Uzair said his father had been holding money for al-Qaeda. The U.S. government concluded that Saifullah Paracha was an al-Qaeda financier.

  By the summer of 2003, Washington had apparently decided it couldn’t trust President Musharraf’s government to arrest prominent Pakistanis whom the U.S. government suspected of terrorism. Earlier the Americans had relied on Pakistan to arrest KSM, Ali, and Majid Khan—all of whom appeared to be involved in plotting a second big attack on the United States. But Aafia and some others whom the CIA wanted had managed to escape, and now the CIA seems to have feared that if it asked the Pakistanis to take Paracha into custody they might help him get away. So the Americans concocted an elaborate plot to lure the businessman to Bangkok.

  Paracha’s American business partner, Charles Anteby, asked him to come to a meeting in Thailand, and the CIA kidnapped him as soon as he stepped off the plane. They took him first to a secret prison in Thailand, then to Afghanistan, and later to Guantánamo. It was more than a year before the International Committee of the Red Cross told his wife, Farhat, where her husband was—a year in which she was often beside herself with fear and grief.

  The U.S. silence, however, which was standard procedure during its secret war, may have provided Aafia’s family with an opportunity. Since the CIA refused to admit that it was holding kidnapped men like Paracha and the others, no one believed the agency when it said it wasn’t holding Aafia.

  Ismat stopped circling the country asking for help. Both women stopped talking to journalists. They telephoned Imran Khan, the politician
whom Aafia’s uncle S. H. Faruqi had approached for help. Weeping, they asked him not to publicize Aafia’s case. “They told me, ‘We’ve had phone calls, and they say if we speak out, the same thing that happened to Aafia will happen to us,’ ” Khan told me later. “These poor women are afraid.”

  Pakistanis across the political spectrum accepted the Islamist line that Musharraf and his government would sell their own mothers in exchange for American dollars. “To stay in power, these people are jumping at every order from D.C.,” Khan told me. He assumed that the CIA or the ISI was holding Aafia prisoner.

  Amjad and his parents did not believe that Aafia had been arrested, nor did they want her to be. Amjad felt that wherever his children were, they needed their mother. But they needed their father, too, and he thought the Siddiquis, if they wanted to make a reunion possible, could have arranged it.

  They pressed ahead with their custody suit. When their lawyer deposed Ismat on August 1, 2003, she claimed under oath that FBI and Justice Department officials in Boston had verbally informed her American lawyer “that the minors are with the mother and are in safe condition.”

  Ismat’s testimony was the opposite of what her American lawyer had said of the FBI’s and Justice Department’s comments to her in May. As Sharp later told me, U.S. officials had said they had no idea where Aafia and the children were.

  But the judge in the Pakistani custody case ruled that since the children had disappeared, there was nothing he could do.

  The Khans sought help from government ministers and an ISI officer they knew. They said they were told that a government decision had been made. Through her family, Aafia had assured the government that she simply wanted to live quietly and raise her children. The government, for its part, had agreed not to reveal her location to the Americans. “The gist of what they said was ‘We know Aafia is around,’ ” Amjad said. “ ‘The only reason we are not exposing her and continuing to let her be “lost” is that she is after all a woman and a mother.’ ”

  One day late in 2003, the same uncle who had witnessed Aafia and Amjad’s divorce decree saw a woman he recognized as Aafia outside Karachi’s English-language Nakhlah school. He caught the woman’s eye; she drew her veil over her face and turned away. It was the same school that Grand Mufti Muhammad Rafi Usmani had recommended when Aafia and Amjad had visited him the year before. As soon as the Khans heard about the uncle’s sighting, Amjad and his father rushed to the school to see if Ahmad and Maryam were enrolled there. But they were told that the school had no children by those names.

  Amjad felt he had reached a dead end.

  He decided he had to get away. With his photograph still up on the FBI’s Web site—though by now it was marked “Located”—he knew he could not work in the United States. So he took a job at a hospital in Saudi Arabia and moved there with his new wife and their baby daughter.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ayaan often spoke of how much she missed her father. She had shown the filmmaker Karin Schagen the little picture she carried in her wallet of Hirsi in the 1960s, looking so young and optimistic. She told Trouw that her father was the one person she wished could have been with her when she was sworn in to Parliament. “To him I was an apostate,” she wrote later, “but still, I was following in his footsteps, committed to working for the well-being of others.”

  Hirsi Magan now lived in London with his first wife, Maryan Farah Warsame. The last time Ayaan had seen any of her relatives was in 2002, at a celebration in Rotterdam of her older half sister, Arro’s, marriage. Arro was still very stylish and beautiful. (Ayaan would later tell a reporter that Arro never left the house without her hair done.) Now a gynecologist, she had married a fellow doctor and was practicing medicine in England. Ayaan and Faduma Osman rode together to the party, which was strictly for women. Ayaan seemed to enjoy the dancing. But, that fall, the controversy erupted over the threats against her, and her half sisters never heard from Ayaan again.

  Arro, like Ayaan, declined to be interviewed for this book. Other relatives told me that Arro didn’t want to be associated with Ayaan in any way. Like her mother, Arro had dedicated herself to trying to eradicate the Somali custom of female genital mutilation. She worked with women all over Europe, including Zahra Siad Naleie, the director of the Dutch government’s program to combat FGM. Naleie had initially welcomed Ayaan’s campaign promise to make eradication one of her top priorities in office. But eventually she decided that Ayaan was making her job harder rather than easier.

  Ayaan sometimes seemed to share the impatience that many Somali women felt with what they felt was a creepy Western curiosity about the practice. “That’s just the way it is in Somalia,” she told one journalist who asked her for the umpteenth time about what it was like to have her genitals cut. But she said that Cisca Dresselhuys and other Dutch feminists had talked her into speaking out about her personal experiences. They had told Ayaan it was her duty to expose the subject.

  FGM had been illegal in the Netherlands since 1993, but Ayaan, Naleie, and others argued that it had merely gone underground. “During school holidays,” Ayaan said, “children are taken to their countries of origin, where female genital mutilation is not forbidden, and then children are operated on without anesthetics. It’s done with scissors; it’s done with razor blades; it’s done with broken glass, and that’s really very inhumane.”

  In 2003, under pressure from Ayaan, the Dutch government commissioned two researchers from Amsterdam’s Free University to study the issue. They found that anywhere from ten to a hundred girls with Dutch citizenship were being circumcised every year, most of them from within Holland’s Somali community. Based on their findings, Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner proposed making it a crime for parents to have their daughters circumcised in any country, overseas as well as in the Netherlands.

  But when Ayaan unveiled her party’s plan in February 2004, she went a step further. Rather than wait for doctors or the girls themselves to report their circumcision, Ayaan proposed that the government require annual vaginal examinations for girls from high-risk countries such as Somalia until they turned eighteen. If a doctor discovered that a girl had been mutilated, he or she would be required to report it to the authorities for prosecution.

  Naleie and other Somalis who had campaigned for years against FGM were aghast. They felt the law would invade the Somalis’ privacy and stigmatize them besides. Naleie thought the plan could set her work back for years. She recalled, “We were very, very angry with Ayaan. The parents said, ‘We don’t want doctors examining our girls’ vaginas.’ If it were everybody [being examined], it would have been okay. But Ayaan said that would be too expensive. It was just Somalis, and we don’t agree with that.”

  The national doctors’ association also opposed the bill. Doctors argued that the measure would turn them into policemen, destroying the trust between them and their African patients.

  For several years, Somalis had been leaving the Netherlands for the United Kingdom. Some had hoped all along to settle in an English-speaking country. Once they gained Dutch passports, they often exercised their right under European Union regulations to move to the United Kingdom.

  But other Somalis said they had left because they disliked the way they were treated in Holland, especially in the years after 9/11. They chafed at bureaucratic restrictions that dictated where they could live and made it hard for them to start businesses. They resented the hostility they felt toward immigrants, and they resented the social workers and teachers who they believed disapproved of them and discriminated against their children.

  By 2003, a third of Holland’s 29,000 Somali residents had left—often for the growing Somali enclave in the city of Leicester, in the English Midlands. By 2005, an additional 10,000 Somalis joined the exodus.

  Somalis told Dutch researchers that they could never “be themselves” in Holland. They often cited Ayaan as a factor in their departure.

  The Dutch thought of Ayaan as a model immigrant. To Somal
is, however, this woman, who insulted the Prophet and was written about proudly drinking alcohol and taking lovers, was a nightmare vision of what their children might become if they stayed.

  For some Somalis, Ayaan’s media campaign against female genital mutilation came to symbolize the deterioration of their dealings with the Dutch. “When I first came to Holland in 1994, I was seventeen, and I took a train to Amsterdam from Hoek van Holland,” a Somali friend who later moved to the United States and married a British academic once said to me. “The conductor told me, ‘You are a beautiful girl.’ I was truly excited.

  “In May 2005, I took the same train to the ferry. This time the conductor looked at me and said, ‘They are barbaric where you come from.’ I said, ‘What are you saying?’ He said, ‘You cut your women’s vaginas.’ I was so angry. I was thinking, It’s our culture. What has it got to do with you? There are a lot of things I don’t like about Dutch culture, but I don’t talk about them.”

  My Somali friend had two sisters with Dutch citizenship. One had already moved to England—“she just can’t bear it here.” The other was planning to move to England soon. Unlike Ayaan, my friend’s sisters were already married and had children when they arrived in the Netherlands, and they found it hard to gain acceptance. In the fourteen years that one sister lived in Leiden, she was never invited into a Dutch person’s house. Peering at her from behind their lace curtains, her neighbors spied a lot of Somalis entering and leaving her place. Soon a tax inspector came around to see if she was running an unauthorized day care center. It was a common suspicion. Dutch small-business men often accused immigrants who started small businesses of competing unfairly by failing to pay taxes and ignoring Holland’s numerous rules.