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Wanted Women

Page 28

by Deborah Scroggins


  Ayaan knew the film would infuriate people. “The whole Muslim world will fall on top of me,” she told Jutta Chorus almost gleefully. “They will be very angry.” But she decided to make the film anyway. “She was just very passionate, and she felt she had to do it,” Philipse said.

  She was invited to appear in August on the popular Dutch television show Zomergasten (Summer Guests). The program usually profiled Dutch celebrities, who shared bits of their favorite childhood movies or TV shows. Only a few politicians had received such invitations, and Ayaan’s friends urged her to accept. Ayaan asked the show’s producers if she could show the film that she and van Gogh were planning, and they agreed.

  While still working on the project and before appearing on Summer Guests, Ayaan got into another quarrel. She suggested in an interview on the TV program Buitenhof that potential employers should question Dutch Muslims about their religious beliefs. Why question Muslims and not Catholics? asked the host. “The threat of terrorism comes from Muslims,” Ayaan replied.

  Many Muslims—who as a group were poorer than non-Muslims and more often unemployed—felt that Ayaan’s comments would make the Dutch even more suspicious of them.

  Terrorism hadn’t yet struck Holland, but the nation’s mood kept getting uglier. Around the time of the March bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people, the Dutch intelligence service warned again that “a growing number of Muslims feel that opinion makers and opinion leaders are treating them rudely.” A De Volkskrant poll taken a few days after Ayaan’s television interview found that 68 percent of respondents felt threatened by “migrant or Muslim youths,” that 53 percent feared a terrorist attack by Muslims, and that nearly half feared the Netherlands would someday fall under Islamic rule.

  Considering that Muslims still constituted only 5 percent of the population, these fears might seem exaggerated or even bizarre. But many of the Dutch shared them.

  Now when Ayaan and her bodyguards appeared in the streets, Muslim men hissed, “Whore,” and spat at her. In June, she wrote in her column that a young Dutchman had tapped her on the shoulder in a bar in The Hague and told her “very politely” that he hoped the mujahideen would kill her. Ayaan gave the man a butter knife and asked why he didn’t do the job himself if he thought killing her was such a good idea.

  It was the kind of bravado that Ayaan’s admirers loved, but it masked the serious dangers building.

  A rap song about her appeared on the Internet. Called “Hirsi Ali Dis,” by the Muslim rap group The Hague Connection, it attacked her viciously and threatened her with death, calling her a “cancer whore” and a “shit stain.”

  Police arrested the rappers and charged them under an obscure provision that made it illegal to hinder elected politicians in their work. But the song was a sign of the growing Muslim fury.

  In Amsterdam West, the disciples of the Syrian cult leader Abu Khaled itched worse than ever to do violence against the enemies of Allah. The Dutch intelligence agency AIVD had already named them “the Hofstad network” after police, in 2003, arrested Abu Khaled, a young follower named Jason Walters, Samir Azzouz, and two others based in The Hague on suspicion of planning some kind of attack. (Hofstad means “capital city,” in this case The Hague.) They were soon released. But then in June two more of Abu Khaled’s acolytes were arrested in Portugal for plotting an assault on the UEFA European football championships. Meanwhile in Rotterdam, police who searched the house of Samir Azzouz and his wife, Abida Kabbaj, found a gun, two ammunition clips, night-vision goggles, a bulletproof vest, and chemicals commonly used in making bombs.

  The AIVD also knew about Mohammed Bouyeri, in Amsterdam, but they didn’t consider him as dangerous as some of Abu Khaled’s other disciples. It was a feeling Bouyeri may have shared—and resented.

  The videos that the group continued to download were themselves becoming increasingly ghoulish as jihadis in Chechnya and Iraq seemed to torture and butcher their prisoners in increasingly cruel ways.

  KSM’s former comrade and the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, brought different jihadi groups together to kidnap a twenty-six-year-old American named Nicholas Berg. In an imitation of the murder of Daniel Pearl, he sawed off Berg’s head in front of a camera. The film was posted on www.ogrish.com, and Mohammed Bouyeri copied it onto a CD to pass around to his friends.

  By the summer of 2004, Bouyeri was determined to show that he was as tough as his bloodthirsty heroes. So he looked around for suitable targets and was fascinated by the prospect of tearing out a living heart.

  He wrote tract after tract on the Internet denouncing Jews and other enemies and raving about how the “knights of Allah” would soon march into the Binnenhof, the castle that served as the seat of Holland’s government; they would rename Parliament “the court of sharia” and hoist the flag of tawheed, or the oneness of Allah. In May, Bouyeri grew so angry at some sluggish bureaucrats in a welfare office that he threw a trash can at a security guard and threatened to kill him, screaming, “I’ll tear your heart out!” (The Dutch authorities merely banished him from the office.)

  In the jihadi chat rooms Bouyeri frequented, he adopted a new pseudonym, Abu Zubair, and began threatening leaders from the king of Morocco to Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. To the Moroccan king he wrote that “my greatest wish is to see how your chest is torn open, to see how your beating heart is wrenched out of your body, and then watch how death seizes your rotten soul to drag it to the dungeons of Hell while you are screaming and struggling.”

  Bouyeri narrowed his options down to local enemies, and on August 17 he began drafting letters on his computer threatening the deputy mayor of Amsterdam, Ahmed Aboutaleb, and also Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

  Ayaan and the Moroccan-born Aboutaleb opposed each other politically. The deputy mayor thought the Dutch ought to make Muslims feel included as long as they obeyed the law. His solution to the problems of integration was to offer immigrants language training and other classes that would help them find jobs and fit in. But he and Ayaan were both prominent secular Muslims, and Bouyeri seems to have considered one as bad as the other.

  All the members of Abu Khaled’s little sect hated Ayaan with a passion. Jason Walters included her on a list of Dutch politicians he wanted to kill as early as 2003. The girls in the group shared his sentiment.

  The gang was beginning to pair up in secret “marriages” performed by “the sheikh,” as Abu Khaled’s followers called him, or by Bouyeri himself, who had lately been functioning as Abu Khaled’s deputy. Such marriages had no validity under Dutch or classical Islamic law, but members of the group argued that it was their Islamic duty to marry and procreate. “We do this for the ummah,” a girl who called herself Fatima later told the newspaper Trouw. “If a man conceives children with several wives, he creates more Muslims.” One girl blushed as she told the Dutch journalists Janny Groen and Annieke Kranenberg how she and her “husband” had used to lie in bed thinking up “battle names” for the children they were making.

  Bouyeri had fallen for a neighborhood girl whom reporters later identified by the pseudonym “Fatima.” She attended some of Abu Khaled’s lessons. In August, Bouyeri asked “Fatima” to marry him, but she turned him down. “I didn’t get on with such a quiet boy,” she said. Instead she became the second wife of another member, Mohammed al-Morabit.

  Clearly, Bouyeri needed to show that he was every bit the warrior his friends were.

  Dutch Muslim chat rooms were already hurling threats at Theo van Gogh for his remarks against Muslims and the Prophet and because of a satirical book he had written called Allah Knows Best. That summer the filmmaker noticed men in long gowns and prayer caps watching his house.

  Police suspect that one of Bouyeri’s friends, who worked for a construction firm on the same street as van Gogh’s apartment, let the rest of the group know that the filmmaker cycled back and forth to work each day at regular times. One night, as van Gogh left a restaurant, a man called from the darkness that he would
kill him and his family.

  Ayaan has said that she called their movie “Submission: Part I” because she intended it to be the first of a series exposing several kinds of suffering caused by Islam. The film was ten minutes long. Van Gogh’s friends said his company spent 18,000 euros to produce it. Ayaan finished writing the script at the end of July. They shot it at an Amsterdam studio a few days later.

  The film opens with a woman praying. She wears a transparent veil. (Ayaan has said she wanted to show the woman’s naked body in order to challenge Allah metaphorically—and to challenge viewers, too, presumably—to recognize that a real woman lived beneath the veil. She may also have been inspired by an incident two years earlier in which some Muslims had smashed advertisements for a play called The Veil Monologues, which featured a woman in a similar see-through veil.) Inscribed on the woman’s back are the opening verses of the Quran, which every Muslim recites at the start of a prayer. At the end of the prayer, she raises her head.

  The camera turns to face the first woman of four in the story. She tells Allah that she has obeyed all of his injunctions, yet she has been flogged for falling in love. The next woman says that she was forced to marry her husband, and now she is forced to submit to him sexually. A third woman’s husband beats her. The fourth is a girl who has become pregnant after being raped by her uncle. The last line contains the message “I may no longer submit.”

  None of Ayaan’s friends liked the movie. “When I saw it for the first time, I said, ‘It’s a horrible film,’ ” Theodor Holman recalled. “There’s no drama, no action. It’s not a movie.” He says van Gogh felt the same way but made the movie anyway because he was committed to helping Ayaan. “We all completely underestimated the effect.”

  Cisca Dresselhuys saw it and was worried. She asked Ayaan if she really wanted it shown on television. Not that Dresselhuys imagined that anyone might be killed. “No one thought about murder. If we had, we would have said, ‘No!’ ”

  Ayaan showed it to the leaders of the Liberal Party. She has written that her party mentor, Gerrit Zalm, was undisturbed. “He simply asked if all this stuff was really in the Quran; because it was, he concluded that there was no reason I shouldn’t use it, although he thought it unfortunate that our actress was half naked.” The minister of the interior, Johan Remkes, also seemed to think Ayaan was exaggerating the impact her little film would have.

  But the press was excited. A few days before Ayaan was scheduled to appear on Summer Guests, the respected NRC Handelsblad published an article headlined “Hirsi Ali’s Latest Provocation.” The next day, Jutta Chorus’s long feature on the past six months of Ayaan’s life appeared. In still another article, “Uncrowned Queens of the Netherlands,” Ayaan was listed as the sixth most influential woman in Holland.

  “Submission” aired on August 29, 2004.

  At first, nothing much happened. Then, in September, someone calling himself Abu Nawaar el Hosaymi published the unlisted address of the new apartment that the Dutch secret service had found for “the devilish apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali” next to the Israeli Embassy in The Hague. Police concluded that militant Muslims were watching her movements. In a second message, “Abu Nawaar” threatened “the disbelieving diabolical mocker” van Gogh. The police transferred Ayaan to another house, but they appear not to have taken the threats against van Gogh as seriously.

  When they tracked down “Abu Nawaar,” he turned out to be a twenty-two-year-old Moroccan who had been posting jihadi comments for months.

  Ayaan told van Gogh he needed bodyguards, but he resisted. The Dutch secret service saw the threats intensifying, but it protected royals, diplomats, and members of Parliament—not ordinary citizens like van Gogh.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Relentless police work and international intelligence resulted in the roundup of more and more people in KSM’s network and related groups.

  In June, the police arrested Ramzi Yousef’s brother, Abdul Karim Mehmood, and his sister’s husband, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi militant Dawood Badani, in connection with an attempted assassination of Karachi’s corps commander. Abdul Karim—who also went by the name Musab Aruchi—had a U.S. bounty of $1 million on his head, and Pakistani intelligence agents told the Washington Post that he was in touch with people planning attacks on financial institutions in New York and Washington. “It seems that this family,” one agent said about the al-Baluchi, “has something in their genes against the icons of financial power in the U.S.”

  The interrogation of Abdul Karim led to the arrest on July 13 of twenty-five-year-old Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, a computer expert from Karachi who manned an al-Qaeda communications center. Police found files in Khan’s computer containing the detailed surveillance of financial buildings in New York, New Jersey, and Washington, including the Prudential Building and the International Monetary Fund.

  Pakistani intelligence decided to use the young computer whiz in a sting. Over the weekend of July 24–25, they had him send e-mails to all his contacts. When the replies came in, they helped the authorities track down dozens of his accomplices.

  In Pakistan, Khan led the CIA and Pakistani police to the hideout, in Gujarat, of Ahmed Khalfan Gailani. Gailani was the Tanzanian who had helped plot the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and the man whom Aafia was alleged to have supervised buying diamonds in Liberia. He had a $10 million U.S. reward on his head, and he was captured with his Uzbek wife after a fourteen-hour gunfight.

  In Britain, the e-mails Khan received prompted police to arrest twelve men of mainly Pakistani descent on suspicion of planning to attack Heathrow Airport—the operation that Aafia’s husband, Ali, had taken over from the imprisoned KSM before Ali, too, was arrested. The e-mails led to the capture of Dhiren Barot, a British former airline agent and Hindu convert to Islam who had become one of KSM’s top secret operatives, and of Babar Ahmad, the webmaster of the jihadi Web sites www.azzam.com and www.qoqaz.com, both of which Aafia had frequented before 9/11.

  Aafia almost certainly knew the webmaster, Babar Ahmad—at least by e-mail. She frequently read www.azzam.com, and in the summer of 2001 she was probably translating Abdullah Azzam’s book The Maidens of Paradise for the Web site. Babar Ahmad was about Aafia’s age, and he worked closely with pro-jihadi activists in the United States, including some of Aafia’s friends at Benevolence International. The name of the Florida jihadi Adnan Shukrijumah appeared in official comments on the wave of arrests, and credit card and telephone records indicated that Shukrijumah might have scouted out the Prudential Building and other sites and might have written the surveillance reports found in Khan’s computer.

  Some close observers of the roundup speculated that Aafia might be arrested next.

  Noting that the Pakistani government “almost magically” managed to uncover high-level al-Qaeda figures whenever important Americans visited, Asia Times suggested that the ISI knew where most al-Qaeda figures were hiding and produced them “when and as needed” to stave off U.S. pressure. The magazine expected the pressure to heat up as the U.S. presidential elections neared.

  As for Aafia, the reporter for Asia Times wrote, his sources claimed that she was in ISI custody but the ISI wasn’t ready to hand her over. “Acquaintances of Aafia say she was an ISI contact and played an active role as a ‘relief worker’ in Chechnya and Bosnia—a role the government now does not want to reveal. She has also been connected with different Arab nongovernmental organizations in the United States, through which she also helped to supply aid and funds to Chechens.”

  British intelligence wanted to follow the victims of Khan’s sting a bit longer to see where they led. It suspected that the Bush administration had leaked the news of his arrest in the hope of winning credit not long before the 2004 election. But it turned out to have been Pakistani officials who had leaked Khan’s name to the press—possibly to halt the sting and prevent British and U.S. agents from penetrating deeper into al-Qaeda’s Pakistani cells.

  And
Aafia’s arrest did not occur. According to U.S. officials, she had become the most wanted woman in the world.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Ayaan went to see her literary agent in Paris that October. She told Susanna Lea about all the press coverage that she and “Submission” were getting. Her agent agreed that she had a wonderful story. But if Ayaan wanted to produce a book, she would have to stop talking to journalists and start writing it. Lea could guarantee that if Ayaan wrote it, the book would be noticed.

  Back in Holland, Ayaan got together with the television program Nova to show “Submission” to four Muslims in a shelter for battered women. The idea was to see how victimized women like the ones in the film would react to its message. As the cameras rolled, it became clear that the women didn’t like the movie at all.

  Ayaan tried to explain that she meant to help; but as the discussion continued the women from the shelter became increasingly emotional. “You’re just insulting us,” one woman cried. “My faith is what strengthened me. That’s how I came to realize that my situation at home was wrong.”

  “I simply want this to stop,” said another woman, whose face was disguised for the camera.

  “But I am not going to stop,” Ayaan said. She remained very calm.

 

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