I called Haq and asked him for an interview. He said he would be glad to see me. I put on a long tunic over my trousers, draped a scarf around my neck, and took a taxi to his office.
I recognized Haq’s heavy-lidded eyes from old photos of his father, the military dictator, though with his square jaw and clean-shaven face, he looked less like an Islamist than like the captain of an American college football team. He welcomed me into his large office dressed in a spotless brown vest and long white shirt. The photographs lining the walls, of him shaking hands with presidents, princes, clerics, and such, showed him looking equally comfortable in a Western business suit or a Saudi gown. Haq had studied at Southern Illinois University. His son had attended Boston University, where either Aafia or Fowzia—he couldn’t remember which Siddiqui sister—had made homemade curries for his son so he wouldn’t feel homesick. If I hadn’t read about it in a Pakistani weekly, The Friday Times, I never could have guessed that only a few months earlier this smooth and seemingly Westernized man had become so enthusiastic at the launch of a pro-Taliban cleric’s book that he offered himself up (rhetorically, I presume) as a suicide bomber, exclaiming, “Anyone who does not believe in jihad is neither a Muslim nor a Pakistani!”
Instead I listened as he told me how terribly sorry he felt for the Siddiquis. He said that Aafia’s disappearance had devastated the family. “It is a very humble family that has no political background or political inclinations,” he said. “This was a very unfortunate incident.”
The minister told me he had tried his best to help Ismat and Fowzia find her, but he hadn’t succeeded. He personally suspected that her ex-husband might have had a hand in her disappearance. “I’ve told Mrs. Siddiqui to keep an eye on the father,” he said in a confidential tone.
He asked if I was planning to see the Siddiquis. I told him I wanted to. He offered to call them for me. And while I sat in front of his wide desk, he telephoned Ismat and Fowzia.
After speaking to them in Urdu for a few minutes, he hung up with a long face. “They say that they have no clue where she is. She is probably not in the United States, probably not in Guantánamo, but in some third place. The mother was crying so much that she had to put down the phone. I spoke to Aafia’s sister. She says her mother is very ill. They said they know about you, but their lawyer has advised them not to talk to you.”
Sharp had told me she had wanted the Siddiquis to see me but they had refused. But I supposed that what he said could be true.
He wished me good luck.
I went to see Khalid Khawaja, a former Pakistani Air Force officer and ISI member who had once served as Osama bin Laden’s pilot and had now joined the celebrity cricketer and politician Imran Khan in a campaign on behalf of “missing persons” in the war on terror such as Aafia.
Khalid Khawaja was a wiry, fidgety man with a frizzy gray beard, and when he got excited his knee jumped up and down. He had a round, mobile face that was almost comically expressive. One minute he’d scowl, railing against the United States and the Pakistani “puppets and slaves” who did Washington’s bidding. Then he’d break into the sunniest of grins and describe bin Laden as “an angel of a man.”
Khawaja spoke perfect English and knew everybody who was anybody in the jihadi firmament. (His wife, Shamama, a former lawyer, told me stories about bin Laden’s wives. “So humble, yet so organized! They put on tea parties in a cave.”) In the late 1990s, Khawaja had become a conduit for Western journalists seeking to meet jihadis. The CBS reporter George Crile, for instance, had relied on Khawaja while researching his book Charlie Wilson’s War. But Western journalists had become wary of Khawaja after he was implicated in the Daniel Pearl kidnapping.
In the days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Pearl’s friend Asra Nomani had met Khawaja through an aunt of hers who belonged to a group of devout middle-class Deobandi women that Nomani jokingly called “the ladies’ auxiliary of the Taliban.” Later, Pearl, who also knew Khawaja, asked him for help to meet Sheik Mubarak Gilani, a Deobandi cleric who Pearl suspected had acted as mentor to the shoe bomber Richard Reid. When Pearl went missing after leaving for what he thought was an interview with Gilani, the police took Khawaja in for questioning. The police had cleared him of any involvement. But Pearl’s widow, Mariane, had written that she still suspected the former spy and confidant of bin Laden of being involved in the kidnapping.
I had read all this before I met Khawaja at the nearly empty office in Islamabad that he and Imran Khan called the headquarters of their organization. Khawaja had agreed to meet me, but he told me he didn’t know Aafia or anything about her. At first he was unfriendly. “Ask your own cruel government where she is!” he said. “Maybe they have killed her three children in front of her. They are capable of anything. I should know.”
The interview seemed to be going nowhere. Then, out of the blue, he looked at me and asked if I knew how to reach Mariane Pearl.
I didn’t, but Vogue had featured Mariane in a recent issue, and I was sure my editor did. This information seemed to soften him. He told me he wanted to let Pearl’s widow know that he had had nothing to do with her husband’s murder. Then he said I should drop the Aafia story. Instead, I should come to his house for the post-Ramadan Eid celebration and meet some real jihadi women. “Come see how terrorists celebrate Eid,” he joked.
Khawaja and his family lived in a three-bedroom flat in Islamabad’s F-8 Sector, a neighborhood of large white bungalows with red-tiled roofs and well-tended gardens populated mainly by diplomats and retired military offers. I arrived dressed in a shalwar kameez and accompanied by a Pakistani journalist, and Khawaja introduced me to a woman I had read about. Her name was Zaynab Khadr, and she was the twenty-four-year-old daughter of Canada’s most notorious jihadi. Her father, Ahmad Khadr, an Egyptian immigrant to Canada, had been a member of al-Qaeda’s inner circle before Pakistani commandos killed him in a firefight in Waziristan in October 2003.
I also met Khawaja’s wife, Shamama, that day. She looked very dignified in a white head scarf. “Does she look oppressed to you?” Khawaja asked me in his needling way. His son, Osama—named after bin Laden—and his daughter, Rubina, were also on hand. We ate dates and a plate of spiced chickpeas and yogurt.
Zaynab, the young Canadian, was wearing a black niqab, a long gray overdress, and black stockings. She related the story of her life in a flat Canadian accent that seemed not to match her clothes and story. Her father had moved the family from Toronto to Peshawar when she was five. She had then grown up with the children of the world’s most militant jihadis and had later spent her youth in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, a period she described as “the best five years of my life.”
Alas for Zaynab, this Islamist Arcadia had ended with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. A younger brother had been captured and was now the youngest prisoner at Guantánamo. She and the rest of the family had dodged bombardment to escape across the mountains into Waziristan. Then her father had been killed and another brother had been paralyzed in a firefight with Pakistani forces, and Zaynab and her mother had left Waziristan. “We no longer had any men to protect us,” she told me. Her mother had returned to Canada to get medical help for her paralyzed son, while Zaynab stayed in Islamabad with a third brother, twenty-three-year-old Abdullah. A few weeks earlier, however, Abdullah had joined the ranks of “the missing.” The ISI, she said, had picked him up with some Pakistani friends, and no one knew where they were.
Khawaja told me he had been trying to find places for Zaynab and other al-Qaeda women and children to live but that even Pakistan’s generals, admirals, and religious party leaders were too cowardly to help. They told him they wished they could, but they were too scared. This, said Khawaja, after men like Zaynab’s father had dedicated their lives to ridding Afghanistan of communism! “They say, ‘Our hearts are with you.’ I tell them, ‘We need more than your heart. We need a house.’ But they are chickens.”
As we talked, I realized that
Khawaja knew the families of just about everyone I had seen mentioned in connection with Aafia’s case. For example, he was helping the Paracha family. He was also in touch with Malaqah Khanum, the activist and wife of Abdul Qadoos, the Rawalpindi microbiologist in whose house KSM had supposedly had been found. (Khawaja said that KSM had not really been found there and that the Qadooses were being punished because their son, an army major serving in the border town of Kohat, which I had visited the year before, was friendly with the mujahideen.) Then there was Majid Khan, the Baltimore man for whom Aafia was accused of renting the post office box in Maryland: Khawaja knew his wife. He said she was only a slip of a girl but was stoutly supporting her husband.
The only family Khawaja didn’t seem to know was Aafia’s. “We haven’t found any information about her,” he said. His knee bounced nervously.
Khawaja wanted to know why I was so interested. After all, I could meet any number of women who supported al-Qaeda by visiting the female seminary next to the Lal Mosque in downtown Islamabad. He casually added that the most recent attempt to assassinate Musharraf had been planned at the Lal Mosque. Quite recently, he told me, three thousand women at the seminary had demonstrated against Musharraf’s decision to send troops to Waziristan. The head of the mosque, Mufti Abdul Rashid Ghazi, was a good friend of his. Khawaja gave me the mufti’s phone numbers. He also called Malaqah Khanum and asked her to see me. (I phoned Khanum later to set up an appointment, but she hung up on me.) As for Aafia, he advised me to quit looking for her.
Zaynab had been sitting on a bed, listening. “I pity Americans,” she interrupted, her small black eyes glittering above her niqab. “Most of them don’t understand why they are hated. They don’t even know that they are the agents of Satan. You just have to read the Protocols of the Jews to know that America is hostage to a handful of Jews. But most Americans don’t even know it. There should be ten more 9/11s if that’s what it takes to wake Americans up to what their government is doing.”
She said it with so little affect that I had to remind myself that she and Khawaja were friends of Osama bin Laden and that Daniel Pearl, as Khawaja kept reminding me, had been kidnapped and murdered not long after he had visited this very apartment. I began to notice that every time I steered the conversation back to Aafia, Khawaja returned to Pearl’s kidnapping.
He said he had felt from the start that the shoe bomber Richard Reid had been a plant. “You can’t blow up an airplane with some little stuff in your shoes,” Khawaja said, as if he knew what he was talking about. He had become convinced he was being set up when American reporters such as Pearl had started calling him to ask about some link between Reid and Khawaja’s friend Sheik Mubarak Gilani. “We could smell it—they are tightening the noose,” he said. He warned Pearl to leave Gilani alone, but the journalist—did I know Pearl was a Jew?—wouldn’t listen. Khawaja spread out his hands, helplessly. Zaynab looked on, eyes glittering.
I protested that I wasn’t writing about Pearl; I was writing about Aafia Siddiqui.
But Zaynab broke in again. “This is an area where they don’t want people to probe,” she said. “When they keep it so quiet, they want it to stay that way.” Zaynab didn’t say who “they” were.
“Aafia is like Richard Reid,” Khawaja chimed in from his armchair. “You are following a wild goose.”
“We suggest to you not to put yourself in trouble,” Zaynab added. “No one will talk to an American. They will think you are a spy.”
Her tone sounded vaguely menacing, but when I thought about it later at the Marriott, I wondered if perhaps she was pulling my leg. “Come and see how terrorists celebrate Eid,” Khawaja had said. Maybe he and Zaynab were having a laugh right now over scaring the gullible American reporter. Or perhaps everything was just as they said. Perhaps they were working for Osama bin Laden and wanted me to stop writing about Aafia, just as they had wanted Pearl to stop writing about Richard Reid and his friends. And perhaps they wanted to stop us both for the same reason: because the “wild goose” in each case led to the same hidden forces that had protected KSM and were still protecting Aafia and al-Qaeda. I really didn’t know.
I had little time to ponder the question. The new U.S. ambassador to Pakistan was an old friend of my husband, and I had asked for his help in securing a permit to visit Karachi. The day after my troubling visit to Khawaja’s house, the embassy called to say that the permit was waiting for me at the Interior Ministry.
After so many warnings, I wasn’t about to go to my interviews in Karachi alone, so I hired a local Pakistani journalist to come along. We decided to drive over to the Siddiqui house in Gulshan-e-Iqbal and ring the doorbell. It was late November but still sweltering in Karachi. As we stopped and started through innumerable honking traffic jams, with candy-colored buses decked out in baroque decor and beggars in blue Afghan burkas sticking their hands up to our window, I thought about how antiseptic Islamabad was. Sand-colored Karachi was the real Pakistan.
We turned down Aafia’s street, and the noise of traffic died. We were in a zone of large houses shaded by palms and mango trees, as quietly respectable as any in Islamabad. “This is the E Section,” my Pakistani colleague breathed, audibly envious. We parked and approached a faded white stucco wall covered in pink bougainvillea. The gate appeared to have had an intercom once, but it had been pulled out of the wall. Through the bars we saw men in beige tunics sitting on the porch. My colleague thought they looked like intelligence men. After a while a servant woman dressed in a ragged black skirt came out with a baby on her hip. She said no one was home except Fowzia’s son. We left a note for Fowzia and said good-bye.
I tried telephoning the house from my hotel. That time a woman who spoke English with an American accent answered. But when I asked for Ismat or Fowzia, she told me I had the wrong number.
Were they prisoners, or were they being protected? I asked the journalist I had hired. He spread his hands helplessly. He couldn’t say.
I had read the Siddiquis’ claim that Aafia’s former in-laws, the Khans, lived behind high walls in a mysterious compound. I was therefore surprised when I visited the Khans the next day to see that their wall was no taller than the one that shielded the Siddiquis. We rang the bell, and Aafia’s former father-in-law, Aga Naeem, emerged. He was silver-haired and wore faded gray trousers and a short-sleeved white shirt buttoned up to the neck. He called to his wife, Zahera, to come downstairs, and he invited us onto the porch for a cup of tea.
As we sat around a wicker table, I noticed how apprehensive this frail old couple seemed in the presence of strangers. She was bent with osteoporosis. His hand trembled slightly as he brought out a collection of newspaper clippings and court documents. Yet compared with most of the other people I’d met on this trip, they seemed amazingly straightforward. When I asked them about the Siddiquis’ allegations that Amjad had beat Aafia, they didn’t deny it—although they said the only incident they knew about was the one in Boston when he had thrown the baby bottle. They laughed when I asked if their son had gone into hiding. They said he worked at a hospital and didn’t care to talk to the press. What made them despondent, and very angry, was the subject of their missing grandchildren.
“I was the one who arranged this marriage,” Zahera told me sadly. “I liked her very much. But she was rigid. Stubborn. Whatever she wanted, she would do. More or less, she was an extremist. Now we are very sad. Where are the children? We don’t know where they are. All we know is that they are with Aafia and Aafia is with them. We don’t know if Mrs. Siddiqui knows where they are or not. She says they are with the FBI.”
I broke in. “When did she say that?”
Aga Naeem pulled out a copy of the statement Ismat had given to the family court in August 2003. Ismat claimed she had contacted both the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department in Boston and that they had “verbally told the lawyer that the minors are with the mother in safe condition.” I copied Ismat’s words down by hand and returned the paper to them. When I looked
up, I saw them gazing at an old photograph of little Ahmad and Maryam, smiling and dressed up for Eid in shiny green and yellow costumes. Zahera took off her glasses and wiped her eyes.
I asked if they believed that the FBI had Aafia and the children.
Aga Naeem slowly shook his head. “I think not,” he said. “Mrs. Siddiqui hasn’t filed any missing persons case. She doesn’t meet us. She keeps very close. She doesn’t answer phones. She doesn’t answer the door. This gives us the impression that Aafia and the children are underground here.”
Zahera spoke up with difficulty. “We don’t want our names in a magazine. We don’t want any trouble. We just want to find the children.”
I promised I would let them know if I learned anything.
My stringer was impassive. I sensed that he either didn’t believe the Khans or disapproved of them for talking to me, for some reason. But I felt as if I had just had my first honest exchange since arriving in Pakistan.
The Siddiquis, on the other hand, still refused to see me. In desperation, I phoned their lawyer in Massachusetts again. Sharp told me she had tried to persuade Fowzia to agree to an interview, but Fowzia’s baby was sick and she couldn’t manage it. As a last resort, I wrote down a few questions for my stringer to ask her. Then I sat in the room with him while he phoned.
My questions didn’t even include asking where Aafia was. I felt sure that Fowzia wouldn’t answer. But since many people had told me about her mother’s charity, the United Islamic Organisation, and I had copies of e-mails from Aafia listing Fowzia’s address in Chicago as one of the charity’s locations, I thought it might be innocuous to ask about that. I also wanted to let her respond to the contradiction between her mother’s claim that the FBI was holding Aafia and Sharp’s statement to me that the FBI had denied holding her. So I asked him to pose those two questions to Fowzia.
With the call coming from my stringer’s phone, Fowzia answered on the first ring. But she grew frosty when the journalist told her he was calling on my behalf. He asked about the UIO. “I’ve never heard of that organization,” she answered curtly. He asked about Ismat’s statement to the family court that the FBI was holding Aafia. She cut him off, saying there was no such court case.
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