Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The British television presenter Yvonne Ridley had never forgotten about the screams of the woman that Moazzam Begg, the Briton later released from Guantánamo, had described hearing at the CIA’s secret prison at Bagram in his memoir Enemy Combatant. In 2008, while putting together a program on Guantánamo, Ridley asked Begg who he thought the woman might have been.

  “I put it to him that she didn’t really exist and that the screams he had heard were on a tape recorder as part of a mental torture process used by his interrogators at Bagram,” Ridley wrote me later. But Begg replied that other detainees at Guantánamo had told him they had seen a woman at Bagram, and he directed Ridley to a video on YouTube in which four al-Qaeda detainees who escaped from Bagram in July 2005 expressed their disgust at the way a female prisoner was being treated there.

  Ridley found the video. She also learned that another prisoner at Bagram had seen such a woman, and he said that the Americans had given her a number: 650.

  Ridley hasn’t identified her source. But some months later, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident who was captured in 2002 trying to fly out of Karachi with the former American gang member Jose Padilla, and who was later imprisoned at Bagram and Guantánamo, said in public interviews with Begg and Ridley that he had encountered a female prisoner at Bagram who wore a shirt with the number 650 on it.

  Neither Binyam Mohamed nor Begg could be called a disinterested witness. According to U.S. officials, anyway, Binyam Mohamed was working for the same circle of al-Qaeda operatives around KSM in 2001 that Aafia was later accused of working with. The thin, soft-spoken Ethiopian claimed to have left London for Afghanistan in June 2001 to kick a drug habit, but he also admitted that he had trained in Afghanistan at al-Qaeda’s al-Farouq camp that summer. He was arrested on April 4, 2002, trying to use a false passport at the Karachi airport. U.S. military prosecutors later charged him with participating in KSM’s plot to blow up American apartment buildings—the same “dirty bomb plot” involving Jose Padilla that may have led the FBI in Boston to question Aafia and Amjad in May 2002. But Binyam Mohamed denied having had anything to do with such a plot. The charges against him were later dropped, and he was released in 2008.

  According to Binyam Mohamed, he was flown to Morocco after his arrest in Karachi and tortured in an effort to make him confess that he had met with al-Qaeda leaders such as KSM and bin Laden. From Morocco he was taken to the so-called “dark prison” that the Americans ran in the Afghan capital, Kabul. He arrived at Bagram in June 2004. He said that was when he saw a female prisoner who he heard was a Pakistani who had studied in the United States.

  Binyam Mohamed said that the woman was kept in isolation and that the Americans in charge of the prison told the other prisoners she was a spy working for “the governments.” (He didn’t say which ones.) In an interview filmed for Cageprisoners, Begg showed Binyam Mohamed a picture of Aafia. He identified her as the woman he had seen at Bagram.

  Ridley says she doubted at first that Aafia could be prisoner 650. As she wrote me, “I thought to myself, ‘If it is her, what the hell has the United States done with her baby and two young children?’ ” But whoever prisoner 650 was, Ridley wanted to find out more.

  In late June 2008, she contacted Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wright, a spokesman for the Pentagon. Wright denied that there was any prisoner 650, and he said the United States was holding no female prisoners at Bagram. (Later a spokeswoman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan said that a female prisoner had been held in Bagram from 2003 to 2005 but she wasn’t Aafia Siddiqui.) Ridley, however, felt sure of her source, and she refused to drop the story.

  She says she told Wright, “Mark, we can do this the easy way or, if I have to, I will go and get some sworn affidavits which will prove that you are being lied to and passing on wrong information to me. Do you really want another Abu Ghraib on your hands?” Shortly after that, Ridley says, Wright stopped answering her calls, and the YouTube film made by the Bagram escapees—which had appeared on the Internet for two years—was pulled down.

  Ridley decided to go public with her suspicions. On July 5, 2008, she and the director of Cageprisoners, Saghir Hussain, flew to Islamabad to hold a press conference with Imran Khan, the politician and ex-cricketer who had become the champion of Pakistan’s disappeared.

  The next day was the first anniversary of Operation Silence, the Pakistani military’s assault on the Lal Mosque the year before.

  Striking the themes that Aafia herself had used to rouse Boston’s Muslims to jihad, Ridley called on the ummah to protect a Muslim woman threatened by unbelievers. “Today,” she told more than a hundred Pakistani journalists who showed up at the conference, “I am crying out for help, not for myself but for a Pakistani woman whom neither you nor I have ever met. She has been held in isolation by the Americans for more than four years and she needs help.” Ridley said she called Aafia the Gray Lady “because she is almost a ghost, a specter whose cries and screams continue to haunt those who hear her.”

  Ridley’s press conference attracted enormous coverage. Reading about the hubbub in Amsterdam, I thought she might actually have solved the mystery of Aafia’s whereabouts. In Pakistan, of course, the idea that Aafia had been handed over to the Americans fit in nicely with the claims of Umme Hassan and Khalid Khawaja that Musharraf’s government had joined a grand conspiracy against Islam and was willing to imprison Muslim women and children in return for U.S. dollars.

  The agitation was still growing when, a few days later, a strange incident took place in Afghanistan that struck many Pakistanis as further proof of Aafia’s plight.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Ayaan often said that she missed her father more than her mother. Even as a child she felt Hirsi was the parent who lifted her out of the ordinary, the one who called her pretty, the one who called her his only son. She was also angry, though, that he had abandoned her again and again, first as a child, then as a young woman alone in Europe, and finally as a novice politician in danger of her life. When she first sat down to write her autobiography in 2004, she found herself instead composing an open letter to her father. She accused him of offering his children only conditional love. “Every time he has had to make a choice between the community and his children, he has chosen the former,” she wrote. “This hurts.” In many ways, her imperious father was her audience of one. Yet before their brief telephone call in the summer of 2008, they hadn’t spoken in four years.

  Why didn’t she go to him now? She wrote in Nomad that when she phoned him, she was on her way to a conference in Brazil. She says she planned to visit him later in the summer. She says she was afraid to go to his apartment in Tower Hamlets, a largely Muslim development in an immigrant section of London, without taking the police with her, though she knew that doing so would cause offense. Yet even if she rejected going to Tower Hamlets, she could have tried to meet him somewhere else. Or she could have phoned him again from Brazil. But she didn’t.

  Why not? One had to think—or at least I do after reading what Ayaan has written and said, and talking to so many people who know her—that she was still afraid to confront him. Just as her tongue had “stuck in my throat” the time her mother had begged her to tell her father about her secret marriage and instead she had run away to the Netherlands, this time she also ran away—first to the conference in Brazil and after that to another conference, in Australia.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  It was just getting dark on July 17, 2008, in the bazaar district of the ancient walled city of Ghazni, Afghanistan, when a shopkeeper noticed a woman and a boy of about twelve sitting on the ground in front of a closed shop.

  The woman wore the all-concealing powder blue burka of an Afghan woman, and she was holding the boy’s hand. She had a large black handbag by her side. As the shopkeeper later told the FBI, the Ghazni police had recently alerted him and other merchants to a tip they had received: that a woman and child might be coming to Ghazni t
o cause some kind of trouble. The shopkeeper decided to use his phone to tell the police about the pair.

  The Afghan government at the time controlled Ghazni, a provincial capital south of Kabul, but little else in the area. The war was going badly for the Americans and their ally, President Hamid Karzai. As the violence in Iraq subsided, war was surging in Afghanistan. For the first time, more U.S. soldiers were being killed there than in Iraq. In the first two weeks of July alone, sixty people had been killed in a suicide attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, twenty-four more had died in a suicide attack on a police patrol in Uruzgan, and a ferocious Taliban assault on a U.S. military outpost had left nine Americans dead. The Afghan and U.S. governments said that Pakistani groups such as Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba were helping the Taliban, and they had telephone intercepts showing that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies were directing the attacks. A separate UN study showed that more than half of Afghanistan’s suicide bombers originated in Pakistan.

  Traditionally, the Afghans didn’t draft women into their ceaseless warfare. But that was changing—under Pakistani influence, according to Karzai’s government. In May, a woman in a burka had blown herself up, killing twenty-eight people. Across the border in Pakistan’s tribal areas, Islamist militants had shut down dozens of girls’ schools in the areas they ruled, replacing them with madrassas where girls as well as boys were indoctrinated to become suicide bombers. Only days before the woman in the blue burka appeared in Ghazni’s bazaar district, the governor of Ghazni, Muhammad Usman, had received a report that the Taliban were sending a Pakistani woman and a young boy to circulate in Afghanistan, urging Afghan women to volunteer for suicide missions. “We heard they are saying, ‘This foreigner is willing to give her life for Islam. What about you?’ ” the governor told me later by telephone.

  Police commander Ghani Khan and another officer arrived at the shop and began questioning the woman. They spoke in the Afghan languages of Dari and Pashto, but the woman didn’t understand and replied to them in Urdu, the Pakistani tongue. A passing man who knew Urdu later told the FBI that he had stepped in and offered to help. The woman told him she was looking for her husband and needed no help. Then she walked away. When the police tried to stop her, she and the boy began kicking the officers and calling them infidels. “Allahu Akhbar!” the boy cried, while the woman shouted that the officers were “Americans, not Afghans.”

  A wind blew up, and the woman threw a bunch of papers out of her bag, causing the men to chase after them. To the Urdu-speaking man’s amazement, the papers turned out to include maps of Ghazni’s Jihad Mosque, the governor’s house, the airport, and the Afghan National Police compound, plus drawings of materials used in bombs.

  “Back up!” one of the policemen shouted. “This woman is dangerous!”

  The police opened her bag. Inside, they found chemical substances and gels in sealed bottles. They also found hundreds of pages of tiny handwritten notes and diagrams for making explosives, maps of Afghan army and police posts, and some photocopied excerpts from The Anarchist Arsenal. Some of the papers were written in English, others in Urdu or Pashto. Police commander Khan took the woman to the police station and delivered her bag to the governor himself.

  Governor Usman examined the woman’s belongings and decided she must be an international terrorist. He went to the police station, a walled collection of adobe buildings in the Ghazni city center, to get a look at her. Small and slight though she was, with enormous, frightened eyes, she refused to sit still. Even handcuffed she kept fighting and trying to get away, screaming, “Allahu Akhbar! Allahu Akhbar!”

  When the governor approached her, she spat at him and cursed him in Urdu. “She called me very bad, very terrible names,” Governor Usman told me. “She said I am a dog of the Americans. She said I will die like a dog and I will go to hell.”

  He telephoned Captain John-Caleb Threadcraft, a U.S. infantry officer from Alabama who acted as the liaison between the Afghan national forces and the Americans stationed in Ghazni, and asked if he could visit the captain right away.

  Threadcraft later testified that the governor had burst into his unit around 8 p.m. “I’ve captured a female bomb-maker,” he told the American. The governor showed Threadcraft the woman’s bag and its contents, exclaiming excitedly, “You see? You see?” The two men started going through the papers. Threadcraft saw notations in English concerning dirty bombs, the Ebola virus, and bioweapons, as well as something that looked like a fuse. He called his superior, the U.S. battalion commander at Ghazni. The battalion commander agreed that Threadcraft should try to take the woman into custody and find out who she was.

  Threadcraft drove to the police station, and the police chief took him to the building that housed the jail. They found the woman still shouting, “Allahu Akhbar! Allahu Akhbar!” When she saw Threadcraft, she began yelling even more loudly that the Afghans would go to hell if they gave her to the Americans. For two hours, Threadcraft tried to persuade the police captain to release the woman into his custody, but the chief refused. He said he needed permission from the interior ministry in Kabul. Governor Usman said the Afghans planned to hold a press conference the next day to exhibit their important captive. After that, he would give her to the Americans.

  Threadcraft went back to his unit, gathered the woman’s things, and took them to the military intelligence unit at Ghazni Forward Operating Base. By now it was almost 2 a.m. The military intelligence officer, Captain Robert Snyder, had to be woken up by his aides. Threadcraft and the governor had found a thumb drive in the woman’s bag; he now plugged it into his computer. Flipping through the documents stored there, he came across one in English titled “Why I Am Not a Terrorist.” Its author described attending MIT. She wrote about living in a dorm where she claimed American women were regularly raped. She decried the way women were treated in America and said Islam offered a far superior alternative.

  Threadcraft had never heard of Aafia Siddiqui, and he couldn’t imagine the small, scared woman in the police station being the person who had written the fiery statement on the thumb drive. But when Snyder appeared and read the document, he decided she might be a U.S. citizen and that the FBI unit at Bagram Airfield should know about her.

  The response from the FBI was electric. The special agent in charge let Snyder know he was sending two FBI agents to Ghazni first thing in the morning to interview the woman.

  Snyder and his team continued translating, photographing, and cataloging the items they found. Among them was a plastic container filled with white briquettes that the FBI later identified as more than two pounds of sodium cyanide, an extremely toxic industrial chemical. There were writings about a “mass casualty attack,” maps and diagrams of the Empire State Building, Wall Street, the Brooklyn Bridge, and other famous New York sites, even a discussion of how to build a dirty bomb.

  At the Ghazni police station, some policemen and an Afghan named Abdul Qadeer, a counterterrorism official, were beating the woman with sticks. “People say she was a suicide bomber so we are all hitting her,” Qadeer later testified. Qadeer was informed that two Afghan officials would be arriving from Kabul to take the woman to the capital, so he led her out of the jail and into another building to wait in a second-floor meeting room with a shiny yellow polyester curtain strung across it.

  The governor’s office held its news conference as advertised. The governor’s spokesman told gathered Afghan reporters that the two had been attaching explosives to their bodies when they were spotted and had planned to kill the governor with a suicide bomb. “They both were attempting to get into the governor’s compound and target the governor and high-ranking officials,” the governor’s spokesman said. He handed out photographs of Pakistani military figures, and he claimed that the woman had been carrying the pictures.

  In a video of the press conference, the woman and boy are shown covering their faces while officials and reporters shout questions at them. “We didn’t do anything,” the woman keep
s saying in a high, soft voice. “We didn’t do anything, and we didn’t come to do anything.” The governor’s spokesman said the woman’s name was Saliha and the boy’s name was Ali Hasan. He said the woman was twenty-five years old and the boy thirteen. They both spoke English, Urdu, and Arabic. Apparently the woman told them that they came from Pakistan and the boy was an orphan she had adopted.

  The governor’s spokesman said “Saliha” told them she had left Pakistan from Quetta (in Baluchistan), entered Afghanistan at Chaman, and traveled to Kabul before continuing on to Ghazni two days later. He said she had confessed to having three other accomplices, who were not captured.

  After the press conference, another officer took the boy into a separate room to question him, and Abdul Qadeer, the Afghan antiterrorism official, called the Interior Ministry for further instructions. He later testified that, while he was on the phone, the woman leaped over some chairs onto a bed behind the curtain and tried to jump out the window.

  His officers restrained her. She fought back, biting one man on the wrist deeply enough to draw blood and hitting and kicking at the others. Finally they tied her to the bed. Qadeer then took the boy to another office and questioned him.

  While Qadeer was dealing with the captives, the two FBI agents and a U.S. Army expert in chemical weapons arrived by helicopter at the U.S. base outside town. Threadcraft was told to accompany them to the governor’s house and ask the governor to release the woman into the agents’ custody. He took Captain Snyder with him on the mission, together with a female medic, a Special Forces team led by a warrant officer, and several Afghan interpreters. To the Americans’ disappointment, however, Governor Usman told Threadcraft that the prisoner couldn’t be given to them as promised. He said that the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, had called him personally to say that he had decided to take charge of her case.