Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  The U.S. group returned to its base. Threadcraft went to bed, and Snyder called headquarters for further orders. He was told to go back to the Ghazni police station with the rest of the party and at least try to question the woman and find out who she was.

  They piled into a couple of Humvees and drove back to the police station. Since the press conference, several Afghan officials from the Interior Ministry had arrived from Kabul. When the Afghan officials saw that Qadeer and his men had tied the woman to a bed, they ordered him to untie her. “What can she do? She is a woman,” Qadeer recalled them saying.

  The woman sat down on the bed, and someone closed the yellow polyester curtain, presumably to protect her modesty.

  Curious Afghans were now milling around the police compound. As usual in Afghanistan, most of them were armed. The U.S. soldiers and FBI agents arrived. They were tired and cranky after being up all night and felt frustrated at not being allowed to take the woman into custody. The armed crowd of Afghans struck them as menacing.

  The police chief told the Americans that they could talk to the woman, but first they needed to meet with the Interior Ministry officials from Kabul.

  So Captain Snyder, the FBI agents, the chief warrant officer, their interpreters, and the female medic were led across the courtyard, into another building, and upstairs to the meeting room with the yellow curtain where the officials from Kabul were waiting. Sergeant Kenneth J. Cook and Pat MacDonald, a civilian investigator on loan to military intelligence, stayed outside to keep an eye on the increasingly surly Afghans in the courtyard, who were now huddling in small groups and pointing their weapons at the building. Some men in the crowd carried rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

  “Something bad is going to happen,” Cook told MacDonald.

  “Relax,” said MacDonald.

  “I know something bad is about to happen,” Cook repeated.

  Just then the two Americans heard shots inside the building. Afghans and Americans came tumbling down the stairs and out the door. MacDonald dashed up the stairs to see what had happened; Cook dropped to one knee with his automatic rifle to guard the entrance. After a few minutes, MacDonald, Snyder, and the medic came out carrying a small, struggling woman. Snyder ordered Cook to fetch a litter from the Humvee. When he brought it back, the sergeant saw that the woman’s feet were tied and that she was handcuffed and bandaged around the abdomen. But she was still kicking and, to Cook’s astonishment, yelling in English.

  “Cover my feet!” Cook heard her say as he and the others tried to maneuver her onto the litter. “Cover my fucking feet! Cover my feet, you motherfucker!”

  The Americans picked up the stretcher with the woman on it and ran for their Humvees.

  From Ghazni, the woman was flown to another base, called Organ-E, where military surgeons operated on her to save her life. From Organ-E, she was flown to Bagram. With the woman now hospitalized, restrained, and under guard, the FBI at last took her fingerprints. It was only then that the United States confirmed her identity.

  She was Aafia Siddiqui.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Ayaan wasn’t exaggerating when she told her father she was afraid to visit him without the police. She had told the Dutch Justice Ministry that of all possible assassins, she feared Somalis most.

  It was true that many Somalis couldn’t stand her. A lot of her own relatives, for example, refused to read anything written by or about her. They would turn off the TV rather than watch her being interviewed. They had heard enough.

  Her cousin Omar Osman Haji, an influential clan leader and businessman, absolutely would not forgive her. I first met Omar in Kenya in 2006 at a hotel in Ayaan’s childhood neighborhood of Eastleigh. It was easy to see, watching the man, where Ayaan got her regal manners. He wore leopard-skin slippers and a pale linen suit jacket over his spotless white gown. A tall, commanding figure, Omar stood out among the skinny Somalis lounging around that marbled lobby like a lion surveying a herd of gazelles.

  We sat down in the deserted hotel restaurant. It was Ramadan, and Omar was fasting. I asked him about Ayaan’s autobiography. He hadn’t read it. As I nervously described Ayaan’s account of Haweya’s abortions and the days leading up to her death, he stroked his beard and tapped his cane against the floor.

  His voice had thickened when he spoke again, and I saw that his eyes had misted over. “I don’t know about any of that,” Omar said shortly. “I don’t know how Haweya died. I only know that it was very tragic. But if Ayaan would talk this way about her own sister, maybe it is not so surprising that she would talk the way she had about our Prophet.”

  Evidently more comfortable talking about Ayaan’s perfidy than about his dead niece, he warmed to his topic.

  “It is amazing,” he said. “A child, born from a Muslim family, educated in Muslim schools, a relative who knows a lot about Islam—you can hardly believe that she would say such things. You know, if it’s an illiterate person, if it’s a convert, we say they got bad information. But she knows a lot.

  “I wonder who put her up to it,” he continued. “This is craziness, to insult a billion people. She just insults us like this. It’s not fair. You are insulting 1.5 billion people. You have to respect the religion of Islam. You have to respect the people.”

  But what made him angrier than what Ayaan had said was the way the West applauded her.

  “The West! We don’t insult their religion. You must not insult the deepest beliefs of other people. I respect your beliefs. You should respect mine. This is what we are looking for.”

  His voice grew louder. “You talk about freedom of expression. To say, ‘You are ugly, you are dirty,’ is that freedom of expression?” He was shouting now.

  “If I shit on your face, is that freedom of expression? It is not! It is an insult! You can’t criticize what you don’t know. Do you know me? Do you know Africa? Do you know Islam? If you don’t know me, how can you criticize me?”

  He dismissed Ayaan’s book with the same aristocratic wave that had so irritated people in Holland when Ayaan used it on the abused women who didn’t like her film “Submission.” Omar said he didn’t need to read the book to know that her family had the right, perhaps even the duty, to kill her.

  “She is bringing problems between Muslims and the West. When others do it, we think maybe they don’t know, it’s ignorance. But she knows. A close relative can kill her now. And I must say, I am a close relative to her.”

  Ever since 2002, Ayaan’s father had refused to discuss her with journalists, and he had ordered other family members to follow the same rule. He told Westerners that despite everything Ayaan had done, she was still his daughter and he didn’t want to run her down. To other Somalis, he said he believed that she had gone mad, like her sister.

  “It’s tragic because he loved her so much,” one of their cousins in London said. “He held her in very high regard.”

  Other members of the family said angrily that Ayaan had stopped sending money to her mother, who now lived in poverty in Somalia, and to her brother, who suffered from mental illness. Her formidable stepmother and stepsisters had disowned her long ago. A relative who was present in London when her stepsister Ijaabo first read the passages about herself in Ayaan’s autobiography told me that Ijaabo had begun trembling so violently she had to leave the room to compose herself.

  I called Ayaan’s stepmother, Maryan Farah Warsame, not long after the Bush administration backed an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2007. She was anxious to speak out about the killing of civilians. But Maryan’s tone turned icy when I asked about her stepdaughter.

  “There is just one thing I have to say,” she interrupted. “I have nothing to do with Al-i. Do I make myself clear?” Her voice dripped with contempt as she pronounced the two syllables of the name that Ayaan had adopted when she moved to the Netherlands.

  Ayaan rarely mentioned the torments of her homeland. She told David Pryce-Jones of National Review that she foresaw nothing but violence and
war for Somalia. Pryce-Jones wrote, “The only way to prevent and cure these self-inflicted Third World injuries, Ayaan says, is Western intervention.”

  Her parents and other educated Somalis who remained connected to their homeland considered that attitude a way of writing Somalia off. To those who had lived through the U.S. “intervasion” of 1992–1994, it was clear that the West had neither the desire nor the means to fix Somalia. Indeed, as the country’s agonies spilled into Western consciousness in the form of an al-Qaeda plot hatched there or a Somali pirate attack on a foreign ship, the United States no longer bothered to send soldiers or aid workers but used unmanned drones to hunt for suspects from the skies. The only thing the West wanted from Somalia was for the country to disappear. A good many Somalis seemed to think that Ayaan felt the same way.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The U.S. government said nothing at first about its capture of Aafia Siddiqui. But word got back to Pakistan, setting off another maddening series of unexplained events.

  Three days after Aafia was shot, Pakistan’s Urdu press reported that her mother, Ismat Siddiqui, had died. Aafia’s ex-father-in-law, Aga Naeem Khan, thought he might mend the rift between the families by visiting the Siddiquis’ house and offering Fowzia his condolences. But as he and his driver entered the gate, they were shocked to see a young girl that they recognized as Maryam—Aafia and Amjad’s daughter—playing in the garden.

  Aga Naeem called to his granddaughter; Maryam saw him and ran inside. Then a servant came out and informed the visitors that Ismat was not dead but away in Islamabad.

  Islamabad was already buzzing with fresh rumors that Aafia was being held at Bagram, just as Yvonne Ridley had said at her press conference two weeks earlier. Almost nobody, however, yet connected her presence there to the incident in Ghazni, which involved an alleged suicide bomber called “Saliha” and a boy called “Ali Hasan.” Instead, the assumption was that Aafia had been at Bagram since she had disappeared in 2003.

  Both Great Britain’s Lord Nazir Ahmad and, independently, the nongovernmental Asian Human Rights Commission appealed to the U.S. government on July 24 to tell the truth about “Prisoner 650.” That same day, a Pakistani barrister named Javed Iqbal Jaffree received two or three calls from a source who was supposedly inside Bagram. The source said that Aafia was badly hurt and if someone didn’t get her out of Bagram soon, the Americans were going to kill her. A Shiite from Lahore, Jaffree had attended Harvard Law School and was known for his willingness to challenge just about anyone. Jaffree didn’t know the Siddiquis, and they didn’t return his telephone calls, but, persuaded by his source’s urgency, he went ahead on July 29 and filed a habeas corpus petition for Aafia Siddiqui—a petition her own family had long declined to file—before the Islamabad High Court. Meanwhile, another prominent Pakistani—Ansar Burney, a former federal minister and a member of a UN advisory committee on human rights—asked permission from both the U.S. and Afghan ambassadors to visit Aafia and other Pakistanis being held at Bagram.

  It was a perfect storm of publicity, and it seemed to confuse the Siddiquis at first. Fowzia tried to discourage Jaffree from pursuing the case, telling him, as she had told others, that she didn’t dare approach the court because the Americans were holding Aafia’s children hostage. “Fowzia has stated that the U.S. is safekeeping the children,” Jaffree told me when I phoned him. “She says the government of Pakistan is trying to help and that I should be careful.” But he decided that Fowzia was naive to think that the United States and Pakistan were on her side, and he went ahead with his petition.

  In the meantime, Yvonne Ridley and Lord Ahmad scheduled another demonstration on Aafia’s behalf. It would be staged in London on August 1.

  As for Aafia, she had been talking for almost ten days in Bagram to a pale young FBI agent named Angela Sercer, while CIA and FBI analysts in Washington were examining the documents, phone numbers, chemicals, and other items she had been found carrying. They were looking for anything they could use in the hunt for al-Qaeda.

  A few hours before dawn on July 28, a barrage of U.S. missiles sailed across the border from Afghanistan and into a mud-walled madrassa in Pakistan’s South Waziristan, near the village of Azam Warsak. Among the bodies found in the rubble was that of al-Qaeda’s famed chemical and biological weapons expert, fifty-four-year-old Abu Khabab al-Masri, and four other high-ranking Egyptians in al-Qaeda. Apparently al-Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was among those wounded. A day after the strike, the same Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who had been accused of murdering Benazir Bhutto, sent a message to Peshawar that was intercepted. Mehsud was urgently requesting a doctor for Zawahiri, who, Mehsud said, was suffering from infected wounds and severe pain.

  Whether Aafia’s statements or belongings had directed the Americans to Abu Khabab and his colleagues remains unknown, but the timing is intriguing.

  The Siddiquis still hadn’t made any public statement. On July 30, I e-mailed their American lawyer, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, to ask about Jaffree’s petition, the London demonstration, and the reports of Ismat’s death. Sharp wrote back the same day that “thankfully Ismat is not dead” (no one ever explained why the Urdu press had reported that she was) and that the family had had nothing to do with the legal moves or the demonstration. “It’s been initiated by a human rights group, and the best thing to do is to call them with any questions. The family knows nothing about any of this.”

  Then on Sunday, August 3, Sharp, still at home north of Boston, announced the stunning news to the press that the FBI had notified the family that Aafia was “injured but alive” in Afghanistan. On Monday, before anyone could digest that, the U.S. Department of Justice released its own statement: Aafia had been arrested, announced U.S. Attorney Michael J. Garcia, and had already been flown from Afghanistan to New York. She was charged not with terrorism but with attempting to murder U.S. personnel on July 18 at the police station in Ghazni. Garcia said she had picked up a rifle that one of the U.S. soldiers had left lying on the floor and fired it at the Americans and Afghans who came to interview her.

  The most wanted woman in the world was no longer wanted. If convicted, she could face life in prison.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Ayaan attended a dinner in Australia with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, afterward correcting him in an interview with Rebecca Weisser of the Australian for what she said was his misunderstanding of the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek on the free market.

  She hadn’t talked much lately about Shortcut to Enlightenment, her proposed book about the Prophet debating Friedrich Hayek, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Popper, but in the admiring presence of Weisser, who had written an earlier article about Ayaan called “The Dangerous Odyssey of a Muslim Voltaire,” Ayaan spoke with zest about her favorite project. “The great thing about Hayek is his proposition that the individual’s life is here on earth, not in the hereafter,” she told the reporter, beaming as she spoke.

  Ayaan was stopping over in Los Angeles, on her way back from this pleasant trip, when Marco called her again. He had received another message from her half sister Sahra. Their father had slipped into a coma, and Ayaan needed to hurry to London if she wanted to see him.

  So Ayaan called the twenty-four-year-old half sister whom she hadn’t seen since Sahra was eight and Ayaan stopped in Ethiopia on her way to Germany. To Ayaan’s surprise, Sahra didn’t seem hostile to the family’s most famous rebel. She assumed that Ayaan wanted to visit their father, and she seemed to take a furtive pleasure in helping to arrange it. She volunteered that Ayaan might feel more comfortable if she avoided the Royal London Hospital’s normal visiting hours, when many other Somalis went to see her father and seek his blessing.

  Ayaan phoned “a number of friends in Europe who might be influential” in helping her get to his bedside fast. A large black car from the Dutch Embassy was waiting for her when she reached London’s Heathrow Airport. Behind it, Scotland Yard had positioned a smaller vehicle
full of armed policemen. Whisked by this convoy through the darkened streets of London, Ayaan arrived at the hospital and went straight to the intensive care unit.

  She found her father lying in bed. The family says he was already in a coma. Ayaan says he smiled at her.

  She says he grasped her hand and made kissing gestures with his lips, gasping and struggling to speak. She wrote that she felt he was using his last strength to say something to her, but she didn’t know what it was. She told him again that she loved him. She felt she saw in his eyes and in his gestures that he had forgiven her.

  “He ultimately allowed his feelings of fatherly love to transcend his adherence to the demands of his unforgiving God,” Ayaan wrote of what she sensed.

  But visiting hours were quickly approaching. And despite the presence of her bodyguards and Scotland Yard, she wrote, she couldn’t bear to meet any Somalis. So she slipped out of the hospital into Whitechapel Road, got into a car with her guards, and returned to Heathrow and the United States.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  More than five years after her disappearance, Aafia limped into the same federal court in Manhattan where Ramzi Yousef and his Al-Kifah associates had been tried and found guilty of conspiring to bring down the World Trade Center fifteen years earlier. It was now August 5, 2008. Spectators craned their necks to get a look at the tiny thirty-six-year-old woman with the burgundy scarf over her hair. The judge read out the charges of attempted murder and assault; Aafia shook her head slowly and decisively. She seemed to be saying she wasn’t guilty.

  Pakistani and Western journalists agreed that her case was one of the most mysterious in a secret war dense with mysteries. Few believed the Bush administration when it claimed that the Afghan police had simply found her loitering in Ghazni on July 17, less than two weeks after Yvonne Ridley’s press conference. Some suspected, rather, that the United States had set her up in Ghazni to conceal the fact that it had secretly imprisoned her for more than five years. The Pakistani press reinforced that suspicion by continuing to report it as a fact that Aafia and her children had been kidnapped on March 30, 2003, and later turned over to the FBI.