Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  Some of Pakistan’s newspapers made the situation even more confusing. If the English-language papers seem to reflect the country’s ego, its Urdu papers are like its id. The latter print lurid conspiracy theories involving malignant agents of the Dajjal—India, Israel, and the United States. Now they were also telling convoluted tales about how Blackwater, the U.S. mercenary company, was responsible for the suicide attacks and how Pakistan’s secular government had sold Aafia (“Daughter of the Nation”) to be raped and tortured in a U.S. jail.

  The rallies for her were massive. There were no rallies for the thousands of Pakistanis being killed by bombs and assassinated in the tribal areas. Most people were too fearful of the militants and their hidden backers in the Sunni elite to take a stand. “Please don’t quote me saying anything against them,” an elderly member of the ruling family of Swat, a pristine mountain area once beloved of tourists, told me when I visited him in his Islamabad bungalow. “Those chaps would think nothing of cutting my head off.”

  Even liberal Pakistanis preferred to turn their rage against the United States. If it weren’t for the Americans—who had nurtured the jihadis to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, then gotten into a fight with them and were now bribing Pakistan’s rulers to do the same—the country wouldn’t be on the brink of civil war. Or so I heard, over and over. “We don’t know who these people are,” said a young woman whose affluent family had moved from Peshawar to Islamabad for safety. “We used to think they were part of us, but now we don’t know. We think the CIA or RAW”—India’s intelligence agency—“is behind them.” The backing that Pakistan’s government had given the militants for twenty years seemed to have vanished from their minds.

  Aafia was the perfect emblem of this mood. Despite the unanswered questions about where she had been and despite the unmistakable hand of the religious parties in whipping up daily protests on her behalf, Pakistanis of every description latched on to the cause of this “Daughter of the Nation”—desperate, perhaps, for something to unite them.

  “Free Dr. Aafia” began appearing on walls even in remote areas. Retired generals published poems about her on the Internet. “To filthy scum they sold the bride,” ran one typical offering. “Yet the mighty Creator, seeing it all, unveils the gruesome act they hide!” She became the new symbol of Islamic victimhood. Mass-printed by the thousands, the picture of her crumpled figure became the latest bloody flag to wave, a new scab to be ripped from the wound, a new proof of Pakistan’s impotence against America—and of the need for an Islamist takeover.

  Just as the question of whether the Dutch government had been wrong to stop paying for Ayaan’s bodyguards became a political litmus test in the West, so the question of whether the Pakistani government was wrong to let the United States go unpunished for brutalizing “Dr. Aafia” became a test of Pakistani pride and nationalism.

  The former ISI agent Khalid Khawaja, with his Defense of Human Rights group, was especially busy in rallying support for Aafia. The mysterious Khawaja, who seemed to have plenty of money, had left the apartment where I first met him four years earlier for a larger neoclassical house farther away from town. Still dressed in his cotton gown and skullcap, he had smoothed his edges a bit. He ranted less about the angelic qualities of Osama bin Laden and more about how the United States and its Pakistani “slaves and puppets” were violating the human rights of Muslim prisoners. But as we began to talk about Aafia, Khawaja openly admitted that he had been trying to steer me away from trying to find her when I had visited him and Zaynab Khadr, the daughter of the Canadian al-Qaeda man, back in 2004. “There was a feeling,” he said, tapping his foot, “that maybe Aafia has gone underground herself, and so why take up this case. . . . Now, of course, I see that I was wrong. Aafia’s case is one of the worst crimes in history.”

  Aafia, he said, was no ordinary person. “She was unique, standing out from the whole block. She was like an angel.” He said he had come to believe that Pakistani intelligence had picked up Aafia in 2003 and held her until 2008. “I think it is probably not the Americans but our government that has done the worst to Aafia,” he continued. “I am quite sure that most of the blame is going to fall on Pakistan.” He said he had heard that she had been separated from her children, and that her youngest, Suleman, had died while in custody.

  But when I asked who had told him that, he waved away my question and began slapping his knee. “I don’t know exactly. It is just a strong hearsay.”

  It struck me again that Khawaja—who was now building up Aafia as a holy martyr—seemed to be in awfully close contact with the same jihadi groups for which Aafia was accused of working. When I asked if he would help me reach the relatives of Aafia’s second husband, Ali, and the relatives of Majid Khan, the man for whom U.S. prosecutors claimed that Aafia had rented that post office box, he simply whipped out his telephone and began calling them. None wanted to speak to a reporter on the telephone, but he had their numbers on speed dial. I asked if he also knew Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He answered with a diatribe on how KSM had not directed 9/11. The real mastermind, Khawaja said, had been the “Satanic rule which is behind Bush and all of this.” As for KSM’s family, he said, “You know, you call them the worst people, but we call them the best people. That family is really outstanding. We get inspiration from them.”

  Who did Khawaja really work for? Al-Qaeda? The ISI? Himself? All of them—at least that was my guess.

  And now he had taken up the quest, like much of the rest of Pakistan, of making sure that Aafia’s son Ahmad was brought back from Afghanistan and reunited with Aafia’s sister and parents. The U.S. government had originally planned to take Ahmad to the United States, where he would stay with Aafia’s brother, Ali. But after politicians had denounced the United States in Parliament for illegally detaining a Pakistani minor who had committed no crime, and after the Pakistani embassies in Kabul and Washington had demanded his return, the U.S. and Afghan governments had agreed to release him to Fowzia.

  According to the New York Times, the boy had admitted to Afghan intelligence that he belonged to Jaish-e-Muhammad. Under Pakistani law, custody would normally have gone to his father, Amjad, because his mother was in jail. But with the whole country rooting for Fowzia to get him, Amjad decided not to interfere.

  Much of the Pakistani press corps turned out at the Islamabad airport to record the reunion of the shy, black-haired boy and his veiled, tearful aunt, who was staying in the capital at the home of her uncle S. H. Faruqi. Fowzia had scheduled another news conference at the Islamabad Press Club for the following day. About eighty journalists waited for an hour for her to arrive and tell them where Ahmad said he had been for the past five years, but she failed to show up. Finally a businessman friend of hers appeared with the news that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies had surrounded Faruqi’s bungalow and ordered Fowzia not to meet with reporters.

  Since many news reports were still calling the boy Ali and others said he might actually be an orphan, I later asked Fowzia’s friend, who said he preferred to remain anonymous, if he was sure the boy was Aafia’s son.

  “Even I can see it!” he told me. “All you have to do is to look at the eyes.” He added that the boy had also recognized Fowzia. But he said a shadow had come over the boy’s face when the businessman asked him what name he preferred to be called. “I don’t like to talk about my name,” the boy replied. “Every time I change my name, something bad happens.”

  I asked Fowzia’s friend why the boy’s name might have been changed. He shrugged. “Maybe he has been hiding, and his mother changed his name,” he told me, “or maybe whoever has been holding her has changed his name.”

  The next day, Fowzia took the boy back to her mother’s house in Karachi. Soon she told the press that he was “mentally unfit” and so traumatized that he didn’t remember his own name. Khalid Khawaja and others began to say that maybe he wasn’t Ahmad after all. “The child doesn’t even know about Aafia,” Khawaja told me, shaking his head sad
ly, when I went to see him the next day. Fowzia herself declined my requests for an interview.

  I left Islamabad for Karachi. This time no one bothered me about a travel permit. The Siddiquis still wouldn’t see me when I got there. But some of KSM’s family did.

  I contacted them through the lawyer who had filed the missing persons petition before the Supreme Court for KSM’s sister Maryam. Maryam herself was in Iran, but KSM’s uncle, Mohammed Hussein Abid Baluch, and his wife and Ali’s sister Amna all came to meet me at the lawyer’s office in the dimly lit old sandstone building across from the British-era Karachi courthouse. They told me I was the only foreign journalist to meet with them, and as far as I know I still am.

  KSM’s uncle had a clever, hawkish face, but the al-Baluchi were in general less polished than the Siddiquis. I could imagine Aafia’s mother disapproving of her marrying into their family. The uncle wore a simple cotton skullcap. The two women in their black polyester abayas and niqabs—including Aafia’s sister-in-law Amna—twisted and turned in their chairs and tucked up their feet. They didn’t speak English and evidently were more comfortable sitting on the floor. In previous interviews with the Pakistani press, other members of the KSM clan had cheerfully admitted that Ali and Aafia had been married. Ramzi Yousef’s older brother, Abdul Qadeer, had even described how the pair had used to argue. By the time I met them, the family had grown more cautious. They told me they didn’t know for sure whether Aafia had married Ali before he was captured. But they said they wouldn’t have objected if he had. “It is a blessing to marry divorced women,” Ali’s sister Amna said. “Our Prophet did it, peace be upon him.”

  I wanted to go on talking with KSM’s relatives and learn more about this extraordinary family, whose members had been involved in nearly every serious al-Qaeda attack on the United States over the past two decades—attacks that had killed thousands. What made them do it? But KSM’s uncle was getting restless. It was late in the afternoon. He said they needed to get home in time to break the Ramadan fast. So we said our good-byes, and I went back to the small Karachi hotel where I was staying.

  The hotel’s televisions and computers were down when I reached my room. So it wasn’t until my husband phoned me from Amsterdam that I learned that a suicide bomber in a dump truck had finally succeeded in blowing up the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. The attack coincided with the time of day when the maximum number of upper-crust Pakistanis would be attending parties there to break the Ramadan fast. Sixty people were killed, not counting the bomber. All that night, Pakistani television broadcast scenes of firemen slipping and sliding in blood as they tried to douse the burning building.

  Later, an investigation traced the attack to the same conglomerate of Deobandi jihadi groups—Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jaish-e-Muhammad, and the Pakistani Taliban—that were so closely associated both with KSM’s family and with Aafia.

  Might KSM’s relatives have wanted to go home because they knew the blast was coming and planned to watch the aftermath on television? I had no way of finding out. When I suggested to the Pakistani colleague who had accompanied me to my interview that we visit the family again—but in Lyari this time, at their house—he begged me so earnestly not to do it that I took his advice. Soon afterward, I left the country.

  Chapter Thirty

  Ayaan got a call from her cousin Magool after her father died. Magool was the Somali girl who had lived briefly with Ayaan and Marco in Leiden. She had done well in the years since Ayaan had seen her and was now studying law at a British university.

  Magool said she wanted to ask a favor.

  Instantly Ayaan was suspicious. “From the old days,” she wrote, “I know that Somali relatives ask—no, demand—money, immigration papers, the smuggling of people and goods; they request to be allowed to camp in your home for three days only, which stretch into forever.”

  But Magool just wished that Ayaan would call her mother, Asha.

  Ayaan protested that she didn’t think her mother wanted to talk to her. But Magool said that Asha did want to hear from her, and she gave Ayaan her cell phone number in the remote hamlet of Las Anod where she was living. “She is all alone now and she talks about you all the time,” Magool said.

  Ayaan wrote in Nomad that she could imagine how her mother was living: a cinder-block house with a dirt floor surrounded by “thorn bushes and endless dust.” Just thinking about it made her feel guilty. She knew that in Somali eyes it wasn’t her parents who had abandoned her but she who had abandoned them—and to poverty and disease.

  For a while, she couldn’t get through to the number. But then one day as she was driving along in a car with an American friend, she tried again, and her mother answered.

  They spoke for a few minutes about the death of Ayaan’s father. Then her mother asked if Ayaan prayed and fasted and read the Quran. Ayaan replied that the Quran didn’t appeal to her. Her mother hung up the phone.

  If Ayaan had been alone, that might have been the end of it. But the American friend who had overheard the conversation talked Ayaan into calling her mother back and apologizing. Mother and daughter began to talk, albeit in a distant and sometimes hurtful way. And Ayaan says she started sending her mother and brother money.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Aafia remained stubbornly, bafflingly silent. She refused to attend her arraignment, and she refused to attend a hearing in September. Nor would she meet with visitors. Cut off from contact, her lawyers backed away from their early assertions that she had been held and tortured by the Americans in Bagram. Fink began saying that Aafia had been held by “somebody—American or Pakistani intelligence—on the dark side.”

  But in Pakistan’s peculiar way, the public there absorbed such vague statements without letting it dent their conviction that Aafia was innocent. It seemed to me that they knew and didn’t know at the same time that Aafia was a jihadi, and they preferred to keep it that way.

  After Aafia missed several of her own hearings, Fink wrote to the court in September suggesting that her client was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. She said that she had not been able to develop a relationship of trust with Aafia and she did not think Aafia was mentally competent to assist in her own defense. The Justice Department agreed that Aafia should be evaluated, and an early-psychiatric report by the Bureau of Prisons diagnosed her as psychotic.

  In October, Judge Richard M. Berman ordered that she be sent to the only specialized medical facility in the U.S. prison system for women, the Federal Medical Center, Carswell—in Fort Worth, Texas—for further evaluation.

  The Pakistani Senate sent a delegation to meet with her at FMC, Carswell, in December. The senators found her in good spirits. She still wasn’t able to explain exactly where she had been for the past five years; all she remembered, she said, was getting into a taxi after her fight with her mother in 2003 and then waking up at Bagram. (She warned the senators that she had made some statements to the FBI that might not look good to the Pakistani public, but she said she had done it only because her children had been threatened.) Apparently that was good enough for the Pakistani Senate, which voted to allocate $1.8 million to her defense.

  Aafia’s ex-husband, Amjad, had not wanted to tangle with the Siddiquis either in court or in the media since returning from Saudi Arabia in 2004. But as time passed and the Siddiquis denied him access to Ahmad, and no one came forward to say where Maryam and Suleman were, he felt he had no choice.

  In December, he wrote a letter to Dawn announcing that he had decided to sue the Siddiquis for custody of Ahmad. In February 2009, he agreed to an interview with the News. “Aafia’s mother and Dr Fowzia had warned me at the time of our divorce that they would take revenge by not letting me meet the children,” Amjad said, adding, “but now they are discouraging a meeting with Ahmad because they fear Ahmad will reveal the truth about Aafia’s activities and the whereabouts of his siblings over these years.”

  The Jamaat-e-Islami party rushed to defend the Siddiquis. Anwar ul-Haq
, a U.S.-educated pathologist who had announced after the September 11 attacks that the Mossad had done it, now wrote letters to Dawn denouncing Amjad as a “sadistic extremist” and a sexual pervert.

  Pakistan’s spy agency, meanwhile, cautioned Amjad’s family that if they went forward with their custody suit, it might hinder Aafia’s possible repatriation, and they might also put themselves in danger from Ali Abdul Aziz Ali’s family—that is, KSM’s relatives. Some people would have taken that as a serious government threat, but after many delays Amjad filed his suit anyway.

  The Siddiquis didn’t respond directly to his allegations; instead, Ismat’s brother S. H. Faruqi wrote to Dawn to say the boy whom Amjad called his son might not be Ahmad after all. Faruqi claimed that Ahmad continued to insist he was an orphan from Balakot whose family had died in the 2005 earthquake; now Ahmad supposedly told Faruqi that he had been held by U.S. and Italian soldiers and given a new name every few months and that he had been scolded and sometimes physically punished if he failed to remember the new story.

  In Faruqi’s account, the boy said he had been ordered to travel to Ghazni with Aafia. Faruqi said he didn’t know who had given the order.

  When I asked Faruqi about this complicated letter to Dawn, he wrote me back that Fowzia had commissioned two DNA tests on Ahmad and that she remained dissatisfied with the results. (Evidently she claimed not to believe the result of the U.S. test that identified the boy as Aafia’s son.) Amjad, meanwhile, who was certain just by looking at his pictures that the boy was his son, volunteered to have his DNA tested to prove it; the Siddiquis ignored him.