Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  Aafia and Amjad’s youngest child, Suleman, still had not been found, but Amjad believed that he was alive and living under an assumed name with members of the Siddiquis’ extended family. But, by the end of 2010, Amjad and his family were so exhausted by battling the Siddiquis that they decided to abandon their custody suit. “The children are by now of a mindset that is not compatible with us,” Amjad wrote me. “We will welcome them if they want to come meet us but we are not going to the Siddiquis’ place to meet them. And if they don’t want to meet us, that’s okay too. I am, and always have been, willing to fulfill my obligations towards them.”

  As for al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s jihadi groups, they used Aafia’s case as a rallying cry, accusing the Pakistani government and military of failing in their religious duty to protect and avenge her. “If a Muslim woman is arrested in the east, it is the duty of every Muslim in the west to save her,” Jaish-e-Muhammad declared in its online magazine, al-Qalam.

  Even before Aafia’s trial began, the new leader of the Pakistani Taliban, the long-haired Hakimullah Mehsud, had released a video in which he revealed that a Jordanian doctor had killed seven CIA operatives and a Jordanian intelligence agent in a suicide bombing at Khost, Afghanistan, partly in revenge for Aafia’s imprisonment. Now that she had been convicted, the Pakistani Taliban announced, Aafia’s family had approached them for help and they had agreed to add Aafia to a list of twenty-one Afghan prisoners for whom it had agreed to swap one U.S. soldier it had taken prisoner, twenty-three-year-old Private Bowe Bergdahl of Idaho.

  The Siddiquis, however, denied having made the request, and the Americans refused to swap anybody.

  In early March, Khalid Khawaja, the ex-spy who in 2004 had advised me to drop Aafia’s story, traveled to Waziristan to try to make peace between the Pakistani Taliban and the Pakistani army. He carried a letter from Hakimullah Mehsud to Fowzia on his way back. “You are my sister and I share the pain and grief that you are undergoing,” Hakimullah wrote to Aafia’s sister. “And God willing we will teach a lesson to the U.S. and cruel rulers of Pakistan—a lesson to be remembered by them.” He told Fowzia she could reach him through Khalid Khawaja.

  Fowzia later told Dawn that the letter had never been delivered. “Mr. Khawaja called me and said he had some letter for me,” she explained. “He wanted to personally hand over the letter to me, but I avoided meeting him.”

  Khawaja returned to Waziristan on March 25. Toward the end of April, a group calling itself the Asian Tigers announced that it had kidnapped him and his companions. The group delivered a series of videos to the press in which Khawaja confessed to being a double agent.

  Masked men subsequently dumped Khawaja’s body beside a stream in North Waziristan. He had been shot through the head and chest. The men left a letter on his corpse stating that he had been killed for associating with the ISI and the CIA, and for his role in the army’s assault on the Lal Mosque.

  The next day, Hakimullah Mehsud released another video. It promised to avenge Aafia. The day after that, May 1, a thirty-year-old man left a car running in New York’s Times Square. The car was crudely fitted with propane gas tanks, fertilizer, gasoline, and explosives. If it had gone off as intended, it could have killed dozens or even hundreds of people. Police soon tracked down the would-be bomber, Faisal Shahzad, to Bridgeport, Connecticut. He proved to be a recently naturalized U.S. citizen and the son of a Pakistani Air Force officer. On his Facebook page he had posed wearing fashionable sunglasses. Raised in Karachi and educated in the United States, Shahzad’s background resembled Aafia’s. The trail of his contacts soon led back to Jaish-e-Muhammad—and to Hakimullah Mehsud.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  A picture of Khalid Khawaja, wrapped in a white shroud, with his eyes closed and a bullet through his head, appeared on the Internet. I wouldn’t have expected it, but I felt a wave of regret. Khawaja had been an enigmatic figure, infected by the same evil fantasies as Aafia; now he had been devoured by the same nightmare forces he had helped to set into motion.

  After his death I also discovered that, in a circuitous way, Khawaja had shown me a link between Aafia and Ayaan—the sixth degree of separation, perhaps, that I had sensed in their stories that very first day in 2004, when, on my way to Pakistan, I had read about the beheading of Theo van Gogh.

  Back in 2004, when Khawaja had asked me to tell Daniel Pearl’s widow, Mariane, that he had nothing to do with Pearl’s murder, I had contacted Pearl’s friend Asra Nomani with a request that she pass along the message. Nomani and I began to talk, and I learned about her plans to unravel the conspiracy that had led to Pearl’s killing. Eventually she went to work on an investigation called the Pearl Project, which was staffed by students and teachers at Georgetown University.

  In January 2011, Nomani and a professor at Georgetown, Barbara Feinman Todd, released the results of their research on Pearl’s murder. U.S. officials, they had learned, believe that on the last day of Pearl’s life three men arrived at the shed where he was being held captive on property owned by the patron of the al-Rashid Trust. One of the men was KSM. Another was the cousin who had studied with KSM in North Carolina, Ramzi Yousef’s brother Abdul Karim, also known as “Musab Aruchi.” The third man, Nomani and Feinman Todd said, was KSM’s nephew—Aafia’s future husband, the handsome young Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.

  The men had entered the shed to make a movie.

  Ali set up the video camera. The men interviewed Pearl about his Jewish ancestry. Then Abdul Karim and another man, who had been guarding Pearl, held the bucking and struggling journalist while KSM cut his throat—not once but twice, to be sure Ali captured it on camera. It was twenty-four-year-old Ali who U.S. investigators believe shot the film “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.”

  It was just a horrible coincidence, but what struck me was the impact—almost like the butterfly effect—that Ali’s film had on Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s rise to stardom as an Islam critic. For it was “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl” and the many copycat versions that followed it that had inspired Mohammed Bouyeri and taught him how to murder Theo van Gogh. And it was Bouyeri’s murder of van Gogh that had made Ayaan and her film, “Submission,” internationally famous.

  Then in 2011 another event showed how tragically these opposites, Ayaan and Aafia, had become mirror images of each other in the eyes of some of their adoring followers. That summer Anders Behring Breivik, a thirty-two-year-old Norwegian who shared Ayaan’s fears of an Islamic takeover of Europe, slaughtered seventy-seven government officials and youthful Labor Party campers whom he blamed for Muslim immigration to Norway. In the 1,500-page manifesto Breivik left behind before setting off on his “martyrdom operation,” he claimed to belong to an al-Qaeda-like organization of the “Knights Templar” that would expel Muslims, punish “multiculturalists,” and restore Europe to cultural purity. He also proposed Ayaan for the Nobel Peace Prize.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  On September 23, 2010, I joined the same Pakistani and American spectators who had attended Aafia Siddiqui’s trial and filed through the now-familiar security checks into Judge Richard Berman’s courtroom for her sentencing.

  Lawyers and aides for both sides made their way to the tables in front of the bench. Aafia was led in by U.S. marshals. After looking around the courtroom for her brother, she took a seat in her usual garb of long beige gown and white polyester head scarf tied across her face.

  Judge Berman arrived in his robes, and all rose.

  The judge warned that the sentencing could take some time. For one thing, there were certain mysteries surrounding Aafia’s case that had never been resolved.

  Despite having followed her case for six years, I had to agree.

  It had never been definitively established, Berman observed, why Aafia and her son had turned up in Afghanistan on July 17, 2008. “Speculation,” said the judge, “has ranged from the following, that, one, she was looking for Ammar al-Baluchi [also known
as Ali], who I understand she is married to, and who is currently being held, along with his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, at the United States base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Other speculation is that she was on a mission to attack Americans. Another speculation is that she was there to distribute documents instructing the Taliban how to make explosives to destroy the foreigners and the government army.”

  He added that the court lacked the evidence to confirm Aafia’s whereabouts between 2003 and 2008. But he had not found any credible evidence that any U.S. agency had detained her before she was captured on July 18, 2008.

  The trial had been a complicated one, partly because Aafia had disrupted the proceedings with her outbursts. The judge had found her competent, but “this was most definitely a situation in which the defendant’s political beliefs and perspectives blur the line between mental health issues and political advocacy.” Overall, he said, she had been able to confront her accusers and participate in her own defense. The result was that the jury determined that Aafia picked up the chief warrant officer’s rifle in Ghazni, “aimed at the Americans and pulled the trigger, firing several shots.”

  Dawn Cardi spoke for the defense. She told the court that Aafia’s had been one of the most difficult cases of her career, most of all because Aafia remained “an enigma.” “I don’t think in this time we really know what the truth is and what happened in the life of Dr. Siddiqui,” Cardi said. She agreed that “there were no facts in front of the court to corroborate or to aid us in knowledge,” but she said she believed that the CIA and other government agencies knew and that someday the truth would come out. She argued that Aafia had been frightened and just trying to escape that day at Ghazni. She asked for mercy for a woman whose children were missing and whose mind was clearly impaired. She asked the court not to give in to “fear” but to settle for a sentence of twelve years.

  In his turn, U.S. Attorney Christopher La Vigne urged the judge not to forget fear but to remember the fear that the members of the U.S. interview team had felt when Aafia picked up the gun and fired it at them. “That’s the fear in this case. That’s what this case is about. That’s what the jury found.”

  Aafia then gave a long, rambling statement in which she said she loved America and claimed she had proof that Israelis had masterminded 9/11. She said she had only been trying to stave off a catastrophe because “big wars are being planned and they are involved in it.” Once again, she advised Americans to use genetic testing to determine who was loyal and who was not. But she said several times that she did not want Muslims to think that she had been tortured.

  Then Judge Berman read out her sentence. He recommended that she be allowed to serve it at the FMC, Carswell, where she could receive psychiatric treatment and her brother would be nearby. But he sentenced her to eighty-six years in prison.

  There were gasps from the audience. “Shame, shame, shame on this court!” one man cried out.

  Aafia stood up again. “I just want to say one thing,” she said. She spoke about how the Prophet Muhammad had forgiven all of his personal enemies. “Forgive everybody in my case, please. . . . Don’t get angry. If I’m not angry, why should anyone else be? Just, I mean the world is so full of injustices. You can strive in many ways to make the world a more livable, peaceful place.”

  Judge Berman thanked her, and she thanked him in return.

  There was talk of an appeal. Aafia said she didn’t want one, but her lawyers said they would file for one anyway.

  At last Judge Berman said, “It’s been a long day, Dr. Siddiqui. I wish you the very best going forward.”

  Aafia nodded back to him. The U.S. marshals got to their feet, and she was led away.

  Chapter Forty

  And so it was over. The six years I had spent following these two women, both so ambitious and dramatic in their different ways, had come to an end. What had I learned?

  Just as there are layers of stories about Islam, so there are layers to the tale of the war on terror—including the important story of women in general and many tales of individual women as different as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui.

  When I began, I felt that the control of women was as fundamental to radical Islam as racism was to the old American South or as anti-Semitism was to Nazi Germany. I learned that this was true, depressingly so. But I also learned that Westerners who want to keep the Muslim world under Western rule also have used Islamic attitudes toward women not so much to help free Muslim women as to justify the West’s continued domination of Muslim men.

  In the mirror symmetry operating here, the jihadis claimed that they weren’t really fighting to maintain their control over women but rather to throw off Western dominance. Right-wing Westerners, meanwhile, claimed that they weren’t fighting to maintain Western dominance but to liberate Muslim women. Women like Ayaan and Aafia became symbols in battles that were really about other things.

  I thought when I began that, by following Aafia and Ayaan, I could get close to what was driving the war on terror, and I believe I did.

  Both these women are products of our migratory times. Like many others of their generation, they grew up on the move between countries and cultures, and they took refuge in universal identities. Ayaan chose the West and Aafia chose Islam; both women became symbols in what they defined as an inexorable clash of civilizations. Ayaan’s sweeping criticism of Islam and Muslims led her to be threatened and her collaborator Theo van Gogh to be murdered. The help that Aafia gave al-Qaeda and, more particularly, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his family led the United States to hunt her in its shadowy war against jihad. And despite the muddiness of the truth each woman came to be seen by her camp as a pure victim who embodied everything that was wrong with the other side.

  In the lands of European descent, Ayaan appeared as heroic proof of the barbaric essence of Islam. Shaped and molded by Ayaan and her packagers, her story seemed to prove that Muslims everywhere, but for the power of the West, would be mutilating women’s genitals, forcing them to marry strangers, justifying their treatment in the name of Islam, and killing them when they dared to resist. The complexities within modern Islam, its indigenous struggles for justice, the history of Western imperialism in the region—all these were lost in the version of Ayaan’s tale fed to the public.

  In the lands of Islam, Aafia came to be widely viewed as living proof of the emptiness and hypocrisy of the Western concept of universal human rights and of the West’s continuing designs on Muslim territory. Aafia’s defenders said that the problem with the Muslim world wasn’t that it mistreated women but that it failed to protect them from a West that respects no law, not even its own—a West that kidnaps, tortures, and kills Muslims at will. They closed their eyes to the paranoia, the willful disregard for the truth, and the sheer bloodlust of Aafia and her jihadi friends even as it threatened above all their own society.

  In each case, the woman’s legend was false enough to convince her critics that her supporters were either liars or completely irrational. Important bits of each side’s sweeping complaint, however—whether against the oppression of Muslim women or against the frequent lawlessness of the war on terror—were true enough to persuade each woman’s supporters that her critics were toadies, traitors, or hopelessly naive. Ayaan and Aafia both proved to be powerfully polarizing; as such, they became useful to the real drivers of conflict in their countries, whether the ISI and the Islamists in Pakistan or anti-Muslim pundits and politicians in the United States and Holland.

  That is not to say they are equivalent figures, morally or otherwise. They are not. Ayaan, as her friend Herman Philipse pointed out long ago, “fights only with words,” whereas the evidence leads me to conclude that Aafia was almost certainly plotting murder during her missing years and perhaps prepared to further a biological or chemical attack on the United States on a scale to rival that of 9/11. For all its faults, the system that Ayaan espouses provides for the happiness and freedom of hundreds of millions of people. Aafia’s apocalyptic v
isions, by contrast, can only bring destruction. Accordingly, perhaps, their recent fortunes have been as dissimilar as their thinking, at least for now. Ayaan, as I write these words, is looking forward to marriage and the birth of her child with Ferguson. Aafia, meanwhile, faces life in a federal prison.

  Yet Aafia’s grim failure won’t lead her ardent followers to give up their faith in her innocence any more than Ayaan’s worldly success will convince her most passionate supporters that her concept of the war on terror was dangerously overblown. To her followers, each woman is an icon; her legend will always be more alluring than her reality.

  Note on Sources

  Since 2004 I have interviewed dozens of people about the events described in this book. Some of those who informed the chapters about Ayaan are Abdullahi An’Naim, Karima Belhaj, Frits Bolkestein, Sam Cherribi, Cisca Dresselhuys, Jocelyne Cesari, Margreet Fogteloo, Theodor Holman, Geert Mak, Fadime Örgü, Annelies Moors, Eveline van Dijk, Herman Philipse, Bram Peper, Paul Kalma, Marco van Kerkhoven, Joris Luyendijk, Janny Groen, Albert Benschop, Ruud Peters, Jytte Klausen, Nimco Mahamud-Hassan, Sinan Can, Jos van Dongen, Elma Verhey, Guled Ahmed Yusuf, Yassin Musse Boqor, Omar Osman Haji, Maryan Farah Warsame, Asha Hagi Elmi, Alies Pegtel, Huib Pellikaan, Leo Louwé, Juha-Pekka Tikka, and the late Gijs van der Fuhr.