I have, since an early age, found religion faintly ridiculous. I do not write this to cause offence to anybody and hope I have not done so. Indeed, I respect the evident fact that many wise people and some close friends profoundly disagree with me on this rather fundamental point, beginning with Louis. So, while these jihadi fundamentalists prayed to their god and Louis spoke to his, I talked to my family.
I imagined we were all gathered before the fireplace in our log cabin in the woods northeast of Ottawa. I saw myself approaching each member of my family, beginning with Mary. Taking her face between my hands, I kissed her eyes and then, lightly, her mouth, and looking into her eyes I told her how much I loved her and how much she had made my life better, fuller, and more enjoyable than ever it could have been without her. I thanked her for her love, her generosity, and for being such a wonderful mother to all our children and their families. And I asked her to forgive me for the pain I was currently causing her.
I then went through essentially the same ritual with each of my daughters, in order of age: first Linton, then Ruth, Antonia, and Justine. Then it was the turn of the grandchildren, Grier, Alice, and Henry. Their men received more macho treatment: a squeeze of the shoulder, a look in their eyes, and my thanks for taking such good care of our girls and grandchildren.
This intimate rite was repeated each evening, beginning on the third night at Camp Canada. I found it both emotionally wrenching and deeply comforting.
Once the sun had dipped well below the high wadi wall to the west, darkness would fall fast and we prepared to bed down. I would smooth out our cocoon-shaped side-by-side sleeping positions, removing thorns and stones and checking for scorpions, and then we again shook out our well-toasted blankets, made the bed, and stretched the tarp over the barrels. We’d have a brief conversation—mindful of the relevant rules—and sometimes sleep came quickly, and sometimes it would not.
We really didn’t know much about how our captors organized themselves, other than what we saw from our tree. Usually we were woken up by the sounds of their pre-dawn prayer (for which we did not stand) in total darkness. Many of our jailers then returned to their blankets, widely dispersed throughout the camp, for a little more sleep, while the designated kitchen staff lit fires and began to make the rudimentary breakfast.
They shared all the essential tasks. Everyone—including Jack and his staff, when they were in the camp—took his turn at kitchen duty and everyone stood sentry duty on the basis of an established roster. We would often see Omar One wandering around the camp, working out that roster on a scrap of cardboard.
There were always sentries out, one with a belt-fed PK machine gun on the highest point near at hand, which at Camp Canada was on a small peak atop the cliff face to the southwest, from which the sentry had a clear field of fire over our entire designated area. As well, mobile sentries ranged widely to the north, west, and south. At night, Soumana would be brought to sleep near us and at least two sentries watched the three of us—one static, sitting a few metres from us and usually in the company of one of the children, the other mobile, patrolling a radius of about twenty metres from our position.
Aside from the water and telecommunications sorties, our captors would spend the day repairing trucks or tires, sleeping when coming off sentry duty, or praying, chanting, and reading the Qur’an. When on the move they only very reluctantly travelled in the extreme heat of the day, between about 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. If the journey they had in mind required more travel than could be accomplished before or after that, they found somewhere to wait out the brutal part of the day, but I was never happy when that meant we would be travelling fast across the desert at night.
Extreme worry and fear were enormously debilitating and physically taxing (memory loss, diminished appetite, insomnia). Certainly, they were major contributors to my constipation issues.
But for somebody who has spent most of his professional life analyzing geostrategic challenges, it was also fascinating to be living, talking, and sleeping with Al Qaeda. At one point I said to Louis that if only we knew this nightmare would end well, from a professional point of view this very intimate opportunity to examine militant Islamic fundamentalism—arguably the greatest current threat to international stability—would be a unique and informative experience. I think it was at that point that I decided if I got out in one piece, I would write this book.
Unfortunately, of course, we did not know if it would end well. I admit to a sometimes pessimistic outlook (my wife calls me “Cassandra”—and each time she does, I remind her that although nobody believed her dire prophesies, the youngest daughter of Priam was always right in her predictions), and I just could not convince myself that a happy ending was likely. Therefore, increasingly, I turned my thoughts to the daunting prospect of escape and the unhappy calculations pertaining to rescue scenarios.
Our escape plotting centred on the fundamental issue of establishing our location. Unless we knew where to head and that getting there was feasible, any attempt would be futile and quite possibly fatal. Would we be able to get a reasonable start before we were missed, given 24/7 guards? And, of course, the cost–benefit calculation had to measure the prospect of a successful attempt against the certainty of reprisals which would follow a failed attempt.
We knew we were about a thousand kilometres into the Sahara, north of Gao and at a somewhat greater distance northeast of Tombouctou. I figured that if I could slip away into a moonless night, I could probably walk twenty kilometres before dawn, carrying—if Louis agreed—our communal four-litre plastic jug of water. That would leave only 980 kilometres to go. I knew I would not last long once the sun came up and, unless I left during one of the relatively rare sandstorms, which itself would probably do me in, a child could follow my tracks across the desert. They would accomplish that in a few minutes in one of their trucks.
Then there was the issue of where to head, and the only plan I could come up with was to go south … hundreds and hundreds of kilometres across the Sahara desert. Even if I could find a well-travelled track and a passing vehicle were to pick me up, there was a good possibility that anyone transiting those regions would simply hand me back to AQIM or turn out to be worse abductors. As for retribution for any escape attempt, I had to consider the likelihood that it would be visited upon both me and Louis, whether or not he were to join me in the attempt, and likely to be worse for him in the extremely unlikely event that I succeeded.
If we attempted to escape, we understood that we would, in effect, be breaking the rules of the limited, Middle Ages style of “parole” that had been tacitly accorded us and had won us at least the freedom from being blindfolded and bound and the right to walk for health and sanitary reasons. Losing such privileges would have dire consequences for our psychological and perhaps physical well-being, and would have changed our relationship with our captors—and a number of them would have welcomed such a development. Finally, I was well aware that were I to proceed with an escape attempt without Louis’ agreement and assistance, that decision would also change the relationship between us, one on which I heavily depended.
I realized that the essential escape parameters were unlikely ever to be satisfied, but I never wrote off the possibility that that could change.
My constant, clearly obsessive, running of rescue scenarios risked driving me crazy, but here too I never stopped gaming out how a successful rescue operation might or should go down in whatever circumstances we found ourselves. Obviously some situations offered better opportunities than others, the night only four of our captors were present being dramatically better than when the full complement of thirty was on hand. I must say, though, that I considered the chances of a totally successful rescue only marginally better than those of a successful escape attempt, less for on-site operational reasons and more because I believed that the policy decision making back home would necessarily be too timid and too late.
For a rescue to stand any chance of success, we would have to be pr
ecisely located; moreover, the chances of success stood in direct proportion to the amount of time any potential rescuers would have to observe and understand the conditions of our captivity. But would the political decision making take into account such an operational reality?
Obviously, any rescue mission would depend on our would-be saviours incapacitating anyone with a gun on us before we could be killed as the attack came in. Would our kidnappers shoot us at the first sign of trouble? The answer, I determined, was an unequivocal yes. I am absolutely certain that our guards and sentries had firm orders to dispatch us first—before, that is, they took any measures to defend themselves. Their body language was explicit in this regard.
I often worried that some extraneous event—say, some smuggler blundering into the camp in the middle of the night or one of our captors inadvertently discharging a weapon—would cause us to be shot by some jumpy, hair-triggered sentry.
Some years ago, I’d had something to do with establishing Canada’s outstanding special operations and hostage rescue force, Joint Task Force Two (JTF2). I know and admire them and their remarkable capabilities. While I thought a successful rescue was unlikely, as our situation deteriorated I hoped on occasion that they would come, and I was prepared to accept ever-longer odds on success.
So we lay in the sand, gazing up at more stars than I had ever contemplated, trying to keep hope alive, both anticipating and dreading a rescue attempt as we fixed rendezvous points and now and then went to bed wearing our shoes.
CHAPTER 8
OUR AQIM CAPTORS
God save thee, ancient Mariner,
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!
In most cases, the names with which our abductors introduced themselves were either their noms de guerre or some other fabrication, which may or may not have resembled their actual names. For instance, our masked interrogator (whom we sometimes called “I” so no one would know whom we were discussing) told us his name was Hassan, but when we spoke of him to the others they said they did not know who we were talking about. Despite this, we heard them referring to him as “Hassam,” but we assumed that too was an alias.
We did not speak Arabic and only three of our captors spoke French fluently: Omar One, Ibrahim, and Hassan. Omar Two spoke it reasonably well. He had had a good French secondary education some twenty years previously and although his French was rusty, it came back quickly through conversation with us. Of course, we did have many and, on some occasions, long conversations with others, including Jack and his principal lieutenants, Omar Three, Ahmed, Abdul Rahman, and Jaffer, but these “discussions” always took place through the not necessarily good offices of one or other of the fluent French speakers, acting as interpreter. In sum, the vast bulk of our interaction with the AQIM group that held us was with Omars One and Two and Hassan. While Ibrahim could have acted as an effective interpreter, and on a few occasions did, he was a member of Jack’s staff and, as a result, visited our camps only sporadically.
Four more had a more tenuous grasp of French but it was possible to hold simple conversations with them: Suleiman, young Al Zarqawi, Ahmed, and Adama. To a significantly lesser extent, this was also true with Ali, Al Jabbar, Julabib, and the young “AR2.” All the remainder had some familiarity with French, but they tended to understand it better than they spoke it and, we suspected, far better than many let on. The gentle Nigerian, Obeida, spoke some English but he was discouraged from practising it with us.
While our captors refused to teach us Arabic, Louis and I liked to think that we became good at interpreting what was going on within their group and vis-à-vis us, simply by observing gestures and body language and listening to their tones of voice. Even at the best of times, though, their dialect tended to sound angry to our Western ears.
Some of the main characters among our captors have already been introduced, but some additional observations about those most relevant to this story and their relationships with us are in order.
Jack, the commander, or emir, of the AQIM group that held us, was a natural leader. He exuded understated authority and an ever-present degree of menace, which served to maintain a palpable if reasonably relaxed discipline among his disparate gang. I never heard him raise his voice or upbraid one of his crew but regularly saw him managing and advising them. While they called him Khaled, it was with evident deference, and to us they usually referred to him as “our emir.” He was correct in his behaviour toward us, never warm or friendly but not gratuitously unpleasant either. Others among our guards were habitually aggressive and threatening toward us, but they did not behave this way in Jack’s presence.
There were three Omars in Khaled’s katiba, or battalion, but Louis and I had more to do with Omar One than with all our other captors combined. Omar was a Malian Arab who had travelled widely as an itinerant Islamic preacher. He spoke of having visited France and all the countries of North Africa, as well as India, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, Senegal, and Mauritania.
From various clues, we deduced that Omar was forty-seven. He was a shortish, wiry type, with brown eyes and the full, well-defined lips and cheekbones of a North African Arab. His beard was light and his hands were hard and rough. He was a tireless, relentless worker—always busy—and a seemingly accomplished mechanic. Despite his extensive travels he had no real understanding of the complex, contradictory reality of life in the West, nor did he have any significant intellectual experience outside his narrow Islamist milieu.
While a deeply committed and charismatic preacher, Omar’s extensive knowledge of the fundamental texts of Islam was learned by rote and he seemed to have a superficial, even simplistic, understanding of and little curiosity about the underlying theological issues and historical context. He could quote great swaths of the Qur’an and recite a withering number of hadith. In addition, he was an animated and compelling raconteur, but he was incapable of adapting the circumstances and meaning of those divine words spoken and written fifteen centuries ago to encompass any kind of twenty-first century reality. The words in which he had invested his entire life were precisely those that had been dictated over twenty-three years by the Prophet in the seventh century as he received Allah’s revelations from the Angel Gabriel. Nothing that had occurred since had any relevance either to those words or to Omar’s being, purpose, or direction in life.
Thus, Omar the preacher sought to establish a personal bond with us, as potential recruits to Islam. His preaching was very much oriented to his jihadi vocation. He regularly offered proof of Allah’s support for their cause by citing instances in which angels, clad in radiant white, accompanied the mujahideen in battle, which enabled them to overcome impossible odds. In one case he claimed that nineteen of their brothers had held off a 3,500-strong Algerian mechanized brigade for five days. After killing over 500, they slipped away, leaving behind three fallen martyrs who had ascended to the mujahideen house in paradise. The eyes of the young acolytes would grow bright and round as Omar described such battlefields, which, he breathlessly insisted, had been strewn with the dismembered corpses of the apostate enemy, blackened stumps evident where the avenging angels had smitten off limbs with their fiery swords.
There was no one among our kidnappers with whom we spent more time, nobody whom we knew better than Omar, even if he always remained something of an enigma.
We were his project. Our impression was that he was our advocate vis-à-vis his mujahideen frères, but not in any sense our friend. He led the team that took us and was a full, committed, and enthusiastic participant in our kidnapping. His exclusive concern was that it serve their jihadi purposes. He considered it his Islamic duty to explain and justify their jihad to us. Effectively, he was Khaled’s hostage liaison officer, a responsibility he took very seriously and jealously protected.
Omar offered us slightly different accounts of the Old Testament favourites: of Adam and the duplicitous Eve; of Abraham being catapulted into the massive fire, which consumed only his bonds; of M
oses’ miraculous parting of the Red Sea (into twelve channels, though, unlike Cecil B. DeMille’s version). He read to us Miriam’s story from the Qur’an, which told of the life of her son, the prophet Isa (Jesus). But he aggressively and disdainfully explained why Isa could not be the son of God, that no one could be associated with Allah, and how Isa did not die on any cross.
Joining Louis and me as we watched a meteor shower one evening, Omar explained how thousands of jinn (genies), acting for Satan, would climb upon each other’s shoulders until they reached just below heaven so that they could eavesdrop on the angels’ plans and how, when the jinn were discovered, the angels would hurl bolts of fire, dashing them to the earth, which was what we were seeing in the sky.
Omar spoke rapturously of the delights of paradise. Yes, there were the seventy-two virgins, but I hadn’t been aware of the refinement that they were invisible to each other, I guess to avoid uncomfortable comparisons. There were indeed rivers of milk and honey, and the meanest dwelling was ten thousand times more resplendent than the most magnificent palace on earth. Only the most perfect among the faithful would be able to view the face of God, and it would be so beautiful that they would not blink for forty years.
Omar told us with great reverence and detail what would occur leading up to the Day of Judgment and then on that day itself, of Gabriel’s questioning, on Allah’s behalf, of each part and each organ of the body—none of which, of course, could speak anything but the absolute truth—to determine the individual’s worthiness for admission to paradise. He described the tortures of hell in as meticulous and vivid detail, and again and again he urged us to consider our options very carefully. The Day of Judgment was indeed nigh in his view, and he wanted us to be fully aware of how relevant this ought to be to two weak and elderly unbelievers held by Al Qaeda in the Sahara. If we died without having submitted to Allah, the horrors of hell would be immediate and extreme. To that end he detailed the Five Pillars of Islam and regularly explained the simple act that would make us their Muslim brothers.
A Season in Hell Page 13