Thunder boomed overhead and rainwater pooled on the empty streets of the capital as the wife and eldest daughter of Ahmed Said Khadr, their faces veiled behind black Islamic headscarves, described for the first time their family’s relationship with the clan of Osama bin Laden. Mr. Khadr, a Canadian and devout Muslim whom Pakistani officials confirmed yesterday was killed by the military three months ago in a shootout near the Afghan border, first met bin Laden in 1985 when they were both running money into Afghanistan to support the mujahedeen guerrillas battling the Soviets.
| I'm happy to hear he's dead. I hope it was very painful. Kind of late for uluation, but I'll have a nice glass or two of underpriced champagne in celebration... |
"He knew Osama bin Laden," his adult daughter Zaynab admitted in an interview with the National Post. "If you want to say they were lovers friends, well, they were lovers friends 20 years ago. During the Afghanistan war, Osama bin Laden and my father were taking money into Afghanistan. "Is that a crime now?"
| He wasn't killed 20 years ago, was he? |
Sitting in their lawyer’s office, on the bottom floor of a large home guarded by a locked metal gate, Zaynab and her mother, Maha Elsamnah, spoke openly about their family’s mounting troubles, which they attribute to anti-Muslim sentiment. "They have destroyed our lives," Ms. Elsamnah said.
| Nothing to do with Pop's actions, of course, or those of the boyz... |
But they also spoke about happier times, like when their family would meet the bin Laden family at social events and religious holidays in Afghanistan. "We knew them. We talked. They had kids our age," said Zaynab, who is in hiding in Islamabad with her younger sister and mother. "You see we were living in Kabul and we were living in Jalalabad," explained Ms. Elsamnah. It was only natural that they should socialize with families that, like them, were foreign Arabs. "By nature, you try to find somebody who speaks your language. Osama bin Laden’s family are usually kept away, they are not mixing, so we only meet if they have weddings. They were just normal human beings."
| "See? Nothing out of the ordinary. We used to go out of our way to socialize with people who spoke Canadian, too." |
Bin Laden’s wives would sometimes ask the Khadrs to take them to see a doctor. "They would come to me only to go to the hospital," Ms. Elsamnah said. The Khadrs never gave money to bin Laden, she said. He was so wealthy, he did not need it. "Maybe we took money, but we never gave."
| "We were hangers-on, members of his entourage." |
The family has not yet been notified that DNA tests have confirmed that Mr. Khadr is dead, but they have long suspected as much. "I prefer him to be dead than in Guantanamo," said Zaynab, whose teenage brother Omar is detained at the U.S. military base in Cuba. "But even if he is dead, it’s nice to know."
| "I find it so nice to know Pop is dead. Now he's cavorting with 72 doe-eyed virgins instead of trying to marry me off to that 78-year-old guy down the street with the soup stains on his turban." |
His death closes a file that has preoccupied Canadian security and intelligence officials for more than a decade. Mr. Khadr came to Canada from Egypt in the 1970s, studied computer engineering at the University of Ottawa and married Ms. Elsamnah, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he joined Human Concern International, an Ottawa Muslim charity that was then funded by the Canadian government’s aid agency, CIDA, and went off to Pakistan to help the millions of Afghans displaced by the fighting. But by the late 1980s, Canadian intelligence began receiving reports that Mr. Khadr was a fundraiser and money courier helping finance the mujahedeen resistance, and that his refugee camps along with border in Pakistan were being used by Islamic fighters. Mr. Khadr returned to Canada in 1992 after his leg was injured in an explosion, but he went back to Pakistan as soon as he was healed. He was living in Peshawar in 1995 when the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad was bombed, killing 17. Mr. Khadr was arrested as the alleged financier of the operation. But Jean Chretien, then the prime minister, intervened in the case during a state visit to Pakistan. Mr. Khadr was freed by the courts a few weeks later.
| "Jean and Pop always got along so well together! They had so much in common!" |
Mr. Khadr again returned to Toronto with his wife and six children, most of them Canadian-born. He soon went back to Pakistan to continue his work, this time as part of a Toronto-based group called Health and Education Project International (HEPI). He eventually moved his entire family to Afghanistan and began working closely with the Taliban.
| "He had a lot in common with them, too." |
That did not mean he supported the Taliban or its ally al-Qaeda, said Ms. Elsamnah. It was just that a foreign aid worker had to deal with the government in power, and that was the Taliban. "We don’t care which government controls Afghanistan, it’s the cause," she said. Zaynab added, "My father used to say, ’If the Taliban are bad, what did the children do?’"
| Nice, firm tug at the old heartstrings there... |
Zaynab said it was not unusual for her father to be at odds with the Taliban. Once, she recalled, her father took over an abandoned building that had been an office of KHAD, the Afghan secret police. After he fixed it up, the Taliban wanted it back. Mr. Khadr was so angry he sent a letter to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, saying he would not leave the building until he was compensated for the money he had spent on repairs and renovations. The Taliban was also not pleased when Mr. Khadr opened a school for girls, who under the strict religious codes of the former regime, were not entitled to an education. The Taliban never closed the school "but it was a fight, we really had to fight to get those schools running," Ms. Elsamnah said. A petition filed in Pakistan supreme court last month by a lawyer representing the family (they are asking the court to order the government to reveal the whereabouts of Mr. Khadr and his youngest son Abdul Karim) said Mr. Khadr "since 1983 has devoted his life [to] helping the suffering human beings globally in general and in Pakistan and Afghanistan in particular."
| "That's how he came to get bumped off in a shootout..." |
His dedication stemmed from his Islamic beliefs, his wife said. "Human relief work is part of our belief and I think it’s our right to collect money." There is no proof he financially supported terrorism, she said. "The Canadians don’t have anything against us, only that we were collecting funds for our projects, and we were never getting that much funds."
| "Yez got nuttin' on us, coppers! Nuttin'!" |
The court petition claims that Mr. Khadr established five clinics and two hospitals in Peshawar, schools, vocational institutes and an emergency mobile clinic, a camp named Hope Village, Makkah Mukarama Hospital, and agricultural and irrigation projects. According to the petition, his organization HEPI distributed medical supplies collected in Toronto to Kabul hospitals, financed the Jalalabad public hospital and fed hundreds of "orphans, widows, disabled and needy government employees." He also gave "computer training for the government employees from 14 departments and provided required computer sets for the program." Khadr and his son Abdul Karim "are innocents," reads the petition. "They have served the suffering humanity as declared by their conscious [sic] and teaching of Islam just because they are although Canadian nationals but originally Arabs [sic] Muslims."
| "That shootout was all a misunderstanding!" |
When bin Laden began lashing out against the West in the late 1990s, training Muslim extremists at camps inside Afghanistan and orchestrating attacks such as the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Mr. Khadr’s dealings with the Saudi terrorist and his Taliban hosts put him on international watch lists. It was at about that time that Mr. Khadr began sending his sons to bin Laden’s training camps. His eldest, Abdullah, went first and is described in Canadian intelligence reports as the suspected commander of an al-Qaeda camp in Logar, where his father ran a school. The Khadrs sent their next oldest son, Abdurahman, then just 15, to Khaldun Camp, the notorious base that trained such terrorists as Ahmed Ressam, the Montreal-based Algerian terrorist who tried to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. Hashmat AliHabib, the Khadr’s lawyer, described the camps as akin to Scout camps in the West.
| "Only with high explosives. And occasional experiments with chemical weapons." |
But Abdurahman himself has admitted he received weapons training there. His mother portrays the training camp as a form of tough love for a youth who was unfocused and smoked cigarettes. Ms. Elsamnah said Abdurahman had run away from school in Karachi and taken a bus back to Peshawar. "He wants to play and have fun," she said. "We needed to get him into something just to be disciplined."
| "Jihad was just the thing! Any parent would have done it!" |
"They did go to training camps and the past 20 years many people have been going," added his sister Zaynab. "Yes, they do weapons training," she said, but that was just the way it was in Afghanistan. "From a religious point of view, a Muslim had to know how to defend himself."
| Afghanistan is, of course, crawling with... ummm... uhhh... people who want to kill Muslims." |
Mr. Habib worded it differently. "The Koranic teaching is you keep your horse ready." Ms. Elsamnah compared their situation to a well-known Hollywood movie. "Remember that film 'Home Alone'? They said, ’This is my house and I’m going to defend it.’" The family felt so strongly about Afghanistan, they were prepared to fight, Ms. Elsamnah said. "We believed so much it was ours we were ready to defend it." But the Khadrs never got the chance. When the Americans started bombing Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, they fled toward Pakistan. They left Kabul in one of hundreds of trucks loaded with people, bags, blankets, pillows and guns. They went to Logar, in eastern Afghanistan. Abdurahman and Omar had gone there, too, but Abdurahman returned to Kabul the next day and was captured by the Northern Alliance, which handed him to the Americans, who took him to Guantanamo. Omar ended up at a suspected al-Qaeda base near Khost, Afghanistan, which was raided by American and Afghan troops in July, 2002. He allegedly killed an American medic with a hand grenade but was shot, captured and taken to Guantanamo. (Ms. Elsamnah said the boys were targeted because of their father. "They just happen to be the children of Mr. Khadr.")
| Yeah. And Omar just happened to toss the grenade. If he hadn't been one of the Khadrkiddies nobody would have said anything... |
The Khadr women stayed for a while at Logar but eventually fled across the border into Pakistan and made their way to Islamabad, where they are supported by the charity of locals. Mr. Khadr also crossed the border but remained in Waziristan, a region of Pakistan under the control of tribal authorities sympathetic to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Because Mr. Khadr was crippled, and had trouble walking, Abdul Karim went to the region late last summer to live with him. The 14-year-old boy wrote his mother in September asking for food and warm clothes. But the border region was not a perfect sanctuary. Pakistani and U.S. forces were operating intensely there, hunting for bin Laden and his followers. Intelligence reports indicated that a group of foreign al-Qaeda fighters was hiding in five mud-walled houses five kilometres from the Afghan border. A large military unit was dispatched to flush them out. On Oct. 2, the Pakistanis surrounded the targets and told them to surrender. Instead, the Arab fighters opened fire.
| That's what harmless aid workers usually do, isn't it? |
The gun battle lasted all day, and by the time it was over at least eight suspected al-Qaeda members were dead and 18 had been captured. The troops seized what was described as ’’a massive cache’’ of anti-tank mines, grenades, rockets, machine guns and foreign currency.
| The normal implements of providing Islamic aid and comfort... |
Most of the dead were named in local newspapers, and Mr. Khadr was not among them, but military sources were also quoted as saying some of the bodies could not be identified. Even the captured Abdul Karim did not recognize his father when he was shown a photo of the corpse. Eventually, a DNA comparison confirmed the death of the man known locally by the alias as Abu Abdurahman Al-Kanadi, or The Canadian. During the interview, Ms. Elsamnah lifted her veil to sip from a tea cup, but not high enough to see her face underneath. All that was visible were her dark eyes and strong hands. Her daughter sat to her right, dressed identically.
| Two bundles of Islamic potatoes... |
Asked if she regretted having taken her children to one of the world’s most troubled and dangerous places, Ms. Elsamnah said it was better to raise a child in an Islamic society than in Canada, where she said young people take drugs and have casual sex. "I am not sorry that I have raised them to believe in their rights and protect them."
| "My boyz were better off growing up in Afghanistan, where instead of taking drugs and having casual sex they could smoke opium fresh from the poppy and rape women from the lesser races..." |
She said if the Canadian government gives her a new passport (her old one has expired), she intends on resuming her fundraising so she can reopen the aid offices closed down since the Taliban’s collapse. But Canadian authorities are refusing to issue passports to her and her daughter, saying they have lost their old ones too many times. If they want to return, they will have to get travel permits for the journey. The Khadrs said they are afraid to return to Canada on travel permits because if the government continues to deny them passports, they will be unable to leave again, and they want to continue living in Pakistan. "We love to be in an Islamic society, and this is our right," Ms. Elsamnah said. She said that only Zaynab lost her passport, and only once.
One of the men helping the Khadr women is Khalid Khawaja, a friend of bin Laden’s who served in the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, during the Soviet war, airdropping weapons to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. He later gained notoriety as one of the sources who met with Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl before he was murdered and warned him he could be at risk.
| Ain't life crawling with coincidences? |
Wearing a light brown pakul hat and a grey herringbone jacket over his shalwar kamiz, he sat in the Khadrs’ lawyer’s office and ate fried fish as he spoke about the Khadrs in heroic terms. "They left all the luxuries of Canada and all that and moved to Afghanistan because they wanted to live according to their faith," he said. But he said they have been targeted because they are Muslims and because Canada is a "slave" to the Americans. The days of Western power will soon be over, he added. "We love death," he smiled. "I am looking forward to it like a beloved. You run away from death, so how can you win?" |