I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

  He took out a piece of paper and wrote something on it. “You will go in the morning and come back the same day, right?” he asked. I nodded. He folded the paper and gave it to me. “Whenever you reach a checkpoint, show them this paper.” He then turned to a man who was among the others sitting at the far end of the room. “Hassan, call Najaf, tell them a journalist called Souad Mekhennet will be visiting. She and her team should get any help and support they need.”

  I was stunned by how easy it had been, and I thanked him.

  “You know what you are doing is dangerous?” he asked. “Even going to Najaf now is dangerous. There could be bombs. Why are you doing it?”

  “Because it’s my work.”

  “No. You could have become an arts writer, a lawyer, or anything else, but you’re going into the most difficult areas in the Islamic world, risking your life.” He stopped, and I saw that his eyes were wet. He seemed moved. “You have chosen a very hard life. May Allah bring you a man in your life who will be worth your big heart and searching mind. That’s what I am wishing for you.”

  I felt a mix of sadness and vulnerability. He had raised questions I myself couldn’t answer. Most of my colleagues were married or at least had steady partners. I had my parents, but that was different. Lots of people also dated in Baghdad. But I wasn’t interested in casual relationships. I felt that I might want to get married to somebody of Arab descent, and I knew that reputation was everything. If my Iraqi translators or drivers got the impression that I was one of these women sneaking around the Hamra Hotel with a man, they would lose all respect for me. I was a German reporter, but in their eyes I was first and foremost an Arab woman.

  In the car Abu Aara, Abu Ali, and I read what the sayyid had written: “Souad Mekhennet is a journalist and she is a descendant of the Prophet’s family. As such, she and those with her should receive full protection and be treated with the highest respect.” It was dated and signed and bore his party’s seal.

  And it was incredible how well the paper worked. While other reporters had to park their cars far from the Imam Ali mosque, we were allowed to park right in front. All the militiamen and mosque personnel who read the paper went out of their way to help us.

  I didn’t know what to expect in Najaf. There was an immense energy in the city, and the closer we got to the shrine of Imam Ali, the more people I saw who were crying for this man, one of my forefathers. It seemed that they felt deeply pained by Ali’s death. Seeing the mourners’ devotion, I realized how much they were willing to do for anyone who was preaching about or asking for something in the name of Imam Ali or his son Imam Hussein.

  I spoke to some younger men outside the shrine, asking what Imam Ali and Imam Hussein meant to them. “I would die for them and kill whoever insults them,” one told me. “I would give my blood.”

  It would be easy, I thought, for Muslim leaders to use this emotional attachment for their own political benefit. They could justify any action in the name of Ali or Hussein. I also understood in a new way that the descendants of the Prophet’s family had a grave responsibility to stop this from happening.

  * * *

  IN MY CONTINUING attempts to understand the roots of the Sunni-Shia conflict, one of the people I most wanted to speak to was Aquila al-Hashimi, a prominent Shia politician and one of only three women on the Iraqi Governing Council. Under Saddam, she had been involved in the United Nations’ oil-for-food program on behalf of the Iraqi government. She had a doctorate in French literature from the Sorbonne and had sometimes served as Tariq Aziz’s French translator. Before coming to Iraq, I’d read many news stories about Shia being treated like second-class citizens under Saddam, and I wondered, if that was true, how a woman like al-Hashimi could have risen to such a powerful position in the government. Ahmad Chalabi and others were saying that everyone in Saddam’s party had to be purged, but if al-Hashimi had succeeded under that system, things must have been more nuanced than we were hearing. I wanted to ask her what it had been like to live as a Shia under Saddam and what she thought of the de-Ba’athification plan.

  “Please come and visit,” she said when I reached her. “There is too much going wrong here.” Her voice was friendly, and I could tell by her English that she was highly educated. “I’m worried there will be lots of bloodshed. I fear for the unity of my country.”

  She invited me to lunch the following afternoon. When I called in the morning to confirm the time, a man picked up. He was crying and his voice sounded broken. I heard women screaming in the background.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  I told him I was a journalist and had a meeting with Aquila al-Hashimi that afternoon.

  I could hear him breathing fast. “They shot her.” A carful of gunmen had attacked al-Hashimi’s car, and she’d been severely wounded. I hung up the phone in shock. I later learned that al-Hashimi had been shot in the stomach and leg. For several days, she lay in a coma in an American military hospital. As I waited for her to recover, I worked on other stories, including one for NPR about rising violence in the city. We wanted to gauge the concern of young Iraqis, so I interviewed some of the young men listening to Iraqi pop music around the corner from our hotel. While I chatted with them, a man with light brown hair came and stood near us. He introduced himself as “Mustafa” and said he was Palestinian.

  We started talking about music, but the conversation shifted to politics. Mustafa was very angry about what had happened in Iraq. “This country was so good to me and my family,” he said. “This is all part of a bigger plan to cut the Middle East into pieces and feed us to the Iranians.”

  Mustafa said he had worked in the security sector under Saddam, but since the security forces had been dissolved, he and others had nothing to do except meet up and spill out their hatred against America, Iran, and Britain. “We felt sorry for the people who were killed in the 9/11 attacks, but now I think this was all just a plot by the Americans so they could have an excuse to invade Iraq,” he said.

  He asked me where I was staying. Given the lack of security and my experience with the tribal chief in Mosul, I didn’t tell anyone where I lived. I apologized to Mustafa, telling him that my parents had taught me not to share such private information with strangers.

  “Fine, fine. Just tell me, are you staying at this hotel?” he pointed to a nearby hotel where the NBC crews stayed.

  I told him I wasn’t.

  Afterward, when I got into my car, I told Abu Ali to drive around in case someone was following us.

  The next morning I was awakened by a giant explosion. My room was on the first floor, and my bed wasn’t far from a window. The impact forced the window open, and I fell out of bed. Whether it was some instinctive reaction or an effect of the blast, I don’t know.

  I lay on the floor wondering if someone was going to burst in and drag me away. Kidnappings in Iraq sometimes worked that way: attackers would use explosives to blast open the gates before coming inside. I could hear my heart beating and my own deep breathing. Shaking, I stood up, put on my clothes, and grabbed my satellite phone and notebook. I shouted Guy’s name and heard him shouting mine. Out in the hall, we saw the hotel workers with shocked, white faces. “Are you okay?” I screamed. “Is everything okay?”

  They told me there had been an explosion at the hotel where the NBC crews stayed. We ran outside and around the corner and saw broken windows and lots of smoke. People poured out into the streets, and soon all the reporters got on their phones. I stared in amazement at the burning hotel. Then I turned and saw the man from the night before, Mustafa, standing nearby. He was watching the scene, and when he saw me, he nodded and smiled. I suddenly remembered him asking me where I was staying and mentioning the hotel that had just been bombed. I walked toward him, but he stopped smiling and shook his head as if to say, don’t.

  A white car stopped in front of him. He got in, and the car drove away.

  I talked to people from NBC and learned that at least one man, a Somali guard, h
ad been killed. After finishing my report for NPR, I did a quick interview with a German radio station. Back in Germany, my professor Lothar Brock heard it and emailed to say that he was worried about me. My voice had been trembling, he wrote, and I seemed to be in shock. I hadn’t realized how traumatized I was.

  That afternoon, I learned more bad news: Aquila al-Hashimi was dead. I had already missed the funeral, but I wanted to visit her family and offer my condolences. When I arrived at the house, a young boy pointed me toward a room.

  I saw women beating themselves and crying—al-Hashimi’s cousins, aunts, and other relatives, wearing abayas. In the center of the room sat an old woman with long gray hair who seemed to be in a trance. She cried and screamed, pulled her hair, and beat her chest. Her undershirt had fallen off, and her skin was red from the impact of her fists. It was as if she were trying to beat out the pain. I knew that this mourning ritual was part of Shia tradition, but I’d never seen it up close before. “That is Aquila’s mother,” a young woman told me. Then she asked who I was. “You can’t be here,” she said after I told her. “This is only for the family.” I apologized and left quickly.

  As I climbed numbly into the car, it occurred to me that for the second time in Iraq, I’d come too late. When they’d taken the former diplomat al-Ani, I’d been convinced that someone wanted to stop me from getting the truth. I’d also felt responsible: maybe someone had been listening to our conversation, and that was why he’d disappeared. Either way, I’d never been able to write about what he told me. The people who wanted to silence him had won.

  With al-Hashimi’s death, they had won again, but this time it felt even worse. As we drove back to the hotel, I began to tremble. I had a very bad feeling that we in the West were destroying the structure of a country that had not been a democracy but that had offered a place to a woman like al-Hashimi, a Shia, who was able to study and enter politics. Maybe it wasn’t a system we liked, but we, the decision makers, were now destroying it and destroying all those people, intelligent people like her who came from diverse backgrounds and who should have had a role in the future of their country. I felt that her killing was another step toward disaster.

  I couldn’t get the image of al-Hashimi’s mother out of my head. She reminded me of my grandmother in Morocco. The noise of the beating, of the moment when her fists hit her chest, echoed in my head. I couldn’t feel her pain, but I could feel anger that we had let this happen. In the car, the sound of the beating stayed in my head, and the anger knotted my stomach. I leaned my head against the car window and cried.

  4

  A Call from Khaled el-Masri

  Germany and Algeria, 2004–6

  Iraq changed me. When I returned home to Frankfurt toward the end of 2003, I carried with me the sound of bombings, the smell of burned flesh, and the screaming of men and women looking for their relatives. On New Year’s Eve, I refused to join my family and visiting friends on the balcony to watch fireworks because the sound reminded me too much of exploding bombs.

  I didn’t feel like celebrating what had happened the previous year or what lay ahead. The lines of hatred between Sunni and Shia were deepening, the war and the occupation of Iraq had become a great public relations opportunity for Al Qaeda, and the murderous behavior of some of the Shia militias in Iraq depressed me. Within a few months, the world would learn of U.S. soldiers torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere through a trove of terrifyingly casual snapshots captured by soldiers who seemed to think they were on vacation in an exotic land where morality and human decency didn’t exist. These scandals reinforced my sense that the West, particularly the United States, had ceded the moral high ground it had once so proudly occupied and was now operating with impunity in what its leaders called “the shadows.”

  “People must know, they must understand, that the war in Iraq will result in more hatred, more threats against Americans and Europeans,” I told Lothar Brock, my international relations professor, during lunch at the university canteen.

  “You must heal,” he said, with concern in his eyes. “Don’t go back to war zones. I’m sure there are enough stories to follow outside of Iraq.” He urged me to devote more time to my studies.

  In 2004, I left the Washington Post to work for the New York Times’s investigative unit. Again, I was on contract, and I was also allowed to work for ZDF, a German public broadcaster that was one of the biggest TV channels in Europe. I was entering an important phase at the university, and my professors were putting extra emphasis on homework and finals. Soon I would begin work on my thesis, the final step before receiving my degree.

  Brock, who was also my thesis adviser, insisted that I focus on a topic unrelated to terrorism. He wanted me to write about the water shortage in the Middle East. He suggested I focus on Jordan, where Prince Hassan bin Talal, the brother of the late King Hussein, was deeply involved in water security issues.

  I tried to concentrate on my classes and research, but I was still closely following the news from Iraq and becoming increasingly interested in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and his network. Between reading chapters in my academic books, I monitored the news from the Middle East, switching among Al Jazeera, CNN, and the BBC.

  One afternoon I received a call on my cell from a number I didn’t recognize. I picked up and heard a low, shaky voice speaking in Arabic: “Are you the journalist Souad Mekhennet?”

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “My name is Khaled el-Masri, and I was kidnapped by the CIA.”

  I moved the phone away from my ear and looked at the number again. It must be some crank, I thought. “Excuse me? I don’t understand. Who gave you my number?”

  He named a source of mine in Germany, an older man who was under investigation for ties to terrorism. Then his story tumbled out, incoherently at first: “I was on my way to Macedonia. They arrested me. They took me on a flight to Afghanistan. I was tortured.”

  “Don’t say these things on the phone,” I told him. “Listen, Mr. el-Masri, where are you? Can I call you back? I think it’s better if we meet in person.”

  I told him to buy a new phone, along with a prepaid SIM card, and call me back so we could set an appointment. In those days, you could still buy a prepaid SIM card in Germany without having to register it under your name. “They” had taken everything he had, he said, but he would find a way to get a new phone and a prepaid card so that we could set an appointment. He began to cry. “My family’s gone,” he said between sobs. “Did they do something to my family?”

  I had no idea if el-Masri was for real, but I wanted to meet with him in person. I called my editor in New York, Matthew Purdy. He was skeptical. “These are big accusations,” he said.

  I agreed, but I convinced him to send me to Ulm, a city of about 120,000 in southern Germany, where el-Masri lived. Perhaps because I was still relatively new and untested at the Times, Matt sent another reporter along with me. We met el-Masri at a train station coffee shop. His dark shoulder-length hair was streaked with gray, and his hazel eyes were bloodshot and ringed with dark circles. We sat down and ordered coffee.

  He asked if we would mind him smoking. “I’m a little nervous,” he said.

  He told us that he was forty-one years old and of Lebanese descent. He was married with four young sons, and he had worked as a used car salesman. In late December 2003, after an argument with his wife, he’d boarded a tourist bus to the Macedonian capital, Skopje, where he planned to take a weeklong vacation. When the bus reached the Serbia-Macedonia border, guards confiscated his passport and prevented him from reboarding the bus. He said he was taken to a small, dark room and accused of being a terrorist.

  “They asked a lot of questions—if I have relations with Al Qaeda, al-Haramain, the Islamic Brotherhood,” el-Masri told us, pausing between sentences. “I kept saying no, but they did not believe me.” Al-Haramain was an Islamic charity suspected of funneling money to terrorist causes, and it
was said to be affiliated with Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban.

  After twenty-three days, the Macedonian authorities turned him over to officials he believed were from the United States. His captors hauled him onto a plane bound for Kabul, Afghanistan, he said. Once there, he was chained and subjected to a series of beatings. He was stripped and photographed naked, then plied with drugs as his interrogators repeated a barrage of questions about his alleged ties to Al Qaeda. After a month-long hunger strike, he was blindfolded and flown to northern Albania, where he was allowed to walk across the border into Macedonia, reclaim his passport and possessions, and fly back to Germany. Altogether, he said he had spent five months in captivity. He had not been charged with any crime.

  It was a stunning tale, and el-Masri trembled as he told it. I’d seen people in Iraq who were in shock after they’d witnessed bombings or been released from prison. El-Masri’s demeanor reminded me of theirs. I wasn’t sure if his story was true, but I was convinced that something bad had happened to him. However, my American colleague, another Times reporter, didn’t buy it.

  El-Masri called me later that evening. “I think your colleague didn’t believe me,” he said.

  I told him that we were just doing our jobs. These accusations were very stark, and we would need evidence. I said I needed time to find more leads, and I asked about his plans. He would contact a lawyer, he said. “I want the people who did this to me to be brought to justice. I want them to acknowledge what they have done to me and others.”

  I still had doubts. What interest would the CIA have in kidnapping el-Masri? He mentioned that he had prayed at the Multikulturhaus, an Islamic center in Neu-Ulm that was frequented by radicals and closely monitored by the German security services. He also was friendly with Reda Seyam, the creator of the video of mujahideen beheading Serbs that I’d watched as a teenager at my cousin’s house in Morocco.