I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

  Between trips to Bahrain, I had met with several intelligence sources from Europe and the United States, many of whom believed that al-Khawaja, the hunger striker, and his deputy and other leaders inside the opposition movement had ties to Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, though there wasn’t any clear evidence of direct Iranian involvement in the protests. A European intelligence official also linked Bahraini opposition figures to Ahmad Chalabi, the Shia activist who had helped lead the United States into war with Iraq.

  I worried that this information might have been planted. “Is this coming from the Bahrainis? Or any other Arab service?” I asked.

  “No, this is our own research,” he said. “Bahrain is becoming a playground for Saudi Arabia and Iran.”

  I told him that what he was telling me was contrary to public opinion. “The Bahrain Center for Human Rights has received international awards even in Europe,” I pointed out. “Those people are sitting on the boards of renowned international organizations, and you are saying they have ties to declared terrorist organizations and shady figures? How is this possible?”

  It wasn’t his job to explain politics, he said. He was just an intelligence official.

  Online, I found an NPR piece reporting that Chalabi was supporting and advising the Bahraini opposition. The piece suggested that Chalabi was interested in Bahrain because it could become part of a “Shiite crescent” that included Iran and postwar Iraq. But Chalabi said that accusing him of sectarian aims was like “accusing Martin Luther King of being a racist. Is he a racist? He stood up for the rights of the blacks because they were oppressed as blacks. These people are oppressed as Shia. So when they stand up for their rights, it is not sectarianism, it is because they are oppressed as Shia.”

  But the focus right now was on al-Khawaja out of concern that he would die from his hunger strike. Through an intermediary, I requested an interview with his daughter Zainab. My meeting with her took place upstairs in the mall that housed the Costa Coffee Shop. The shopping center was owned by a prominent Shia supporter of the opposition, and on this day it was nearly empty; it had been a site of violent clashes and had lost business as a result. Zainab, then twenty-eight years old, was very articulate, but I had the distinct feeling she’d memorized her lines.

  The conversation began cordially. She told me the same thing she’d told all the other media outlets about her father’s situation. One could get the impression he might die at any minute.

  I had watched many of the interviews she and her sister had given on networks such as CNN, the BBC, and Al Jazeera English. It sounded as if they were standing up for “peaceful protest” and nonviolent resistance, but they never denounced the protesters’ violence, either in interviews or online.

  In fact, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights didn’t talk at all about how the protesters had assaulted Asian expatriates, or about the Sunni students from the University of Bahrain who had been attacked by demonstrators with iron sticks and had lain in pools of blood while others were still beating them, as had been documented in the Bassiouni report.

  “Why is it that I don’t read anything about those cases on your website?” I asked. Zainab called the violence “a reaction.”

  “We don’t want peace over freedom,” she told me. “We will choose freedom over peace. We will go on with our fight for self-determination and democracy. But if things continue the way they are, I expect the situation to become more violent.”

  “Are you calling for people to stop attacking police and to stop throwing stones and Molotov cocktails?”

  “No, I will not stand against the victims’ reaction. It really amazes me when people ask if I will condemn it. I will not.” In a way, she reminded me of the ex-rapper Cuspert, who had also said that he was on the side of the underdog. Like him, she seemed to have taken that argument too far, to a point where she believed that only her views were legitimate.

  I asked if she had any affiliation with Hezbollah or Chalabi, and if her father had told her about any military training he had received in Iran. She said she had never heard him talk about that; she believed this was something the government was saying about him.

  Der Spiegel ’s policy on publishing a Q-and-A was that the interviewee had to authorize the transcript. I hated this rule. It ran counter to the principles I had learned working for the Washington Post and the New York Times, where this is not done. The rule at those papers was simply to record the interview. If the subject wanted, she could bring a recorder of her own, and if she had complaints, she could use her recording to support them.

  When Zainab al-Khawaja saw the transcript, she called me. She said she felt I had tricked her. It was clearly not the kind of interview she had expected. But since it was exactly what she’d said, I didn’t understand her surprise.

  “It’s my job to be critical of all sides,” I told her. “I’m not an activist.”

  She asked what would happen if she objected to the interview. I told her that this was a decision for the editors, but that, for my part, I found it difficult to understand how someone who spent so much time promoting human rights and press freedom would now support what seemed like censorship to me.

  She said she would get back to me.

  My editor was also upset by the interview. He said it lacked empathy. “Her father is dying, and we are putting her in the hot seat,” he told me. He decided to cut the interview severely. I sent Zainab the edited version, and she approved it.

  Shortly thereafter, another story ran that drew the family’s ire. The government had granted Frank Gardner, a veteran BBC Middle East correspondent, exclusive access to Abdulhadi al-Khawaja while he was in prison. Like everyone else, Gardner thought al-Khawaja was dying based on the interviews his family had been giving. On May 1, 2012, Gardner reported that he had visited al-Khawaja in the hospital.

  “We went into the hospital room expecting to see a man at death’s door, lying hooked up to drips,” Gardner wrote to me recently in an email. “Instead Mr. al-Khawaja sprang up from doing his prayers and greeted us wearing a tracksuit. He seemed lively and alert, and we conducted a five-minute verbal interview before the Bahraini authorities closed it down and told us to leave.”

  Although al-Khawaja was thin, Gardner recalled, he “was clearly not at death’s door, this was only a partial hunger strike. In fact, when the minders weren’t looking, one of the hospital staff showed us a photo on his phone of Mr. al-Khawaja tucking into a sizable meal in his room.”

  Gardner’s story contradicted the story that the family had been telling. Al-Khawaja’s wife was especially furious. “She took to social media to accuse us of spouting whatever story the Bahraini authorities told us to write,” Gardner recalled, noting that he had interviewed the wife and included her views in his story. “I found it depressing,” he went on, “that a woman who we had devoted some considerable time to interviewing, letting her get her viewpoint across uninterrupted,” should be so angry when things didn’t go her way and, he said, “we didn’t perpetuate a false myth.”

  I would get the answers to some of my questions about Iran’s involvement in Bahrain more than two years later, when I was invited on a brief trip to Iran under the auspices of the Koerber Foundation, a German NGO whose work focuses on international dialogue for social change. The trip involved several days of roundtable discussions with Iranian officials. One night, we were invited to dinner at the German ambassador’s residence, a beautiful villa with an amazing garden.

  I was seated between high-level members of the Iranian and German Foreign Ministries. “You know that Bahrain used to be part of Persia?” the Iranian said. “It’s very important to us.” He went on to say that “the suffering of Bahrainis is of great concern to my countrymen and -women.” And then he added that Iran had asked the Bahraini opposition to participate in elections some years earlier, a revelation that surprised the German diplomat seated on the other side of me.

  “They would not have done it if we hadn’t p
ushed them,” the Iranian said.

  “So they do actually have influence on the opposition?” the German diplomat whispered to me in German. “When the opposition visited us, they denied any links to Iran. Unbelievable.”

  The Iranian knew every main opposition member by name. He was “so glad,” he said, that human rights organizations were following the abuses in Bahrain so closely. He also knew the al-Khawaja family and said they had many supporters in Iran, calling them “great fighters for human rights.”

  It was unsettling to hear him talk about human rights given the killing and imprisonment of protesters in Iran. I decided to press him on this point. “So when Assad or al-Maliki—both of whom, I believe, are backed by your country—commit human rights abuses, it doesn’t seem to be such a big issue. Is it because they are mostly hurting Sunnis?” I asked. “But then, in the case of Bahrain, your newspapers are full of articles, and so are the Iranian-backed channels like Press TV.”

  He didn’t answer me.

  In the summer of 2012, things began to change at Der Spiegel. The people who had hired me got new jobs, and the man who had told me years earlier that I might be mistaken for a Taliban spy was promoted. I felt as if I was in the wrong movie. It sure wasn’t All the President’s Men.

  I was grateful soon after to learn that I’d been awarded a fellowship at Harvard. I happily set off for Cambridge, where I spent a year researching long-term strategies of terrorist organizations since the outbreak of the so-called Arab Spring. I also worked with Nick Kulish to finish our book The Eternal Nazi, which was published in 2014.

  But the truth was that I was in a deep crisis over my profession. Being a journalist of Muslim descent who helped track down the true story of a Nazi doctor accused of hideous crimes against the Jews made me fodder for rumors and accusations. The Arab Spring had also had a profound effect on what counted as international reporting, with one online outlet after another starting up. “Citizen journalism” seemed to be the new big thing, but I worried about what such activist reporting would do to what we call “truth.” If readers and viewers got used to a kind of journalism that told them only one side of the story, how would their views of the world ever change?

  What would people like Maureen Fanning say? Would someone else ask again why no one had reported that the Arab Spring was turning formerly stable countries into security threats? That in fact it was contributing to the sectarian rift that was increasingly dividing the Arab world? That some of those who claimed they were on the streets for democracy did not share the democratic values of the West?

  Soon after finishing the fellowship in 2013, I was in Dubai having dinner with my brother and some friends when I received a call from my sister Hannan. I realized that she had tried several times before, but the restaurant was so loud that I hadn’t heard the phone ringing.

  “The special unit of the police was just here,” she told me. “They said there is a threat against your life.”

  At first I thought it was a bad joke, but her voice sounded anxious.

  “I swear I’m not joking. They said they have to speak to you immediately and left their number. You have to call them right away.”

  I couldn’t understand what was happening. Who was threatening me and why?

  I called the woman in charge of the German police branch that specialized in terrorism, and she explained that her colleagues from a different police branch and the intelligence services had asked her to immediately get in touch with me. “A very reliable source told us that there might be an imminent attempt to kidnap or even kill you. There is some talk about a Daniel Pearl scenario.”

  I was beside myself. “Who? Why? Where is this coming from?”

  “I can’t tell you much now, but it’s related to the region you are in now. It has some jihadist connection to people you interviewed before.”

  “Could my family be in danger because of this?”

  “It’s best if you come back as soon as possible, and we can discuss this in person.”

  I tried to stay calm but I felt guilty that I might have put my family in danger. I also felt very alone.

  I asked Hannan not to tell our parents anything. I flew back to Germany the next day and arranged to meet with the special branch people a day later.

  The night before the meeting, I received an alert on Twitter. Maryam al-Khawaja had added my name to one of her tweets.

  There was a link to an article she had coauthored for the magazine Foreign Policy that was a response to a piece I had written for the Daily Beast about Sameera Rajab, the Bahraini communications minister. Rajab was an unexpected character: a powerful Shia woman and mother of three with complicated family connections to the opposition. Al-Khawaja and her coauthor accused me of being a shill for the Bahraini government, using Rajab as an example of women’s progress when she was the exception, not the rule. “Mekhennet fails to question any of Rajab’s official policy statements,” they wrote. “She does not engage Rajab on her complicit role in the violations committed against Bahrainis. She misses the chance to do what journalists are meant to do.… Mekhennet’s article on Rajab does not come as a surprise since her pieces on Bahrain have a precedence of uncritically embracing state narratives. This is certainly not lost on the Bahraini regime, which previously granted her an interview with the king, then several months later, an interview with Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa.” Though I’m anything but a major player in Bahraini politics, the piece mentioned my name eight times. The authors had never bothered to ask for my side of the story.

  Great. So now along with the jihadists, I have these other extremists attacking me, I thought. I wondered if this new threat had anything to do with these people in Bahrain. Sure enough, shortly afterward, one of my German intelligence sources called. “Did you see Foreign Policy?” he began. “You are mentioned by name, and they imply all kinds of things between the lines. This is not good, Ms. Mekhennet.”

  It wasn’t as if I had told them to write this, I said. In fact, I’d had no prior knowledge of it.

  I met with the police the next day. We were four people around a table. One of the men read from a file. He explained that apparently the German ex-rapper Cuspert, aka Deso Dogg, aka Abu Maleeq, and now known as Abu Talha al-Almani, had had a conversation with one of his comrades somewhere along the Turkish-Syrian border. “There was some talk about whether you were married or not,” the German official said, looking down at his file. “And, well, apparently the plan was to get you to the Turkish-Syrian border region, supposedly for an exclusive interview.”

  His voice sounded as if he were just reading from some file, but it was my life he was talking about. “So basically,” he continued, “if you went there for the interview, they would kidnap you and tell you to marry one of them or you would be beheaded, and a video would be made of this.”

  “They want to force me to marry one of them?” I said.

  “That’s what the threat says.”

  I was told not to travel to the border region, or anywhere nearby.

  Since I didn’t know who had reported the threat to the Germans, I decided to reach out to my contacts around the ex-rapper now calling himself Abu Talha.

  “Maybe they were making some bad joke once about this, because Abu Talha asked if you had gotten married since you met last time, but there is nothing serious, by God,” one of the jihadists told me. “Maybe some intelligence services want to silence you because you don’t write the way they want? Arab Spring and so on.”

  I had reached the point where I didn’t know whom to believe. Anyone might have taken what I wrote personally and decided to personally get back at me. I decided to take off for Morocco and spend a few days in the mountains. I needed a break.

  The morning I was supposed to leave for the airport, I received a Facebook message: “As’salam alaikum, Sister Souad. I am supposed to send you regards from Abu Talha. He said he has no problem with you, what you heard is not true, and he wishes you all the best
, wa alaikum as ’salam.”

  12

  Boys for the Caliphate

  Germany, 2013

  In the fall of 2013, I was interviewing a Syrian refugee family in the Zaatari camp in Jordan when my phone vibrated in my bag. My voice mail picked up, and the buzzing stopped. Then it started again. On the screen, I saw an old friend’s number blinking, followed by a text message: “Please call me back. It’s urgent.”

  As soon as we were out of the camp, I returned the call.

  “Souad, thank God you called back. We have a big catastrophe. You remember my nephew, Pero? He has left Germany with a group of people and gone to Syria.”

  I thought I had misheard her. “What are you saying? Pero?” I said, trying to piece it together. “Your Pero, who was giggling about the Miss Piggy cake we got some years ago for your birthday?”

  I could hear her fighting back tears. “Yes, my Pero,” my friend whispered. She asked me not to use her name or the names of her family members, so I’ll call her Serce.

  In my mind I played back a scene from eight years earlier, when we’d celebrated Serce’s thirtieth birthday with her family, including Pero and his sisters. The highlight had been a specially made cake in the form of Miss Piggy, because Serce had been a great fan of the Muppets as a kid. My friends and I got her the cake as a joke.

  It was Pero, eight years old at the time, who had carried the cake into the room and giggled when his aunt kissed him. Now she was telling me that he’d begun to spend hours each day with a new group of friends his age. “He changed. He didn’t go out much and started talking about religion,” she said. I told her it was a typical pattern, one that had been described to me by many other parents whose children had left.