The Imam of Tawi-Tawi

by Ian Hamilton

  “The family lives at the end of the street,” Pinson said. “The father is a foreman at a well-established construction company. The mother has never worked outside the home. There’s an older brother who’s an elementary school teacher.”

  About thirty metres ahead Ava saw a parked white Commodore with two men inside. “Those are my men,” Pinson said. He stopped his car alongside the vehicle and the man closest to them rolled down his window. Pinson did the same. “The father and brother have gone to work,” the man said.

  The Said home was a two-storey brick house with a terrace on the upper floor that faced the street. Ava could see a woman in a housecoat hanging shirts on a drying rack on the terrace. Pinson parked his car in front of the Commodore and looked up at the woman. When she went inside, he waited for a minute and then said, “Let’s go.”

  The four of them walked up the gravel path. Ava wondered what the woman would think when she opened the door and saw them standing there. Pinson pressed the doorbell. When there wasn’t a response, he pushed it again. The door finally opened a crack and the woman peered out from under a chain. “Yes?” she said, her face confused and fearful.

  “My name is Manfred Pinson and I’m an officer with the Australian National Security Agency,” he said, holding up his badge. “We’re here to speak with your son, Jason Said.”

  “He’s not here,” she said.

  Pinson looked down at her and drew a deep breath. “Mrs. Said, we know Jason is here. You need to understand that we’re not here to arrest him; we just need to speak to him. But if you persist in denying that he’s at home, we’ll have no other choice than to enter your residence forcefully. And if we have to do that, things will not go well for Jason.”

  She closed her eyes and her chin dropped to her chest.

  “I promise you, Mrs. Said, if you open the door, it will go much better for you and Jason,” Pinson said.

  She looked up at Pinson. He arched his eyebrows and gave her the slightest smile. Her hand reached up and the chain fell away. Ava and the three men stepped inside.

  “Is he still sleeping?” Pinson asked.

  She nodded.

  “Wake him please, and try not to alarm him. We want to have a talk with him, nothing more. Do you want me to come with you?”

  “I know how to talk to my own son,” she said.

  They stood in the hallway and watched her slowly climb the stairs. “Do you think this is wise?” Johnson asked.

  “She’ll bring him down. She’s a Lakemba mum. She’ll do anything, whatever it takes, to keep her son out of trouble, and she knows we could be trouble. And he’ll listen to her. Their mothers are the only people — aside from their imams — that some of these guys listen to.”

  “I don’t want to give her more than five minutes,” Johnson said.

  They waited closer to ten, and Ava could feel Johnson becoming increasingly agitated. She was starting to get anxious herself when Mrs. Said reappeared. Behind her was a young man in a black T-shirt and jeans. He looked down at them with disdain.

  “Where do you want to do this?” Pinson asked Dulles.

  “Anywhere we can have privacy,” Dulles said.

  “The kitchen?”

  “Sure.”

  Pinson waited until the woman and her son reached the bottom of the stairs. Then he said, “Mrs. Said, Agent Dulles and Ms. Lee here will be speaking privately to Jason in the kitchen. Why don’t you sit with us in the living room.”

  “Is there any point in my objecting?” she said.

  “No.”

  Jason Said emerged from behind his mother and Ava had her first good look at him. He was skinny, about five foot nine, and his hair was shaved into a wide mohawk. He had a thin moustache and a weak attempt at a beard. His puffy eyes glared at them.

  “Where’s the kitchen?” Dulles asked.

  “Over there.” Mrs. Said pointed to the left. “There’s still coffee in the pot if you want any.”

  “Thanks, I’d love some,” Ava said. The others shook their heads.

  “Let’s go,” Dulles said to Jason.

  The kitchen was small, with a round wooden table and four chairs. Ava poured a coffee, turned to Jason, and said, “Do you want something to drink?”

  “I’d like some water,” he said, but remained standing until Dulles and Ava were seated. Dulles didn’t take his eyes off Said while the young man filled a glass, drank half, refilled it, and then joined them at the table.

  “Do you know why we’re here?” Dulles asked.

  “No.”

  “Is that because you have zero idea or too many things to choose from?”

  “Zero idea.”

  “I’m American and my colleague here is Canadian, but we work closely with Australian national security, which is why Agent Pinson is here.”

  “I’ve never been to America or Canada, and I’ve never done anything that should interest either of you.”

  “It interests us that you went to the Philippines and that until two months ago you were attending Zakat College in Tawi-Tawi.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “That depends entirely on what you tell us about your time there.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “That’s not true,” Ava said.

  He looked at her as if he were noticing her for the first time. “I’ve got fuck all to tell.”

  Dulles leaned forward, placing his hand on Said’s knee. He didn’t apply any pressure but Said recoiled anyway. “Jason, there are two ways we can do this. The easy way is for us to ask you questions and for you to answer them honestly. If that’s the way it plays out, we’ll leave when we’re finished and we won’t tell anyone what you said. There will be no charges, no record that we met — nothing.

  “On the other hand, if you decide to be foolish and not co-operate, then, at our request, Agent Pinson will take you into custody and you’ll be held in isolation for at least fourteen days. You can expect to be interrogated by people who are much less accommodating than us. Everything you say will be on the record. And if you’ve done anything illegal, or even thought about doing anything illegal, you can expect that they’ll find out and you can expect charges to be laid.”

  Said tried to look at Dulles but his eyes wandered.

  “Jason,” Ava said gently, “they will find something to pin on you even if you haven’t done anything. You know how they operate. They’ll grab your computer and get into your hard drive, and once that happens an innocent web search will be interpreted as something far more sinister and illegal.”

  “They are all so full of bullshit,” he said.

  “Maybe they are, but that doesn’t discount the power they have and the damage they can do to you and your entire family,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Look, we’re not expecting you to tell us your life story. Why don’t we start with me asking a few basic questions and see where that leads,” Ava said. “Our interest is in the Philippines. We don’t care what you did before you got there or what your plans are now…unless, of course, they still involve Zakat College.”

  He didn’t react. There were two ways for her interpret that, and she decided to assume it was positive.

  “You’re a Sunni, correct?” she said.

  “You know that already,” he said after a slight hesitation.

  Ava knew more than that. She now knew he would talk to her. She glanced at Dulles, not sure if she had overstepped her bounds.

  “Go ahead, he’s all yours,” he said.

  ( 27 )

  Over the years Ava had developed a sense of what motivated people to open up to her. In her old business it had often been coercion, sometimes physical. But she rarely took that route until she’d exhausted other, more reasonable options. The problem she’d faced was that many of the people sh
e was dealing with were the opposite of reasonable. However, her experience and instincts told her that Said was going to be co-operative. Now it was up to her to ask the right questions and maintain the right tone.

  “And the other students at the college were also Sunni?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Imam Tariq al-Bashir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he Wahhabi?”

  “Yes.”

  “We were told that he has a foreign accent. Do you know where he’s from?”

  He shrugged.

  Ava hesitated. She realized she might have pushed him on the imam too soon. “We’re curious about how you discovered Zakat College,” she said.

  “I found it online.”

  “We looked for it there and found no references.”

  “It was through a ghost website.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Now you see it, now you don’t.”

  “I’m not very technical. Can you explain that to me?”

  “You’ll be looking at a website and another will appear for maybe a few seconds or even minutes, urging you to visit another website in half an hour. When you log in to that one, it might direct you to another. And so on, until you reach the ultimate destination.”

  “What was that final website?”

  He reached for his glass of water.

  “I don’t care what you were searching for or why you were doing it,” Ava said. “All I care about is where you ended up.”

  “I wanted to join the holy war,” he said. “I wanted to help establish a true Islamic state.”

  “And that was the college’s objective?”

  He shook his head, rose from the chair, and walked to the kitchen window. As he gazed out at the back garden, she saw his shoulders slump and knew he felt conflicted.

  “What was the name of the final website, the one that led you to the college?” she asked again.

  “Five fourteen forty-eight,” he mumbled.

  “Was that expressed in numbers or words?”

  “Numbers.”

  “How long did it take you to find it, for you to get there?”

  “Months. After I found it the first time it disappeared, and I couldn’t locate it again until three months later.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I applied to Zakat College.”

  “Just like that?”

  “No. I was directed to other websites and asked to supply all kinds of personal information. They were obviously checking on me.”

  “And you met their criteria,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you think you were signing up for?”

  “I told you already,” he said.

  “You could have joined a holy war without going to a college in the Philippines. You could have gone directly to Syria or Iraq.”

  “I didn’t know how to get there from here.”

  He’s just a boy, Ava thought. He lives at home in Lakemba where his mother makes his meals and does his laundry. Of course he didn’t know how to get to Syria or Iraq. He’s a dreamer, and he would have kept on dreaming if someone hadn’t taken him under their wing.

  “By my calculation, you flew to the Philippines four months ago.”

  “That’s about right.”

  “Did you book your own flight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who paid for the airfare?”

  “I did, but they reimbursed me when I arrived in Tawi-Tawi.”

  “Did they give you any special instructions about how to travel or what to put on your landing card, or anything at all about the trip?”

  “No, they just told me to send my itinerary when my flight was booked and that they’d arrange for me to be picked up at the airport.”

  “Emailed to what address?”

  “It wasn’t email, it was regular mail.”

  “That was clever. Ghost websites and snail mail — an unlikely combination,” Ava said, catching Dulles’s eye. She turned back to Jason. “When you left Sydney, did you tell your parents where you were going?”

  “I didn’t tell them anything, not even that I was leaving. None of us were supposed to tell our families about the college,” he said. “I wrote to them when I got to Tawi-Tawi and told them not to worry.”

  “Postal mail again?”

  “Yeah, and with no return address. Not that it mattered. They told me they never got the letter anyway.”

  “So they must have been especially pleased when you came home and they knew you were safe.”

  “My mother cried for two days.”

  “Who can blame her? She must have been worried sick about you,” Ava said.

  He broke his gaze from the window and turned towards her with a pained look on his face.

  “How many other students were at the college when you got there?” she asked, trying to temper his emotions.

  “More than fifty. I was one of the last to arrive.”

  “From what I’ve seen from the records, you were a mixed bunch.”

  “What do you mean? We were all Sunni.”

  “I meant in terms of nationality.”

  “We didn’t think like that. Where we came from didn’t matter. We were all brothers, there to help form and be part of a new state. The imam stressed that every day. He said that for us to succeed, we had to have the same sense of unity that the world’s Jews do, but we had to apply it in an even more dedicated way. He said that Israel wouldn’t exist if all the other Jews in the world didn’t support it.”

  “He spoke admiringly about the Jewish people?”

  “No, he hates the Jews and he hates Israel. He said they are our most important enemy, but if we want to bring them down, we need to understand them and the power they exercise in the Middle East and the rest of the world.” He said it matter-of-factly, without any passion.

  “My understanding is that the imam spoke to the students every morning after prayer,” she said.

  “That was the schedule.”

  “I was told he preached jihad.”

  “He said there had to be a holy war.”

  “There is one now, is there not? Was he advocating that you join ISIL, Daesh? Was he recruiting for them?”

  “He said they are misdirected, although he didn’t say that at first,” he said. “For the first weeks we were at the college, he talked about jihad in general terms, and about how the Koran endorses and encourages the defence of Islam. He said it was our duty. He said it would be our blessing. He said it would guarantee our entry into heaven.”

  “And you all believed him?”

  “Nearly all of us believed that before we got there.”

  “Of course you did,” she said. “But still, the imam waited for four weeks before he asked you to formally commit to jihad?”

  “He did, and we were ready, and everyone did commit.”

  “I’m told that a few didn’t.”

  “In my class there was one. He was allowed to leave.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “It was a private conversation between him and one of the imam’s assistants. None of us spoke to him after. He was just gone.”

  “What was his name?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Okay,” Ava said. “Why don’t you tell me now what you did after you all made that first commitment.”

  “We learned to make bombs. We learned to assemble, arm, and fire all kinds of weapons,” he said. “And then were taught how, when, and where to detonate bombs with maximum effect and how best to kill with the weapons.”

  “Was there talk about suicide bombings and attacks?”

  “No, it was exactly the opposite. The imam said the longer we stayed in the war, the more likely our vic
tory would be.”

  ( 28 )

  Ava got herself another coffee, brushing past Jason as she did. He hadn’t left his position near the window and avoided looking at her. When she sat at the table again, she changed seats so she could have a better view of his face.

  “Tell me more about the imam,” she said.

  “Like what?” he said, suddenly defensive.

  “What does he look like? Is he tall, short, fat, thin?”

  “Medium height, medium build, black hair and beard.”

  “Does he wear traditional clothing?”

  “Of course.”

  “How about his assistants?”

  “They all wore a thawb except when we were building and exploding bombs. For that they’d change into jeans and shirts.”

  “The imam too?”

  “He never had anything to do with the bombs or weapons.”

  “Did he ever leave the college while you were there?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “And his assistants?”

  “The same, I think.”

  “Where did you eat?”

  “There’s a cafeteria.”

  “Did he eat with you?”

  “No, he and his assistants had a private dining room, and they lived in a separate wing of the college.”

  “So you didn’t see the imam often.”

  “At prayers and the morning lectures. For the rest of the time he kept to himself.”

  “Was there anything striking about him? Did he have any facial features or habits or mannerisms that stood out?”

  He hesitated. “His voice,” he finally said.

  “What about it?”

  “It was different.”

  “How?”

  “He spoke softly, so quietly that even when he was using a microphone, you had to strain to hear him,” he said. “One of the other students — he was English and had studied communications at university — said it was a technique, a way of forcing us to concentrate on what he was saying. Whatever it was, it worked. He could be mesmerizing.”