The Girl From Kathmandu

by Cam Simpson

  After their bus arrived in Kathmandu and they made their way to the ashram, Kamala and Kritika were assigned to a room with other mothers and children on the ground floor of a redbrick dormitory off the main courtyard, where a murder of crows bowed the branches of the tall trees. The room had high ceilings and long windows, and their bare feet were cold on the plaster floor. Eight beds were arranged against the room’s outer walls. For most of her first nights in the ashram, Kamala held Kritika and lay awake. With each step or shift in weight of a woman above, the ancient boards in the ceiling creaked like the towering bamboo of the horseshoe ridge. Women in Kamala’s room seemed to take turns weeping throughout the night, perhaps after waking suddenly from a dream of their lost life or from a nightmare about wicked in-laws, or perhaps overwhelmed by thoughts they could not outrun. Kamala was grateful she had found a refuge for herself and her daughter, but the desolation she heard in the nightly cries made her realize how far away from family and home she was for the first time in her life. She was as alone in the world as everyone surrounding her.

  6

  July 2005

  Amman

  Critical details about the time the twelve Nepalese men spent in Jordan, and definitive proof about for whom they were working, remained out of reach but seemed so much closer than they had only weeks before, and Jordan was the only place those details, that proof, could possibly be found. If anyone could help provide clues that led to filling in the missing forty-five days, it would be the man who was my investigation’s erstwhile ally and obstructionist, Eyad Mansour. I flew back to Jordan.

  Aside from figuring out where the twelve Nepalis were kept and who was involved, I also needed Mansour to flesh out the details of how they were delivered to their deaths, which could reveal as much about the nature of the human supply chain as any other link. I returned to his office and Mansour told me that the twelve were seized by the terrorists from two cars as they were being taken into Iraq in a larger convoy ferrying almost eighty men to the Al Asad Air Base for Daoud and KBR Halliburton’s operations there. The convoy required at least ten vehicles, but as Bisharat’s al-Nadi tried to organize it in August 2004, driver after driver across Amman refused the job.

  It required a four-hundred-fifty-mile drive down the Amman-to-Baghdad highway, which, despite being as wide and smooth and well paved as any American interstate, had become perhaps the deadliest stretch of tarmac on earth. The vast majority of the journey cut straight through the heart of the desert badlands of Iraq’s Anbar Province, the center of the growing insurgency against the U.S. occupation. At a cloverleaf interchange just west of the Euphrates River, the convoy would have to turn north and head up a road running parallel with the river for the last fifty miles, until reaching the American-occupied base near Haditha.

  Bandits plagued the Amman-to-Baghdad highway almost from the first day the border crossing opened between Jordan and Iraq following the invasion. Scouts on motorcycles buzzed up beside vehicles, seemingly from nowhere, craned their necks, and peered through windshields and windows. They’d then signal to AK-47-wielding accomplices following close behind in pickup trucks or even taxicabs. These would brandish or fire their weapons to force drivers or terrified aid workers, journalists, and others to veer off the road and hand over cash, satellite phones, computers, cameras—and whatever other treasures were stowed on board to facilitate long stints on duty inside a nation cut off from ordinary supply lines, a nation at war. Some Westerners had taken to calling the road the “Mad Max Highway” or the “Highway Through Hell.”1 Before long, it was mostly supplies being ferried on the road, not people.

  Even though human cargo from Amman became more limited, as personnel flew on up to sixty commercial flights per day at the newly opened Baghdad International Airport, the passage for goods being delivered by road from Jordan grew far more dangerous as the insurgency blossomed in 2004. By the end of that summer, three hundred trucks were hijacked, robbed, or destroyed, and about forty Jordanian drivers were killed, according to the estimates of a Jordanian transportation group. Mohammad Tayla was among those spared after armed men pulled him out of the cab of his truck. “They tied me up, and I saw them putting gasoline on my truck, and they burned it. They said, ‘If you open your mouth, we’ll kill you,’” he said.2 The four Blackwater men who were murdered in March 2004 had been guarding a delivery of kitchen equipment rolling down the Highway Through Hell.

  By June 2004, the danger had so intensified that the Iraqi government publicly announced plans to provide armed escorts accompanying deliveries from the Jordanian border all the way to Baghdad. In the end, the promise appeared to be little more than public relations. The government had been forced by all of the bad publicity to speak, but it didn’t seem able or willing to act. U.S. Armed Forces accompanied some vehicles “working in support of the coalition,” with a military spokesman telling the Associated Press that summer, “We take the protection of our contracted civilians very seriously. They are essential partners.” Clearly, though, the lives of some contracted civilians were more essential than others’.3

  The month before Bisharat’s al-Nadi tried to organize his convoy for the Nepalis to Al Asad, two Bulgarian drivers were kidnapped. One was beheaded; the other was never heard from nor seen again. Insurgents released a kidnapped driver from the Philippines only after his government agreed to withdraw the few dozen troops it had stationed in Iraq, a decision deeply embarrassing for the United States.

  By the summer of 2004, because the dangers were so abundant and clear, American civilian personnel were flown, not driven, into the country, and the American government warned that travel by road should be undertaken only if absolutely necessary, and only then with proper security.4

  On July 26, 2004, a little more than three weeks ahead of al-Nadi’s attempt to assemble a convoy, the threat came directly to the door of KBR Halliburton contractor Daoud and Partners. Insurgents kidnapped two of its drivers and demanded that the company cease working in Iraq. Otherwise, the men would be murdered. Daoud issued a statement declaring it would withdraw all its personnel from Iraq and no longer work for the U.S. military.5 Daoud’s statement achieved its goal, but it was a lie. Insurgents released the drivers; Daoud did not pull out of Iraq. It was a dangerous game, one that significantly raised the stakes for any and all future Daoud personnel delivered into Iraq on the Highway Through Hell, by choice or by coercion.

  Little wonder al-Nadi had such a hard time finding the phalanx of drivers necessary to bring the Nepalis to the American air base. Not only was it one of the most dangerous drives in the world, but it was a particularly risky undertaking for anyone associated with Daoud. Still, flying the men to Baghdad was out of the question for KBR because it was considered too expensive.6 It’s also clear that security for the convoy was never provided, according to both Eyad Mansour and Prakash Mahat, who was then Nepal’s foreign minister.

  What happened next marked perhaps the signal moment in which the lexicon used by the men who ran the industry—referring to people as “imports” or “goods” or basic commodities—translated in a very literal way into how they treated the human beings they traded in. Essentially, the twelve men and the others with them were to be transported down the Amman-to-Baghdad highway in gypsy taxicabs screaming out of Amman, driven by whatever drivers remained who were willing to make the run without armed escorts, without a single professional consultant or security guard of any kind, and without even armor plating. According to Mansour, the drivers who were on the job also violated the most basic rule for convoys in dangerous places: stick together. The two lead cars carrying the twelve Nepalis ended up separated from the rest.

  About forty miles south of the air base, just after the turnoff from the Highway Through Hell, men wielding weapons and wearing the uniforms of Iraqi security forces stopped the two cars at some sort of flying checkpoint. Leave the workers at the checkpoint, the armed men told the drivers, and the Americans will come from the base to collect them. Fooli
shly, the drivers complied, apparently communicating with no one, either at the base or back in Amman.

  Word went out to Daoud and KBR executives hours later from the base: the convoy of workers had arrived, but it was twelve men light.7 Security men operating the checkpoint were, it appeared, working with the insurgents, or were even in their ranks. Within ten days, the bill of a security forces ball cap pulled low would hide the face of the man who sliced the Nepalese farmer’s throat before the camera.

  Not only were the jobs in Jordan fraudulent, but the sons and husbands of the families I had met were sent across another international border and into a third country, a nation that was host to the world’s deadliest war zone. Bundled into an unprotected convoy, without any security precautions, they were driven into Iraq against all public warnings issued by the U.S. government and against all common sense—even though they were apparently headed there to serve the U.S. government. It is difficult to imagine a greater disregard for their lives.

  After having made it clear that he had “possessed” the twelve “goods” from Nepal before passing them on to Daoud and its body shop supplier, Eyad Mansour changed his story one last time, or rather, he added a new twist. He claimed he actually never had full custody of the twelve, because a disloyal former employee had intercepted these specific men at the airport in Amman. The former employee’s name was Amin Mansour, Eyad Mansour told me. (Amin and Eyad are not related but shared the same, common surname.) He said Amin had gone into business with al-Nadi, becoming one of al-Nadi’s partners. “I don’t blame Amin,” Eyad said. “He’s ambitious and wanted to build something for himself.”

  I gave Eyad Mansour physical descriptions of the two men al-Nadi had introduced to me as his partners, in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt. Without hesitation, he identified Amin as “Abdullah,” the short one with the thick handlebar mustache who had tried to keep al-Nadi from handing over the DVD. As his true name emerged, a previously inexplicable tidbit seemed to make sense: One of the twelve Nepalis had used his final statement before the black banner to name the Jordanian broker involved in their ordeal. Although the surname came out jumbled, he clearly uttered the forename into the terrorists’ camera: “Amin.”

  As I concluded our interview, Eyad Mansour noted that I had asked, the first time we met, whether he possessed documents related to the twelve murdered men. “I just found this,” he said, handing a folder across his desk. It held photocopies of the men’s passports, including copies of Jordanian entry stamps. How had he come by these after having just denied even possessing the men who bore the passports? It didn’t matter. I was happy to have the copies just the same.

  Each of the twelve dead men stared back from his own passport page against a background as black as the terrorist banner each had posed before when speaking his final words. In the photo, each looked straight ahead, trying assiduously to suppress a smile, although a couple of the youngest, the ones who were just boys, let one through, including Bishnu Hari Thapa, who was seventeen the day someone set him on a stool to take this picture. He wore a traditional Nepalese cap, called a topi, which is not too dissimilar in style from a garrison cap like the one a Boy Scout would wear.

  Prakash Adhikari wore a tie for his portrait, taken less than a month before he left home. How many other times in his life had he put on a tie? His face unsmiling, Jeet Bahadur Thapa Magar, whose widow now lived in the home for destitute women, wore a dark T-shirt emblazoned with 100% pure whoop-ass, a phrase popularized by the American professional wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. Jeet was cheeky enough that he might have had some knowledge of what this meant, but millions of T-shirts like this, along with other clothing items that Americans leave in charity bins in cities across the United States, routinely make their way through the global aftermarket to Nepal and other poor countries, where they are worn without irony.

  The lack of opportunity in Nepal that had sent each man to his labor broker had been etched onto a blank line in his passport below “Profession”: farmer, helper, laborer. Each was inscribed by his hand or perhaps that of the broker who had helped him get the passport after promising that life in an exotic land would yield a reward so great there wasn’t even a familiar word in his language for the sum of cash he would earn over two or three years. Each passport also had been stamped in Jordan with the same urgent command, eight words in block letters: contact the nearest police station within two weeks. A similar warning appeared on signs near the airport’s immigration queues: foreigners remaining in jordan for more than two weeks must register at the nearest police station.

  Nader Rabadi, my Jordanian interpreter and assistant, led me through a maze of cold, spare corridors inside the gray office blocks of downtown Amman’s Abdali neighborhood. We trawled government offices in search of the right department and the right official within the right department with whom to plead our case. We were after three different sets of records for each man: the record of his passport being scanned by border guards at Queen Alia International Airport upon entry into the country; a similar record when he exited the country at the road crossing into Iraq; and finally, and most important, a police registration shedding light on where he stayed during the nearly fifty days between those two points.

  The soft resistance of Middle East bureaucracy is not dissimilar to the resistance of bureaucracies everywhere. It most often revealed itself in blank expressions across the faces of those who professed to have no idea how such a record could have been generated, no idea about who would be able to do it, and no idea about who could even authorize the granting of such a request from a foreign journalist. No one seemed inclined to pick up the phone to try to find out. Each exchange ended courteously enough. Everyone we saw simply sent us to someone else. In this way, everyone appeared to be helpful without actually helping or conveying any information that could come back to haunt him. When we weren’t bouncing down government hallways, Nader worked the phones in search of an answer. It seemed hopeless.

  As the second straight day of bouncing began drawing to a close, Nader believed we had finally found the right office within a division of Jordan’s Ministry of Interior. Clocks in every government building marched in unison toward quitting time, and each corridor would empty as quickly as a sink after the drain plug is pulled. Despite the hour, we managed to get an audience with a senior-looking official. He wore the light-blue shirt and thick mustache of a security agency employee, with flat epaulets carrying officer’s markings on his shoulders, and a beret. As I pleaded my case for the records, and Nader interpreted, the officer stared straight at me with the poker face of a skeptical cop, revealing absolutely nothing while also reading every line in my face and each movement of my eyes. Finally, I pulled out my passport and flipped to the page with my visa from Nepal. I told him that each of the twelve Nepalese men had left his home to come to Jordan, and yet all twelve were brutally executed in Iraq before the eyes of the world, including those of their families. I told him that I had traveled across Nepal to find those families, and then I handed him my passport, open to the Nepal visa page, as proof. “They just want to know what happened to their husbands, sons, and brothers,” I pleaded, Nader echoing my words in Arabic.

  The officer took the passport and examined the page. He then stared again squarely and silently into my face for what seemed an eternity. Suddenly, he jumped to his feet, a wide smile breaking below his thick mustache. “I think you speak more Arabic than you’re letting on!” he said, laughing and wagging his index finger at me, which I took to mean that he liked me. He handed back my passport and agreed to help. We typed a formal request on Chicago Tribune stationery, handcrafted from a photocopy of my business card in the top corner of a blank sheet of paper, and attached a list of all twelve names and their passport numbers and copies of my press credentials from Washington. We faxed it to the number the official provided, and then waited.

  One potentially significant lead remained: the photocopy of the scrap of paper that had been pro
duced by the brother of one of the three victims who had come from the same town in Eastern Nepal’s lowlands. It contained three handwritten phone numbers, all landlines that rang in Amman. The first two numbers differed by just one digit and clearly rang at the same business, a small storefront shop at the edge of a gritty working-class Amman neighborhood. The shop, called Horizons East for Computers and Communications, offered international calls and Internet service. The shop had a couple of plywood phone booths, and each one, tall and narrow, covered in a thin oak veneer, held barely enough space for a flaccid plastic garden chair and a corner shelf for the telephone. One could imagine the three young men from Eastern Nepal packed against one another in a single booth like rush-hour commuters on a New York subway car, calling home to say they feared going into Iraq.

  The store’s owner did not recognize pictures of the three men, but said that hundreds of foreign workers came into his shop. His business relied on them. Someone kept foreign workers housed in the residential neighborhood just up the street, he said, but he was unsure exactly where.

  We followed the street around a bend and into the nearby neighborhood, landing on Malfuf Street, which was carved into the side of a winding hill. The low side of the street had dirty concrete privacy walls cutting parallel to the edge of the sidewalk for each property. There were small gates in the walls. Behind each, a staircase descended to a concrete block home built into the hillside below.