I Was Told to Come Alone Read online

  One of my sources told me to look up a journalist named Jamal, who had previously worked for Al Jazeera. Jamal had also covered the Taliban and Al Qaeda for several Arab papers. When I met him, he was living in Islamabad, where he ran a film and TV production company. He became a trusted friend and a reliable adviser, and he helped connect me to militants, civil society, and the Pakistani military and intelligence services.

  I would return to Pakistan nearly a dozen times over the next eighteen months for the Times and to make a documentary for the German TV channel ZDF. On one of those trips, I managed to snag an interview with a senior Taliban commander who belonged to the powerful Quetta shura, led by the one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

  Like my meeting with the ISIS commander on the Turkish-Syrian border several years later, the logistics of that meeting were complicated: don’t bring any recording devices; make sure no one follows you; once in our car, you must take the battery out of your mobile. I was told that the Taliban commander would choose the place. “It could be the last meal—maybe a drone, maybe a special commando, you never know,” the contact man had told me. I waited for him to laugh after he had said it, but the expression on his face was serious. He ran his right hand through his black beard and said, “Insha’Allah khair”—God willing, all will be well.

  My dinner date was a wanted man. He had to be extremely cautious, as did I. The meeting took place in Karachi, the city where the Jewish-American Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl had been kidnapped and killed in 2002. All my contact gave me was the name of a road and a description of the place where my car should stop and wait.

  The Taliban commander had asked for the make, model, and color of the car, along with the plate number. My driver, Adnan, normally worked for tourists and visiting schoolteachers. When I handed him a sheet of paper with the names and phone numbers of two people and told him to call them if I didn’t return in three hours, he blanched.

  “I will stay here and wait for you,” he insisted.

  I told him that he should leave when the other car arrived. “No, no. I cannot leave you here alone. This is a side road leading to the highway,” he said, pointing out the window. “And it is dark. You are crazy. This is dangerous.”

  Soon afterward, a car stopped behind us. The headlights were on and my phone was ringing. “I’ve got to go, Adnan,” I said, climbing out of the car. “Please leave now.”

  I walked back to the other car, a new dark blue Mercedes with tinted windows. The door was opened for me and I got in. Inside, the Taliban commander was smiling. “Why is your car stopped?” he asked me in Arabic. “There is no need for your driver to wait. We’ll take you back. Tell him to go.”

  As I phoned Adnan, all I could think about was that my editor at the Times was going to kick my butt if I got kidnapped by the Taliban so soon after my colleague David Rohde had escaped after more than seven months in Taliban captivity. That morning, Michael had sent me a link to the first part of Rohde’s account of his imprisonment, which had just been published on the Times website. After hanging up with Adnan, I switched off the phone and took out the battery, as agreed. In the car I sat quietly, looking out the window and wondering if I’d made the wrong choice.

  “Are you comfortable?” the commander asked. He must have noticed my nervousness. “Are you worried that some of your colleagues are going to ask how it is that you are meeting with us?”

  This was insightful. Since my first days in Pakistan, some journalists had suspected that I might be a spy, and some militants had similar suspicions about me. I also knew from my time in Algeria that I could add several Western governments to that list. Someone in the Pakistani army spokesperson’s office had told me he’d heard from some Arab reporters that I was Moroccan, and that in Morocco “there are a lot of Jews.” They surmised that because I worked for American newspapers, I was also working for the CIA and Mossad. But most of my colleagues were simply worried about my safety. Western reporters in Pakistan, as in other conflict zones, are limited in their movements and access. The danger is great. Many news organizations depend on Pakistani stringers to cover everything outside the big cities.

  I noticed that our driver seemed jumpy, his eyes moving erratically between the open road ahead and his rearview mirror. I tried to talk to him but he spoke neither English nor Arabic, and I don’t speak Urdu or Pashto. Soon we had left the center of Karachi and were passing through neighborhoods with few lights. I stared out the window, trying to discern where we were going. I heard the sheikh open a bottle and start spraying something in the car. “Maybe the air is not good,” he said. “You look very pale.” The smell of roses and musk filled the car.

  I couldn’t believe it. I was worrying about whether I would survive, and this guy was spraying perfume. The night grew darker as we passed through the Karachi suburbs. Finally, the commander’s assistant, who was sitting next to the driver, turned around and said in English, “Don’t worry, we won’t kidnap you this time. It’s just that the sheikh would like to invite you for good barbecue, and the best places are by the highway.” The assistant laughed and translated his words into Pashto for the driver, who started laughing as well.

  It was after 11:00 p.m. when we arrived at the restaurant. The commander was skeptical of reporters, and he asked me many questions about my family, my goals, and my faith. I told him that my parents were Muslim and that I’d grown up in Europe. When he asked if I was married or had kids, I said no.

  I, too, had a long list of questions, mainly about his thoughts on the new American president, Barack Obama, and the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

  “You know,” he said, “Obama has no say in what his country does. It’s the lobbies and other people. He has promised a lot, too much. But we are not expecting any changes.”

  I asked him what exactly he meant.

  “If America and the West really want to have peace with the Muslim world, they have to change their global attitude and their arrogant way of pushing their interests. We don’t see any changes. Obama is the same as Bush, only in black.”

  “Then what has to happen for peace?”

  “We have nothing against the United States,” he said. “We just don’t like people telling us how to live.” The West had forced the Taliban from power, but the commander believed that he and his comrades would retake Afghanistan.

  I looked at the three men, all of whom sat across the table from me. “But what would that mean for women?” I asked. “For example, would I still be able to do my job if the Taliban were in power?”

  The translator laughed, and soon the others joined him. The sheikh answered in Arabic. “Souad, choose the color of the burka, and no problem: you can go on with journalism.” He was referring to the garment worn by many women in Afghanistan, and required under the Taliban, which covers the body from head to toe, including the face, leaving only a small latticework opening for the eyes.

  “I don’t like to wear the burka. The Koran doesn’t tell a woman to cover her face.”

  “Yes, Souad, you are right. The Koran doesn’t say that women have to wear the burka or cover their faces, but this is the tradition in some areas, and shouldn’t it be up to the people to decide?”

  “So then shouldn’t the women decide if they want to wear the burka or not?” I countered. “Yet it seems you don’t give them the option.”

  “Each finger on your hand is different,” the commander said, smiling. “And it is the same with us. Not every Talib has the same opinion on how women should be. I personally like intelligent, strong women.”

  Soon the food appeared: grilled chicken, lamb kabobs, yogurt, rice with raisins, onion rings, potatoes, lentil daal, and greens. It was a feast, too much for four people.

  I had been taking notes, but now the sheikh said, “Stop writing. It is time for the important questions now. Let’s talk about life. You know, Sister Souad, I am also looking for a second wife. I’ve heard many good things about German women. I heard they read the w
ishes off their husband’s lips. I think you are ready for this.”

  I immediately thought about the jihadist from Zarqa who had tried to woo me with text messages, or the time I’d unwittingly joked about marrying Shaker al-Abssi’s son-in-law. This time I decided to play dumb. “I can’t speak on their behalf because I’m not really German,” I said in English. “My father is Moroccan and my mother is Turkish. But I think you’ve been reading fairy tales.”

  The sheikh listened to the translation. “Well yes, but there are also German women who have a Muslim background,” he said.

  “Sheikh, honestly, don’t you think one woman is headache enough?”

  “Yes, you’re probably right. One is already headache enough,” he said good-naturedly. “More wives, more headaches. It’s good to have more children, though. Of course I would not take a second wife if my wife didn’t give me the okay. But she would like to have someone else to help with the housework.”

  Great, I thought.

  The commander, meanwhile, kept piling food onto my plate and his. “I want an intelligent wife,” he continued. “The Prophet Muhammad had strong women, and a strong wife can make a strong leader.”

  I’ll admit I was surprised to hear that.

  “Let me ask you this,” he continued. “How many people sleep around and are unmarried? Don’t you think we are more honest? We don’t just screw the girl. We marry her. We take care of her. We are not trying to hurt women. Allah frowns upon that. Souad, you should think about this. We have some very strong men in the leadership. They would love to get married to someone like you.”

  Again I dodged. My parents would have the last say, I said. It was an excuse that had always worked in the past.

  All three men were working through their food, breaking pieces of bread and using them to scoop up the rice and meat. Though the sheikh said it wasn’t as spicy as usual, I felt my tongue start to burn. I drank one glass of water after another, trying to put out the fire, and left most of the food on my plate. It was really delicious, I told them, but I had eaten already. Finally, the sheikh took my plate and finished my dinner. “That is a big honor,” the translator noted.

  “I do not eat off everyone’s plate,” the sheikh said. “Today we didn’t invite you as a journalist. We invited you as someone we respect.”

  These shifts—from fear to familiarity, from the brink of disaster to a moment of warm acceptance as a human being, not as a potential enemy—were unnerving. After dinner, we stopped at a remote gas station along the highway. A man with a long beard approached on a motorcycle. He was carrying a gun and a bag covered with dark red flowers. For a second, I thought what a funny picture it would be: guns and roses.

  The translator gave the bag to the Taliban commander, who handed it to me. “I cannot accept this,” I said, wondering where the man on the motorcycle had come from and how long he had been waiting.

  “You have to accept this, unless you want us to kidnap you,” the commander said. Our journalistic code of ethics doesn’t allow us to accept gifts, but there was no way my editor would punish me for taking this one.

  “Thank you,” I said, taking the bag from him. “And give my respect to your wife.”

  “Remember when you go back to Germany to look for a good candidate for me,” he said with a slight smile.

  Once back at the guesthouse in Karachi where I was staying, I called Adnan, who had been waiting frantically to find out if I was safe, and returned the calls of worried friends who hadn’t been able to reach me. Then I went upstairs to my room and opened the bag. In it were perfumed oil and red and green decorative stones. I stared at the bag and tried to understand. I knew it was probably just exhaustion, but the whole evening was already beginning to seem like a dream—a strange, surreal dream. Yet when I awoke the next morning there they were: my gifts from the Taliban.

  A month later, after a short break, I returned to Pakistan, this time to Islamabad, the capital. I contacted the Taliban commander, and he again mentioned that he was looking for a second wife. I told him about a dream I’d had of him with two lambs, and that it might mean his wife was pregnant with twins. He laughed and said that she was indeed pregnant, but that she wasn’t having twins.

  He asked if I thought the child would be a boy or a girl. I said a boy. He said that if he became a father of twin girls, he would name one after me. We laughed.

  When we talked next, a few months later, he told me that his wife had indeed had twins. He sounded tired. “When you were a little baby, did you cry during the night and during the day?”

  “I think I was a very nice baby,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  Later, he invited me to meet his wife and children. Proudly, he showed me his cache of U.S. Army boots, sunglasses, field beds, and Special Forces jackets, which he’d bought on the black market in Peshawar. “We are happy because we know that they cannot win the war,” he said, standing amid his booty.

  They gave me the baby who cried during the night to hold. She slept peacefully in my arms.

  “She is crying all the night,” the commander said. “She wants all the attention. I have named her Souad.”

  * * *

  WHENEVER I GOT back to Islamabad after an excursion, I went to Jamal’s office to catch up. One afternoon, after a trip to Quetta, a low-slung city near the Afghan border, I stopped by to say hello. Jamal had visitors, and he invited me to join them. I sat in a corner of the room sipping my tea and listened to one of the three men, who had come from Waziristan, a tribal region in northwestern Pakistan that had been a haven for the Taliban. The man introduced himself as Kareem Khan and said he was a journalist. He spoke Arabic and was cursing the United States. “The only choice one has is jihad against them, and to kill Americans,” he said.

  I had been listening for years to the same expressions of hatred, the same blame game that seemed to stretch from Pakistan to Iraq to Lebanon and Jordan. In fact, during my recent trip to Quetta, I’d met a group of Taliban fighters who told me they hated America because of its occupation of Afghanistan and its penchant for drone strikes in the Pakistani borderlands, especially places such as Waziristan.

  “What would the Americans do if we went to the United States and told them how to live, or how not to?” one of the fighters had fulminated.

  I reminded him that the United States invaded Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks.

  “So, what, did Afghanistan attack the United States?”

  “People who were trained in camps in Afghanistan did,” I answered. “And the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden.”

  The men looked at me angrily and said something in Pashto that I couldn’t understand. “Mullah Omar was very clear,” one of the men told me. “He said, ‘Show us the evidence that bin Laden was behind it; as long as there is no evidence, he will be a protected guest.’ That’s how our customs are.”

  I was about to challenge them further, but I sensed the spirit of the meeting had changed. While at first they had smiled a bit, their faces now looked stern. “If you were American, we would kidnap you,” one finally said.

  This time I didn’t feel like backing off. “Why do you want to kill Americans?” I asked Khan.

  He seemed surprised. “Because they are killing us with these drones. They killed some of my family members,” he said, “and they had nothing to do with the Taliban.” He told me he had lost his son and his brother in a drone strike that had also destroyed his house.

  I knew, of course, that the United States was using drones to fight militancy in Waziristan and other areas in Pakistan. The CIA had been attacking the Pakistani border region with drones since 2004, hoping to kill Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters hiding there. But the bombs did not always hit their intended targets. It was horrible that innocent people were killed, and yet I felt I needed to somehow defend my American friends. I had editors and colleagues of all faiths who had supported me, even when they’d felt
the sting of jihadi violence against their friends and in their own cities.

  “Most Americans are not bad. They don’t even know what happened to you and your family,” I told him. “You cannot hold them all responsible for the actions of their government.”

  He disagreed. Americans surely knew that their government was killing “innocent people” like his relatives. I asked if he or his son or brother had ever belonged to the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or other militant groups. He said they hadn’t and that many other innocents had been killed in drone strikes as well.

  “This is the reason why many more people will now join the Taliban,” he went on. “Because the Americans kill us. We have no choice but to fight back.”

  “Still, believe me, the majority of Americans don’t know about what you are saying. Joining terrorist organizations is not a solution,” I told him.

  “You call them terrorists. What America is doing to us is terrorism as well! But Muslim lives don’t matter to the West.”

  These were well-worn accusations, but I knew the reality was more complicated. I wanted him to know how many people in the United States were fighting injustice and had worked to help Khaled el-Masri and others who’d been treated unfairly. “I’m sure if people knew about what happened to your family and others, they would try to help,” I told him.

  “How would they help?” He looked as if he didn’t believe a word I was saying.

  I told him about the el-Masri case and how the New York Times, an American newspaper, had been the first to tell his story. Moreover, the editors had allowed me, a Muslim woman, to tell it, even though there’d been plenty of risks involved if I got it wrong. I told him about the reporting that other American papers, such as the Washington Post, had done on torture by the U.S. intelligence services and how many American lawyers had offered to help torture victims pro bono.

  He listened carefully. “What is pro bono?”