The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (24 page)

I glanced at it. “No.”

“Make a copy and send it to me,” Aamer said. “I will find out what is going on.”

A week passed while the mail made its way to my friend. And during that week, I received four more letters from Riyadh. Each was on royal letterhead and blasted the same unsubtle message: Break it off with the sheikh’s daughter or we will kill you.

Who is “we”?
I wondered.
And where is Fatima?

I called the hotel. I called her Paris flat. I had not heard from her in nine days, when the most I had ever gone was one. Was she safe? Had the letter writers already told Sheikh Fahim of their suspicions? If so, I was already dead. And, perhaps, so was she.

On the tenth day, my phone rang.

“Did you do anything with her?” Aamer said immediately.

My stomach dropped. “What are you talking about?”

“Fatima. She’s here. In Riyadh. Her cousin, Fayed, sent the letters. Her father sent bodyguards to London. They brought her back here and put her on house arrest. She has a lock on the outside of her bedroom door and walks with a guard everywhere she goes, even inside the villa. Fayed found out she had pictures in her Paris apartment of four different men. One of them was you.”

“Me!”

“Kamal, did you do anything with her?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Kamal….” Aamer’s voice grew indulgent, conspiratorial.

“What?”

“How did Fatima get your picture?”

I sighed, pretending to break. “Okay. When you and I first went to the villa, Fatima left me her phone number. One day when I was in London I called her. We went out for coffee. At the café, she took a picture of me. I guess she kept it.”

“
Never
say that,” Aamer snapped. “
Never
tell anyone that she took your picture, or even that you met. Deny everything.”

“What am I supposed to say, then?”

“Say you don’t have any idea how she got your picture. Say she’s been living on her own, unsupervised. Say she’s got pictures of three other guys, and why don’t they ask them? Say she’s a woman and who can believe a woman?”

It was at a conference on January 11 at Calvary Chapel of Chino Hills that I first told three thousand people that one of Islam’s secret evils had come to America. Ten days earlier, the bodies of two sisters, Sarah and Amina Amin, seventeen and eighteen years old, had been found in Irving, Texas, shot full of holes. The girls were students at Lewisville High School. They shared a favorite color, pink. Sarah loved science and dreamed of a career in medicine. But their father, Yaser Abdel Said, an Egyptian immigrant, was angry that Sarah had gone out with a non-Muslim boy. At one point, the girls’ mother, fearing her husband would harm the girls, took them and fled. But on New Year’s Day, both sisters were found dead, abandoned in the cab their father had been driving.

That’s when I knew. Honor killing had come to America.

After Sheikh Fahim yanked Fatima back from Europe, Aamer convinced him that his daughter was not so much wayward as a silly dreamer with a rich fantasy life. What else could explain pictures of four different men? Surely the sheikh did not think his daughter a whore? And surely he did not think so devout a Muslim fighter as Kamal would jeopardize his mission—and the sheikh’s millions—for one woman, when it was well-known he had lots of women all over Europe. The sheikh believed Aamer, and I lived to see another day. So did Fatima.

Thirty years later, the Amin sisters did not. Since their deaths, I have read in American newspapers that honor killing is not a part of Islamic religious tradition. That is a lie. Honor killing is as much a part of the fabric of Islam as is the subjugation of women, their head-to-toe covering, keeping them uneducated, and denying them the right to vote. Koranic scholars teach that if a wife refuses to make herself beautiful for her husband, or if she refuses to have sex with him, to pray, or leaves the house without a good excuse, he should beat her.

Amnesty International reports that over 90 percent of married Muslim women in Pakistan report being “kicked, slapped, beaten or sexually abused when husbands were dissatisfied by their cooking or cleaning, or when the women had ‘failed’ to bear a child or had given birth to a girl instead of a boy.”
¹²

In Islam, a married man can take another wife and ostracize his first wife simply because he has tired of her. He may divorce the first wife with a simple verbal proclamation: “I divorce you.” He only has to say it, and the first wife is out in the street. But if the man chooses to keep the children, he may do so. The woman can fight him in court. But under Sharia law, the court normally views children as the product of the man’s seed. The woman was only the incubator.

In Muslim societies, even a woman who is raped is not a credible witness in the courts. It takes the testimony of four eyewitnesses to convict a man of rape. But only two men, the rapist and a friend, are sufficient to deny a rape, thereby condemning the woman to a public whipping for the sin of fornication. In Saudi Arabia and Iran, if the woman is found to be pregnant out of wedlock, she can be stoned to death.

This is Sharia law, the same law of which Omar Ahmad, founder of the “moderate” Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said this: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of Scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”

The Amin sisters are not the only victims of violent attempts in America to preserve Muslim family honor. In 2008, Afghanistani immigrant Waheed Allah Mohammad repeatedly stabbed his younger sis
ter because she was a “bad Muslim girl.” Her offenses: wearing immodest clothing, visiting nightclubs, and planning to move to New York City.
¹³

Also in 2008, prosecutors charged Chaudry Rashid, a Pakistani immigrant living in an Atlanta suburb, with strangling his daughter, Sandeela Kanwal, to death with a bungee cord. Kanwal, a worker at Wal-Mart, had planned to end her arranged marriage of six years and had gotten involved with another man. Rashid was sitting in his driveway smoking a cigarette when police arrived to arrest him. He later told police he killed his daughter because adultery and divorce are offenses against Islam.

In seven months’ time, three Muslim men in America attacked or killed women for religious reasons. And yet some reporters have insisted on trying to divorce honor killing from Islam. Why is this? Do we think that by softening this connection in the name of “multiculturalism,” we will somehow appear enlightened and that women’s lives will be spared?

In the name of Islam, I befriended messengers of political enlightenment—communists, Baathists, intellectual revolutionaries—from three countries. Then I killed them. Why do so many Americans think today’s Islamists, now teeming through their cities and actively plotting against them every day, will treat them any differently?

Police believe Yaser Abdel Said did not treat his own daughters any differently than I treated those I killed. He has not been seen since the January 2008 killings and is wanted in Texas for murder. Police believe he is armed. I believe he may be hiding with Muslim sympathizers who consider the killings a righteous act.

1

In 1980, I flew from London to Riyadh to see Sheikh Fahim. Not only was it time to replenish PLO war chests, but for many months I had been monitoring the escalation of a savage attack on Islam. The Soviets were murdering our Muslim brothers and sisters in Afghanistan. I was hoping the sheikh would commit funds to the battle.

I had always hated the Communists. Unfailingly, they behaved as treacherous vipers, and it would prove no different in Afghanistan. In 1978, they took over the country when the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) staged a coup commanded by a U.S.-educated former Afghan schoolteacher named Hafizullah Amin.

Amin and the PDPA ousted the regime of Mohammed Daoud and installed as president Nur Mohammad Taraki, who immediately began to uproot the country’s centuries of Islamic law and tradition and replace it with Marxist-Leninist “reforms.” The changes sparked rebellion among the village
mullahs
and tribal leaders who wished to maintain the old ways. Many Afghan traditionalists, intellectuals, and religious leaders fled to Pakistan, while others waged open rebellion across most of the country. The Afghan government, which by then was receiving assistance from hundreds of Soviet “military advisers,” executed villagers by the thousands—“political prisoners,” they called them.

From London, I watched these developments, outraged at the mur
der of my Muslim brothers and sisters. By July 1978, Taraki’s requests for Soviet advisers had turned to requests for regiments including rifle divisions and an airborne unit. Slowly, a Soviet presence built in Afghanistan.

But Taraki was behind, history later revealed: the Americans had already authorized CIA paramilitary forces to aid the tribal rebels. As events unfolded, I had no idea I would meet some of these American operatives.

In October 1978, the Nuristani tribes fought back violently against Taraki’s reforms. In March 1979, Afghan rebels in Herat killed ten Afghan soldiers. Taraki’s Air Force struck back, killing twenty-four thousand people in the city of Herat in a massive airstrike. Soon, villages around the major cities—Kabul, Kandahar, and elsewhere—began emptying themselves of young men who joined several insurgent factions, eventually forming an uneasily allied
mujahadeen
. Four months later, the Americans began arming and training the
mujahadeen.

That December, I watched the news as Soviet ground forces invaded Afghanistan. Within a month, they had an established force of one hundred thousand, including eighteen hundred tanks, eighty thousand soldiers, and squadrons of bombers and helicopters. The Afghan government, now led by Hafizullah Amin (who, it is rumored, had Taraki suffocated in his bed with a pillow), hoped the Soviet presence would quell rebellion. Instead, the Afghan tribes rose up in defense of their traditions and in defense of Islam. But even with aid from the Americans, then ultimately the Chinese, Soviet firepower outmatched the
mujahadeen
and thousands of Afghan rebels died in the withering fire of Russian choppers and bombers.

By then, I was a familiar face at Sheikh Fahim’s villa, and the guards smiled as they waved me through the front gates in early 1980. The sheikh came to meet me in the same den where we had our first encounter, having swallowed the lie that I had not been sleeping with his daughter. I bent to kiss his ring, and he embraced me like a son.

When we had settled into his fancy sofas, Sheikh Fahim leaned forward to pluck a slice of apricot from a silver platter of dried fruits that sat on the table between us. I was surprised when he brought up Afghanistan before I did.

“If we don’t do something swiftly, Muslims will lose Afghanistan because the Americans will defeat the Soviets there,” he said, popping the orange circle into his mouth. “Then we will spend years trying to deliver Afghanistan from the hands of the Americans.”

I gazed out the window at the sheikh’s garden paradise, thinking. How could we help the Afghans? The
mujahadeen
were already fierce fighters: from the Soviets they had captured caches of RPGs and AK–47s to replace the World War II bolt-action rifles they had been using. Still, the weapons were not enough to battle bombers and tanks; they needed more. The Russians had always been our biggest supplier, but now they were the enemy.

I turned to Sheikh Fahim and shared these thoughts.

“What about the Chinese?” he said.

“Perhaps, but it would be expensive.”

“Kamal, as you know by now, money is not a problem.”

By this time, the sheikh was making direct deposits into a numbered account maintained by the PLO. I left that day with the promise he would pour in seven hundred thousand dollars and boarded a flight for Lebanon. Although I had not seen him in nearly two years, I knew I needed to speak with Abu Yousef.

It would have been the perfect time to stop in and see my mother, whom I missed very much. But I had not seen my father since leaving for Saudi Arabia, and I did not want to see him now. As my status with the PLO grew during the war, he had basked in reflected glory, bragging about me to anyone in the neighborhood who would listen. And the more he did that, the more I grew to resent him. My father loved me not for who I was, not because I was his son, but only because I made him look good. So I stayed away.

I met Abu Yousef in his office at Sabra, the same one where he had dressed me up in a scarf and beret so many years before. He grabbed me in a bear hug.
“Yah ibny!”
he cried.

To my eyes, Abu Yousef had not changed, except perhaps for a sprinkling of gray in his moustache. Quickly, we caught up on our personal lives—he had a new grandson, he said—then got to the business at hand.

“I have separate intelligence both from the PLO and the Muslim
Brotherhood that the Syrians have a cache of SA–7 rockets stored in a weapons depot in the northern city of Aleppo, or Halab,” Abu Yousef said.

“How many rockets?” I said.

“About three hundred.”

Calculating that the sheikh’s money would be enough to buy them all, I told Abu Yousef of Sheikh Fahim’s gigantic deposit.

He chuckled, shaking his head in a slight reproach. “Kamal, these are Syrians. I would not give a Syrian a
kroosh
for his hummus when I can steal his food from his mouth and pay nothing. The Muslim Brotherhood intelligence was able to provide us the depot hours of operation, the guard shifts, and details on all security procedures. We will save Sheikh Fahim’s money for something else.”

I laughed along with Abu Yousef at my lapse into thinking ethically about Syrians. It was very good to see him.

2

Stealing SA–7s (we called them SAMs) from Hafez al-Assad would be like stealing rats from the mouth of a cobra. The PLO could have done it alone. But when stealing from a cobra, it is sometimes wise to enlist the help of a crocodile.

I had long known a man named Abu Tawfiq, the bodyguard of the ambassador from Iraq. Abu Tawfiq was famous for saving his boss from at least two assassination attempts, one during the Lebanese civil war. Now his country had a new president, Saddam Hussein, a man who had long supported the Palestinian cause. I arranged a meeting between Abu Tawfiq, Abu Yousef, and myself. That led to a meeting at the Iraqi embassy with the ambassador where we shared the intelligence on the Syrian rockets and posed a question: would Saddam like to help the PLO embarrass al-Assad, his hated rival?

The answer returned to us swiftly: yes.

Saddam, who had since the early 1960s consolidated his power in Iraq, had SAM missiles of his own he could have given to help the Afghans. But he agreed to involve his intelligence forces for the sheer joy of mocking al-Assad.

A week later, posing as tourists, a unit of
fedayeen
rumbled into Syria, through the port city of Tartuse to Halab, in two buses with storage compartments concealed under false floors. Two kinds of conspirators met us in Halab: Saddam’s intelligence agents and Syrian soldiers who, as secret members of the Muslim Brotherhood, had agreed to betray al-Assad and admit us to the weapons depot.

When we rolled up to the depot, the Iraqi agents subdued the Syrian guards who were loyal to al-Assad, while pretending to force the Brotherhood Syrians to give the
fedayeen
access to the SA–7s. As we loaded the rockets onto the buses, the Iraqi agents shot and injured the Brotherhood Syrians so that it would appear to al-Assad that they had put up a fight. Then we headed for the Iraqi border with three hundred rockets for the Afghans.

The PLO had not used SAMs before, but the Iraqis had. Once in Iraq, we trained for two days at an air base deep in the scorching desert. On the second day I watched a convoy of military vehicles roar onto a ramp area near a warehouse about one hundred meters away from the range area where we were training. A man wearing a khaki uniform, black beret, and sunglasses alighted from the rear of a Jeep and walked to the edge of the tarmac, an entourage trailing out behind him like ladies-in-waiting. The man in the beret held out his right hand. An aide put a pair of binoculars in it, and the man aimed his eyes at us.

“It is Saddam! He is looking at you!” the Iraqi trainers told us reverently. “Wave at him! Show him you are grateful!”

I had heard stories about Saddam Hussein. That he would toss a man into a torture chamber simply for not smiling correctly. I was not afraid to die, but I did not want to die in Iraq, the prisoner of a sadist. So when Saddam Hussein aimed his binoculars my way, I grinned and waved wildly, jumping up and down like a trained monkey.

Among Muslim warriors, the saying goes, “Me and my brother against my enemy.” Saddam was a staunch Sunni brother who hated the Syrians and the Shia as much as we did. Still, on this mission, we knew
we were in bed with real evil. Every one of us was glad when we loaded the SAMs on a Saudi cargo ship bound for Pakistan and left the crocodile behind.

3

Five of us went into Afghanistan. One was a Palestinian named Aassun. He was older than I, in his mid-twenties, and very good with explosives. Tall and slim with curly hair bleached gold by the sun, Aassun could also make anything out of anything. He was like an ancestor to the American television character MacGyver. Zeid, a light-skinned Lebanese with blue eyes, was an intellectual who devoured books the way other men eat meals. He understood Islam inside and out and fully embraced
jihad
as the ultimate aim of the teaching of the Koran and the
hadith.
Zeid was from an upper-middle-class family who used some of their money to finance his zealot adventures. His specialty was an ironic sort of factional diplomacy. He knew enough about the quirks of each rebel group to persuade them to lay down their differences—and their guns—long enough to come to the bargaining table. Two other young Lebanese fighters, Samir and Hassan, also went with us.

The Soviets were murdering our brothers and sisters by the thousands. We went to help the
mujahadeen
repel the Communist invaders. But as they say, war makes strange bedfellows. We loved the idea that the hated Americans were on our side in this war, though for different reasons, and that the Saudis, whom we also hated, were financing our operation.

We were not the only Muslim group to lend assistance to the Afghan
mujahadeen
. Hezb-e-Islamie-i-Gulbuddin, a radical Islamist party that recruited from Muslim religious schools, helped the Afghans, bolstered by aid from the United States and Pakistan. Another Islamist group, Jamiat-i-Islami, infiltrated northern Afghanistan from Pakistan. The Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan, which promoted
jihad
among Arab youth, was funded by Saudi Wahhabists. Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a radical university professor who had been in Saudi at the same time as I, even issued a
fatwa
, or religious decree: “Defense of the Muslim Lands, the First Obligation after Faith.” In this document, Azzam declared that, like the Palestinian struggle I had known all my life, the Afghan rebellion was a
jihad
that required all Muslims to rise up and kill foreign occupiers. Saudi’s grand mufti, Abd al-Aziz Bin Bazz, agreed with the edict. Now, my friend Sheikh Fahim had no need to keep his contributions secret.

For us, the PLO, Saddam Hussein, and the Muslim Brotherhood provided logistical aid. The Syrians (against their will, of course) provided our main weapons. And Sheikh Fahim had lined the purse of a rogue Pakistani general named Hafiz, who agreed to provide us with safe passage from the Turbat region of his country through the mountains of Afghanistan.

When our ship pulled in from Iraq, the Pakistani convoy was waiting near the wharf. Using a small forklift, the ship’s crew loaded the drab olive crates into a pair of Russian-made trucks—ironic, since we meant to go blow up some Russians. Our convoy of trucks and Jeeps rumbled through the ancient wasteland of Turbat, across the Afghanistan border and up into the arid mountains that would lead us to Kandahar. The climb up the mountain roads was treacherous. The trucks were wide and the trails narrow. Our tires bounced dangerously close to the rim of plunging gorges. Many times, the driver came to a complete stop on a steep grade, shifted into the lowest gear, and still could barely get the truck moving again.

Finally, the skinny roads narrowed to what could be called no more than goat paths. At that point, the Pakistanis handed us off to a band of Pashtuns, the dominant Sunni tribe in Afghanistan. The Pakistanis helped us move the rockets from the trucks to mules the Pashtuns had brought. The Pashtuns were mostly farmers and goatherds, but the Soviets had forced many of them to become guerrillas as well. Still, with their wild beards, flowing pants, and tunics, they looked fierce and had a reputation for being experts with knives.

The Pashtuns had brought with them nearly twenty mules and donkeys, the pack animals they still used to transport fruits, grains, and
produce to market. But since the beginning of the war, the tribes had begun using them to carry a different kind of cargo—weapons. Aassun and Zeid climbed into the back of a truck and began cracking open the green crates. Inside were smaller boxes, each containing four rockets. With expert speed, the Pashtuns wrapped each rocket box in thick canvas and secured the bundle with rope. They then placed each box in an empty canvas sack, lashing two sacks to each animal so that they hung down, one on each side, secured across the creature’s back by canvas straps. To conceal the swaddled rockets, the tribesmen placed in some of the canvas bags large cloth sacks labeled
roz
—rice. Other bags they stuffed with blankets and hay, feed for the donkeys and mules. All this was designed to fool the Soviets, who often buzzed legitimate mule trains in search of
mujahadeen.