| |
Captured in the name of
terror
By
Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - In the
post-September 11, 2001 world, including the United
States-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the US
establishment, including the media, have presented a
picture that paints all anti-US moves as orchestrated or
inspired by al-Qaeda. However, there is another side to
the story.
Over the past nearly two years,
approximately 10,000 people, invariably branded as
al-Qaeda suspects, have been rounded up all over the
world in the name of the "war on terror". The most high
profile of these are being held at the US base at
Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Many of those arrested
have been described as exceedingly dangerous, although
there have been some obvious mistakes, such as an aging,
toothless man from Afghanistan who was eventually set
free.
Clearly, it is in the interests of the
world's intelligence communities to talk up their
captures, although some of the descriptions of detainees
could have come right out of 1,001 Arabian
Nights.
Asia Times Online spoke to a
Pakistani field official associated with an intelligence
agency who has personally handled the arrest of 10 Arabs
in Karachi. "I will tell you the modus operandi. For
instance, once the FBI [US Federal Bureau of Investigation]
gives us a mobile number we track conversations,
during which we learn the whereabouts of the
callers. Then eventually we make a raid. That's how we
arrested the first alleged al-Qaeda operator in Karachi,
whose last name was Alavi. He was arrested from the
posh district of Clifton, Karachi. At the time of the
raid he was sleeping, and when we arrested him he did
not have a weapon."
The officer claims that in
most cases the people they were pointed to by the FBI
had simply fled from Afghanistan en route to their home
countries, but they were arrested and branded as
dangerous al-Qaeda operators set on making Pakistan
their "playing field for terror".
"Both US and
Pakistani officials have tried their level best to
portray them as dangerous as possible to accredit
themselves as a success in the US-led 'war on terror'
and to get promotion and rewards," the field officer
said.
Such practices, it appears, are not
restricted to Pakistan, as this correspondent found out
on a recent visit to Sulaimaniya in northern Kurdish
Iraq, where there have been several arrests of al-Qaeda
suspects.
Ansar al-Islam, or the Supporters of
Islam, is a staunchly anti-American, Islamist group
based in this region. Its leader, Mullah Krekar, who has
spent some time in political asylum in Norway, visited
Afghanistan during the time of the Taliban government in
the late 1990s. This helped to brand Ansar al-Islam as
having al-Qaeda connections.
After the Taliban
fell in Kabul in late 2001, Arab Afghans who had been
living in the country for some years and who were not
necessarily associated with al-Qaeda, fled the country
for their home countries. The natural route was via Iran
and northern Iraq.
According to the director
general of intelligence and security of the Iraqi
Kurdish Region (Asaish), Dana Ahmed Majeed, a former
representative of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK
), one of two leading Iraqi Kurdish parties, the
majority of those Afghan Arabs arrested in the region
were seized after the US-led attack on Afghanistan and
before the fall of Baghdad.
Dana would not give
the exact number of detainees, but independent sources
in the Kurdish region put the number at 18.
This
correspondent interviewed three of these, in the
presence of a Kurdish official and an interpreter. The
interviews offer different perspectives on the present
war between the US and Islamists, rather than the single
one propagated by the US establishment.
Before
the interviews, this correspondent was asked whether he
wanted the prisoners to attend with handcuffs, or
without. After being assured that the captives were
harmless, they were presented separately with unfettered
hands.
Haqi Ismail, 33, is tall
and intelligent, with a slightly care-free attitude.
He sports a small beard, but his head has been shaved
since his arrival in jail. He lights a cigarette, and
answers questions freely.
He comes from the
Iraqi city of Mosul in the north, where he was studying
in a technical college, besides working at his father's
printing press, where he read Islamic literature and
decided to leave secular Iraq and live in an Islamic
state. He refused to admit any link with any Islamic
organization. Haqi left his education half way through
in the mid-1990s. He stayed in Jordan for some time,
then went to Iran and from there to Afghanistan in 2000.
When the Taliban fell, he fled again to Iran, where he
was arrested but released at the northern Iraqi border.
When he tried to enter Iraq, Kurdish security officials
arrested him, and he claims that he was made to admit
that he had once met an al-Qaeda operator named Abdul
Hadi al-Ansari in Kabul.
Asad Mohammed Khalid is
a nervous-looking young man with glasses, and after
entering the room he sat down in a submissive manner. He
is 23, and comes from the Syrian city of Halabm, where
he was a student at an Islamic college. Later, he was
admitted to the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi
Arabia. While there, the US-led attacks began on
Afghanistan, and in the spirit of helping a Muslim
country that had been invaded, this untrained and
previously non-violent youth traveled to Afghanistan
through Iran.
But by the time he reached the
Iran-Afghan border the Taliban had already fallen, so he
stayed in Iran, where he was caught by Iranian
authorities. They interrogated him for 45 days and
realized that he was not a terrorist but a sentimental
young man, so they allowed him to contact his family in
Syria. However, his family warned him that everyone knew
that he had gone off to fight in Afghanistan and the
government had blacklisted him, so they advised him to
go to northern Iraq and take refuge with Islamic groups.
The Iranian authorities, though, gave him the choice of
a country, and he opted for Jordan, so he was deported
there.
Jordanian authorities interrogated him
for two days and then let him go. He went to Iraq,
passed through Baghdad, and tried to enter Sulaimaniya,
but he was arrested at a check post in March 2002, one
year before the war on Iraq. Unlike Haqi, who
categorically said that he had "no regrets for whatever
I have done", Asad is full of regrets over his decision
to go to Afghanistan, and he pines for his eight sisters
and brothers.
Saad, 30, comes across as a
confused character. He belongs to a Shi'ite sect in
Baghdad. He speaks Urdu sufficiently well that the
security officer present intervened to ask that we
converse in English or Arabic so that he could
understand what we were discussing.
Kurdish
authorities themselves are a bit confused about Saad
because he is a Shi'ite, with whom al-Qaeda has few
links. But they did recover a card of the Hizbul
Mujahideen, a Kashmiri militant group associated with
the Jamaat-i-Islami, indicating that he is a member of
the organization.
Saad told this correspondent
that he is very fond of Indian movies, and he proved
this by reciting the names of many actors - big and
small. He said that he had always dreamed to going to
India, but in 1991 he went to Iran and stayed there
until 1993. Then he felt bored, so he crossed into
Turkmenistan and sought asylum, but was instead deported
to Iran. But Tehran refused to accept him and he was
dumped at the border with Afghanistan, so he had little
option but to cross over. There he met Ismail Khan, then
(and again now) the governor of Herat, who referred him
to Kabul to study in a college. In 1996, though, the
Taliban emerged and Saad fled, along with the Northern
Alliance leadership, to Mazar-i-Sharif in the north.
But the Taliban influence reached there also and he
was captured. They were surprised to find an Arab with
the Northern Alliance and they offered that Saad side
with them. He turned down the offer and was asked to
leave Afghanistan, so he went to the Pakistani city of
Peshawar, where he met Hizbul Mujahideen people, the largest
militant outfit operating in Jammu and Kashmir state
in India. He joined them, with the idea that the first
Indian soldier he encountered he would surrender to
and apply for asylum in India.
But Saad's
timing was bad. Immediately after September 11 Hizb
officials asked him to leave Pakistan as it would not be
feasible for Arabs to stay there. They left him at the
Pakistan-Iran border, from where he went to Iraq, ending
up at Sulaimaniya, where he was rounded up by Kurdish
security people who recovered the Hizbul Mujahideen
identity card. On the strength of this they branded him
as al-Qaeda. He was arrested in December 2001. "I have
no relations with any religion or sect, whether it is
Shi'ite or Sunni, but I belong to a Shi'ite family. Had
I been involved in any terrorist activity, would I have
kept an identity card of any organization?" he asks.
Saad, Haqi and Asad come from very different
backgrounds, countries and with different motivations,
and each set out to join teams in which they did not
fit. Now they share the same fate as al-Qaeda suspects,
and, if nothing else, they make up the numbers in the
"war on terror".
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information
on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
