Author: Isabel Vincent
Publication: National Post
Date: December 28, 2002
URL: http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?id={35363D34-2294-4F73-96E9-7C568725623E}
Introduction: Omar Khadr: from Toronto's
suburbs to bin Laden's army: 'Omar was always there for us,' says sister
of teenager accused of killing U.S. soldier
Omar al Khadr worshipped Allah and
Tintin. Even after he hit puberty and discovered American action films
and Nintendo, Omar, a conscientious Islamic student, still loved to quote
from the adventures of the Belgian cartoon reporter, which he seemed to
know by heart.
"Billions of blue blistering barnacles,"
he used to say, tripping over the words as he pretended to be the curmudgeonly
Captain Haddock -- a comic routine that was guaranteed to send his five
brothers and sisters into paroxysms of giggles whenever the family was
in the midst of a crisis.
For the Khadr household, crises
seemed to happen with chilling frequency. There was the time their father
stepped on a land mine in Afghanistan and nearly died, and the awful months
in the mid-1990s when he was jailed and tortured by Pakistani and Egyptian
officials and went on a hunger strike to protest what he called his "unlawful"
confinement.
"Omar was always there for us,"
his older sister Zaynab told me. "If you weren't feeling well, he would
go out and get you a biscuit or a juice. Sometimes, out of nowhere, he
would say something from Tintin. 'Blistering barnacles' or 'thundering
typhoons.' And, no matter how we were feeling, we'd all start laughing."
Perhaps Omar imagined that his own
adventures were similar to Tintin's. Like Tintin, Omar spent much of his
time on the road, shuttling with his relief-worker parents between homes
in Toronto, where he was born and partly raised, Peshawar, a frontier city
in Pakistan where the family ran a camp for Afghan refugees, and assorted
cities and towns throughout Afghanistan, on sombre and sometimes secret
missions to save lives.
But the similarities end there.
Tintin's adventures never included embarking on a global jihad, or booby-trapping
a dusty stretch of road in Afghanistan with explosives, or killing an American
soldier. Omar Khadr, who turned 16 in a U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan
in September, is accused of doing all three.
Unlike John Walker Lindh, the young
Muslim convert from California who joined the Taliban and is now serving
a life sentence, Omar was encouraged to join the jihad against the United
States by members of his own family. His primary inspiration was his father,
Ahmed Sa'id Khadr, an Egyptian-born Canadian relief worker who is suspected
of being one of Osama bin Laden's key lieutenants and a high-ranking member
of the terrorist group Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
Omar's older brother Abdul Rahman
Khadr, 19, is also suspected of having ties to terrorists in Afghanistan
and has been in a Kabul jail for more than a year. He was captured last
November by Northern Alliance troops when they marched into the Afghan
capital and rounded up Taliban warriors and their Arab supporters. His
family, in both Canada and Pakistan, has received cryptic messages from
Abdul Rahman, pleading for thousands of dollars in "ransom" for his captors,
who have reportedly threatened to kill him.
Omar's situation also appears bleak.
Since July, when he was discovered by U.S. troops in a bombed-out compound
near the village of Ab Khail, in eastern Afghanistan, he has become one
of the youngest "persons under control," the term the U.S. administration
has coined to describe detained enemy combatants in Afghanistan. For the
time being, they have shipped Omar to a cell at Camp X-Ray on the Guantanamo
naval base, and are pondering whether to try him in a military court.
Omar's grandmother recently likened
the cage-like detention cells on the base to the Bastille. "I am not educated,
but I remember the stories about how they tortured people at that prison,"
a distraught Fatmah Elsamnah said. "They must be torturing Omar. How else
are they going to take information from a child?"
But there may be no need for torture.
"He's singing like a bird," one official close to the investigation said.
Military sources say the Canadian teenager has readily co-operated with
intelligence operatives who are trying to find out as much as they can
about the Khadr family, which they believe to be a sophisticated al- Qaeda
cell.
- - -
Omar Khadr stands accused of murder,
but many of his family, friends and former teachers say they just cannot
believe it. In dozens of interviews conducted over the past few months,
they described Omar as the kindest, gentlest and most dutiful of Ahmed
Khadr's six children.
"I used to tell my children, I want
you to be more like Omar," said Khadija Elsamnah, Omar's aunt, who lives
in a housing project in a Toronto suburb. "He had so much kindness in him.
He was such a good boy. There is no way that he killed someone."
His 23-year-old sister, Zaynab,
a twice-divorced single mother who lives in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad,
with her young daughter and two of her brothers, also describes Omar as
sweet and obedient. I contacted her about a month after the news broke
that Omar had been captured in Afghanistan. She told me she found out about
Omar's detention in an e-mail from her uncle Samir, who is a computer technician
in Toronto.
"When I read his e-mail I really
hoped that it was a lie," she said. Zaynab and I spoke every day for about
two weeks, and above the crackling of faulty international phone lines
I could hear a muezzin wailing the call to nightly prayer in the background
at the end of our conversations.
"The hardest thing is that we just
don't know anything," she told me.
Still, she was quick to defend her
brother, whom she called "a homey kind of kid" and very much unlike her
other brother, Abdul Rahman, who had clearly disappointed his strict Muslim
parents by shunning religious laws, swearing, lusting after film stars
and staying away from home. When Abdul Rahman was captured by the Northern
Alliance, Zaynab told me, no one in the family even realized he was missing.
"My father tried to put him in boarding
school, but Abdul Rahman would always run away," she said. "He was always
away, staying out all night, and only coming home once in a while to change
his clothes. We didn't really miss him."
But Omar was different, she says,
and during one of the many long conversations we had about her brother,
Zaynab insisted on reading to me from a letter sent to her by her father,
who after Sept. 11 went into hiding in "the rural areas" of Pakistan.
"Omar is our mother and our father,
our sister and our brother. He does everything for us. He cooks our meals
and does our laundry. Sometimes, I ask your mother, 'Are you sure he's
ours? He's too good to be ours.' "
But isn't it precisely this kind
of devotion and obedience that turns young Islamic radicals into committed
jihad warriors? Omar was brought up in an ultra-fundamentalist Islamic
household. He attended Islamic school in Toronto, and madrassahs, fundamentalist
boarding schools for boys, in Pakistan. Omar's father, a successful engineer,
was also a deeply religious Muslim who quit a high-paying job at a communications
firm in Canada in order to help the victims of the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes, Khadr père became a fugitive.
His assets were frozen and he appeared on wanted lists posted throughout
Afghanistan, accused of financing terrorist operations, most notably the
November, 1995, bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad that left
16 dead and dozens injured.
"It sounds as if we're dealing with
a youngster who went into the family business," said Vivian Rakoff, a psychiatrist
and professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. "Adolescence
is a time of separation from the certainty of family, and a time of rebellion.
But what he [Omar] is accused of doing stops being an act of rebellion
and becomes more like filial submission."
But while he was devoted to his
father, Omar was also devoted to the materialism that radical Muslims are
supposed to deplore. In fact, the gangly teenager with the close-cropped
curly brown hair is very much a product of the North American suburbs where
he was partly raised. He spent much of his childhood playing basketball,
eating potato chips and watching American action films. He loves Nintendo
and going out for Chinese food. His heroes are Tintin and Bruce Willis
in the Die Hard movies.
Eighteen-year-old Ibrahim Hindy
grew up with the Khadr boys in Toronto and played hockey with them at a
Scarborough mosque where his father, Ali Hindy, is the imam. When Ibrahim
went to visit the family in Peshawar, the boys spent most of their time
playing cricket and basketball in an alley near their home, hanging out
at Internet cafés and watching American films. However, whenever
their father was present, the Khadr boys bowed their heads in a show of
respect, and did not utter a word, Ibrahim said.
"I've never seen so many films in
my entire life," said Ibrahim, who spent a summer with the Khadrs in Peshawar
three years ago. "Every night they would want to watch five or six movies
back to back. They loved Die Hard. I can't remember how many times I had
to watch it."
According to Ibrahim, Omar had become
such an American movie junkie that when his worried father took away the
family television set, a desperate Omar went to the Peshawar black market
to buy a DVD hook-up for his computer, so that he could watch more films.
"Omar liked Peshawar, but he always
told me that he missed everything about North America: the junk food, American
TV, everything," said Ibrahim, who took along to Peshawar a carton of KitKat
chocolate bars that was quickly devoured by Omar and his brothers.
Ibrahim, who is tall and rather
earnest, told me he found it difficult to believe U.S. soldiers found Omar
holed up in an al-Qaeda arms depot in deepest Afghanistan, bent on the
destruction of the society he loved so much.
"He was always quiet; he never picked
fights with his brothers and sisters like other kids do. I don't think
he would go out and kill Americans. He loved everything about America."
But as the hijackers who planned
and executed the Sept. 11 strikes have shown, even radical fundamentalists
can love two disparate things at the same time. They can seek religious
certainty and yearn for earthly pleasures inherent in the culture they
are intent on destroying. Days before they flew their planes into the World
Trade Center, some of the hijackers were seen at roadside bars and strip
clubs, drinking American beer and eating junk food.
"There is no contradiction in liking
Nintendo and hating the society that produced it," said Leon Sloman, a
psychiatrist and honorary consultant at the Centre for Addiction and Mental
Health, in Toronto. "That's what makes religious groups particularly powerful,
because they believe that the world is imperfect and they are the only
ones who can change it. And sometimes the only way to deal with something
you are so utterly attracted to is through violent repudiation."
- - -
Omar Khadr was born in Toronto on
Sept. 19, 1986, and spent the first few years of his life at his maternal
grandparents' small, grey- brick bungalow on Khartoum Avenue, in Scarborough,
an unremarkable Toronto suburb of car dealerships, fast-food outlets and
strip malls crammed with halal butcher shops, Pakistani travel agencies
and hair salons that advertise glue-on, airbrushed fingernails with glitter
appliqué.
Mohammed and Fatmah Elsamnah, Omar's
grandparents, are Palestinian refugees who settled in Egypt and Saudi Arabia
before emigrating to Canada in 1973. They owned a small bakery in a strip
mall crammed with dollar stores and pawnbrokers on Eglinton Avenue East,
two blocks away from their home. Although they closed the bakery in 1996,
after the negative publicity surrounding their son-in-law Ahmed, who was
publicly accused of being a terrorist for the first time, some of their
old customers still fondly recall their steamy coconut buns and chewy round
loaves of yellow cornbread.
"I was sad to see them go," said
Fay Lawrence, a Jamaican immigrant and the owner of Fayvorite Hair Design,
which is tucked into a corner of the strip mall where the Elsamnah bakery
used to stand.
Although she could barely communicate
with Fatmah or Mohammed Elsamnah, who could speak little English, Ms. Lawrence
ended up babysitting many of their grandchildren on Saturdays in the summer
months. The children looked forward to visiting Ms. Lawrence, who would
cook a Jamaican feast of jerk chicken and play scratchy Peter Tosh and
Bob Marley records.
"I tried to teach them to dance,
but it was hopeless," she said with a smile. "You got the feeling that
these kids never listened to music, and had no idea what to do."
The Khadr children visited their
grandparents frequently in Scarborough, but by the early 1990s they were
already firmly established in Peshawar, an important frontier trading post
on the Khyber Pass. Once a fabled stop on the ancient Silk Road, by the
late 1980s Peshawar had become notorious as the centre for the sale of
heroin and antiques smuggled from Afghanistan. During the Soviet war in
Afghanistan, the city also became the regional headquarters for Osama bin
Laden and his fledgling al-Qaeda terrorist movement. At the time, bin Laden
and thousands of devout Muslims, most of them from the Middle East, descended
on Peshawar, where they launched their jihad against the Soviets.
Ahmed Khadr joined them in 1988
when he accepted a volunteer post as the regional director of a Canadian-Muslim
charity called Human Concern International. Authorities later claimed he
used the Ottawa-based organization as a front to funnel money for al- Qaeda,
a charge its board of directors vehemently denies.
The Khadr family lived in a large
compound that also doubled as the charity's offices in Peshawar, where
Ahmed Khadr was in charge of overseeing refugee camps and vocational schools
for the scores of children orphaned during the Soviet conflict, which ended
in 1989. Later, many of those orphans would swell the ranks of the Taliban,
the ultra-fundamentalist movement that took over Afghanistan in 1996. Many
remained loyal to the Khadr family, and helped Ahmed Khadr escape police
detection on numerous occasions. In the summer of 2001, Egyptian authorities
attempted to arrest Khadr, an Egyptian-born Canadian, and extradite him
to Egypt. Khadr escaped, thanks to well-placed contacts in the Taliban,
who spirited him across the border into Afghanistan.
Four years after the family moved
to Peshawar, Ahmed Khadr stepped on a land mine. He told family and friends
that the accident happened while he was inspecting a charity project near
Logar. Intelligence officials now believe he was actively engaged in combat
against local warlords in the civil war that erupted after Soviet troops
left the country.
Whatever the reasons for the accident,
Ahmed Khadr's wounds were so serious that when he returned to Peshawar
on a stretcher, Canadian authorities immediately evacuated him to Toronto,
where he spent nearly two years recovering.
Omar, who was seven years old at
the time of his father's accident, spent a great deal of time at his bedside.
Ali Rakie, a friend of the Khadr
family and a Lebanese-Canadian who owned a halal butcher shop in Scarborough
in the early 1990s, told me he once asked Omar to try to convince his father
to resettle in Canada.
"This little kid looked me straight
in the eye and said that he didn't really like Canada because life here
was too rushed, too stressed," said Mr. Rakie, who briefly employed Abdul
Rahman in his Scarborough butcher shop. "Omar was very mature for his age.
I remember that he had brought black honey from Pakistan to trade in the
Muslim community while he was in Toronto. I was amazed that he had learned
so well how to trade and survive at such a young age."
In Toronto, the Khadr family lived
in a kind of genteel poverty, surviving off donations from different Toronto-area
mosques while Ahmed recovered in local hospitals. At first, his wife, Maha
Elsamnah, and her six children crowded into the Elsamnah bungalow in Scarborough,
but they later moved into a modest flat in a dilapidated rooming house
on Emerson Avenue, in the city's west end -- a multi-ethnic, down-at-the-heels
neighbourhood where teenage Portuguese boys dress in baggy jeans and gang
colours and drive souped-up Honda Civics, blaring Eminem and Dr. Dre. The
rent on the Emerson Avenue flat was paid for by donations from the Muslim
community, which also helped the family buy cast-off furniture at the Salvation
Army. Mr. Rakie also convinced the Isna Islamic School in Toronto to waive
its fees, so that Omar, Zaynab, Abdul Rahman and their brother Abdullah
could continue their Islamic studies while their father recovered in hospital.
"Those kids were always behind the
other children because they had missed so much school," said Fariz Tayara,
a former Isna Islamic School bus driver, who drove the Khadr children to
the red- brick schoolhouse in a quiet, tree-lined Toronto suburb every
morning for nearly two years. "I remember that the math teacher had a huge
problem with them because they had travelled so much and never attended
regular school."
Again, Omar appears to have been
the exception. His 1993 report card is full of praise from his teachers,
especially for his efforts in Koranic and Islamic studies. Abdul Rahman's
report card from the same period includes this comment from his Islamic
studies teacher: "May Allah help him."
"Omar was very smart, very eager
and very polite," said Naimeh Rakie, Omar's Grade 1 Islamic studies teacher,
and Ali Rakie's wife. "Unlike the other children, he had already started
reading the Koran in Arabic when he was seven."
Aminah Hack, who went to school
with the Khadr children and described herself as Zaynab's best friend in
Toronto, says she was also struck by how mature they were. "A lot of us
at the school always tried to skip prayer, but they never did," said Ms.
Hack, who is now 21 and in her first year of a social-work degree. "There
was a sadness in their eyes. I guess it was because they were always so
worried about their father."
Ahmed Khadr recovered from his wounds,
but he was left partly disabled. He walked with difficulty, relying on
leg braces and a four-pointed cane. Although friends implored him to remain
in Canada, he uprooted his family once again and took up his old post in
Peshawar. The decision was to have a devastating impact on Omar.
Soon after returning to Pakistan,
Ahmed Khadr was arrested and tortured following the bombing of the Egyptian
embassy in Islamabad. Pakistani and Egyptian authorities suspected him
of arranging the financing for the terrorist operation, an event that exposed
his connections with Egyptian Islamic Jihad and its leader, Ayman al Zawahiri,
who planned the embassy blast.
Omar and his family were detained
by Pakistani police, who raided their home in Peshawar following the blast.
The family were eventually released, but his father, who had been in Afghanistan
at the time of the bombing, was arrested and detained for four months on
suspicion that he used his Canadian charity to funnel money to Zawahiri's
group. He had also tried to convince his eldest daughter, Zaynab, to marry
a Sudanese terrorist who bought one of the vehicles used in the suicide-bombing
of the embassy. The terrorist, Khalid Abdullah, was living in Ahmed Khadr's
house in Peshawar at the time of the attack.
"You can't imagine what it was like
to visit my poor father in jail," Zaynab said. "Omar, especially, was really
traumatized. Here was this poor disabled man, surrounded by hardened criminals.
It was really hard to take. For Omar, who was closest to my dad, it was
totally devastating."
Ahmed Khadr went on a hunger strike
to protest his innocence, and was transferred to an Islamabad hospital,
where Omar slept every night on the concrete floor underneath his bed.
Although he was eventually released when the Canadian government intervened
in the case, family friends say Omar was marked for life.
"That kid became radicalized," said
Aly Hindy, the imam at the Salaheddin mosque in Scarborough, where the
Khadrs worshipped when they lived in Toronto. "It's impossible to go through
the experiences he went through and not be affected by them."
When I asked the imam whether he
was shocked when he heard about Omar's capture in Afghanistan, he didn't
hesitate in his reply: "No, I can't say I was shocked," said Dr. Hindy,
a retired engineer and a pillar of the Muslim community in Toronto. "I
expected things like this to happen."
But could this dutiful, studious
and kind young man have committed murder? In our final conversation, I
posed that question to Zaynab, and her answer, after a long pause, surprised
me.
"Omar must have had a very good
reason if he did what people say he did," she said.
That reason may have been a combination
of devotion to his father and the fundamentalist cause that he embraced.
He may even have thought that he had embarked on a great adventure. But
in the heat of the moment, he probably did not stop to consider the repercussions
of his actions.
"In his eyes, it probably wasn't
murder," Dr. Rakoff, the psychiatrist, said. "By transforming the sinner,
the tyrant, into a depersonalized cipher, not an individual but a representative
of the tainted order, murder becomes easy, indeed, morally good, and a
necessary step toward redemption."
In Die Hard, Bruce Willis plays
a tough New York cop named John Maclane who unwittingly finds himself in
a Los Angeles office tower where German terrorists take some 30 executives
hostage on Christmas Eve.
The bad guys fire machine guns at
him, set fire to the building and block all the exits. To make matters
worse, the law-enforcement officials sent to save everyone bungle the job.
Singlehandedly, Maclane finds himself battling the terrorists and the security
forces. At the end of the film, he emerges, battle-scarred, to save the
hostages in time for Christmas.
Die Hard was Omar's favourite movie,
and it is hard not to wonder if some of its more dramatic scenes played
themselves out in his head as he lay in wait in the rubble of a mud-brick
compound in eastern Afghanistan. Like the hero in Die Hard, Omar and four
other jihad warriors who were barricaded inside the structure had decided
to take on more than 50 U.S. Special Forces soldiers. They fought a fierce
battle, and then, in the late afternoon of July 27, Omar threw a grenade
that exploded beside Sergeant 1st Class Christopher Speer, wounding him
in the head. The soldier later died of his injuries at a military hospital
in Germany.
Sergeant 1st Class Layne Morris
didn't expect to be engaged in a firefight that day. His unit received
a tip from an Afghan villager who told U.S. forces stationed at Khost that
al-Qaeda terrorists were holed up in a compound near the village of Ab
Khail. A team of Special Forces soldiers and a local Afghan militia set
out to investigate. While they were looking for weapons in the compound,
Sgt. Morris received a signal on a global-positioning device indicating
there might be another building in the area worth investigating. He set
off with five other soldiers and walked the 600 metres to an almost identical
compound, where, through the door hinge, he could see five heavily armed
Arab men sitting in the inner courtyard. The men ignored Sgt. Morris's
entreaties to open the door, and sat with their weapons conferring for
about 45 minutes, which was the amount of time it took for Sgt. Morris
to call in reinforcements.
When the backup troops arrived and
Pashtu translators began to negotiate with the men inside the compound,
they responded with grenades and bullets. Sgt. Morris was wounded in one
eye by a grenade and was evacuated by helicopter, but the battle went on
for more than four hours, with the five men refusing to give up even as
they were being bombed from overhead. When the shooting stopped, Sgt. Speer
and four other Special Forces soldiers were ordered to clear the compound
-- collect arms and intelligence. When Sgt. Speer and his fellow soldiers
entered the bombed-out compound, they weren't expecting to find anyone
alive and were caught off guard when Omar, who was wounded from the bombing,
and hiding between two mud-brick buildings, threw a grenade at the passing
soldiers.
"We were amazed that anyone could
still be alive in there," said Captain Mike Silver, who walked into the
bombed-out compound behind Sgt. Speer. "Within seconds, we had him [Omar]
pinpointed and we opened fire."
Omar, who had the beginnings of
a peach-fuzz beard on his chin, was covered in blood and dirt and lying
on the ground between two fallen pillars. His four comrades had died when
U.S. forces bombed the compound earlier in the afternoon. He had been lying
in wait, clutching a pistol and a grenade. He was surrounded by a cache
of arms that included grenades, ammunition and automatic weapons.
Within seconds of throwing the grenade
at Sgt. Speer, Omar took two shots in the chest and dropped his pistol.
When Capt. Silver approached him, Omar spoke in what struck the assembled
American soldiers as very good English, especially for someone they assumed
to be a jihad warrior from somewhere in the Middle East.
"Shoot me," Omar called out several
times. "Please, just shoot me."
While the army surgeon worked on
Omar's wounds, the other soldiers began to search the compound for evidence
of terrorist activities. Among the weapons and ammunition, the soldiers
found documents and training videos. In one video, Omar appears clutching
various weapons and burying explosives on a stretch of highway in Afghanistan.
Based on the information collected by the soldiers, U.S. military intelligence
concluded the compound was used as an al-Qaeda arms depot and jihad training
centre.
Although both Capt. Silver and Sgt.
Morris were surprised when they found out Omar was still a teenager, they
were adamant they had been dealing with a highly trained killer.
"There is no doubt in my mind that
the kid was training to kill Americans and members of the Afghan government,"
Sgt. Morris said. "He had so many opportunities to give himself up, but
he lay there in the rubble, waiting to kill an American. That's the last
thing he wanted to do on this Earth."
