“Would you work with me on this?” he asked.
I was close to tears. After all I’d been through with the German media, here was a Washington Post reporter asking if I would work with him on a story. I’d been burned before. During my time in Hamburg, I’d seen how some reporters would press Arab students, using incriminating photos of them with the September 11 hijackers and telling them the photos would be printed if they didn’t agree to an interview. I was cautious about working with Peter. “Would it include blackmailing Arab students?” I asked.
“We don’t do that,” he told me. “You have to follow the ethical principles of the paper.” He explained that we always told people who we were working for. We couldn’t blackmail sources. This was the beginning of a new path into the world of journalism, one I’d always dreamed about.
For this new assignment I had to go back to al-Quds. I wanted to know if this was a place people could go into and come out as terrorists. I wanted to know what was taught there. Where in my religion did it say that Muslims had a right to kill innocent people?
I returned to Hamburg, speaking with young men who had known the September 11 pilots, going to the places they had gone, reading the same strict interpretations of the Koran and books about how a Muslim should behave in the West that they had read. I no longer felt nervous or out of place on Steindamm.
I learned how Atta and his group operated and how they were influenced by Bosnian and Afghan war veterans who were affiliated with Al Qaeda. I learned how their plot had unfolded here in plain view.
On September 11, 2002, I entered the world of American journalism as a named contributor on a long piece in the Washington Post headlined “Hamburg’s Cauldron of Terror.” After what felt like a long journey, I had, in a sense, arrived. But I had much farther to go.
*
ONE COLD FALL day later that year, I joined a crowd of journalists from around the world standing in line outside a courthouse in Hamburg. We had been told to arrive four hours early for the chance to score a press pass to cover the trial of the first man accused of direct involvement in the September 11 attacks: Mounir el-Motassadeq, a twenty-eight-year-old Moroccan student in Hamburg who had been a friend of Mohamed Atta’s and a signatory to his will. Prosecutors said that Motassadeq was a moneyman for the Hamburg cell, paying rent and utility bills for a hijacker named Marwan al-Shehhi, and sending money to him in America. Motassadeq was charged with more than three thousand counts of being an accessory to murder and belonging to a terrorist organization. He said he had no prior knowledge of the plot. If convicted, he could spend up to fifteen years in prison.
After the September 11 anniversary story, the Washington Post had put me on contract. I also began to take intensive English-language classes, so I could contribute not only as a researcher but also as a writer. As one of my first tasks for the Post, Peter Finn sent me to get our accreditation to the Motassadeq trial. But as I stood freezing alongside correspondents, cameramen, and producers from Asia, the Arab world, and all the big American news organizations, I had no inkling that covering the Motassadeq trial would change my life. It would propel me into a war zone, and from there into the heart of jihadi networks, including the Islamic State.
The trial was supposed to last several months. Peter and I attended the first few sessions, then moved on to other stories. We returned to Hamburg some weeks later, when the relatives of several September 11 victims arrived to testify. Among the most impressive was Maureen Fanning, whose husband was a firefighter who had died at the World Trade Center. Fanning struck me as strong and determined. She had two autistic sons, and with her husband gone, she’d had to send the fourteen-year-old to live in a group home while she cared for the six-year-old, who could not read, write, or speak. Like the other victims’ relatives, she was still waiting to see what kind of support she would get from the U.S. government. It was her first time in Hamburg, and after hearing her testimony, some of us invited her out to dinner.
It was a cold, dark night in early winter. We chose a steak restaurant in the center of the city, a short walk from our hotel. I sat next to Peter and across from Fanning. Some of the reporters ordered beers, while I had my usual: apple juice and sparkling water. We ate and talked about the trial. After dinner, we ordered espresso, and Fanning began to open up. She said that while she blamed the terrorists for the attacks that had killed her husband, she also blamed the U.S. government, and even us, the press. “Nobody told us there were people out there who hated us so much,” she said. “Why didn’t we know this? Politicians didn’t tell us. You’re journalists, but you never told us.”
Then she looked straight at me. She knew from our previous conversations that I was of Arab descent. “Why do they hate us so much?” she asked. I stammered something about Western foreign policy being unpopular in the Arab world. It was an imprecise answer, and I think she sensed that I felt terribly awkward, but the moment was also meaningful for me. She was questioning whether we were doing our jobs, and I found her criticism legitimate. Why aren’t we doing a better job of telling people like Maureen Fanning what the jihadis think of them? I wondered. Back at the hotel after dinner, I asked Peter what he thought of the terrorism coverage in the United States before September 11. Of course people had written about Afghanistan when the Russians were there in the 1980s, he told me. Some even reported from the country when it was under Taliban rule. But few Western reporters had talked to members of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups or understood their views.
“But don’t you think it’s interesting?” I asked. “And isn’t it our job?”
“Of course. But who has access to these people? It’s very hard to get them to talk to us.”
I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking: Maybe we should try.