I saw women beating themselves and crying—al-Hashimi’s cousins, aunts, and other relatives, wearing abayas. In the center of the room sat an old woman with long gray hair who seemed to be in a trance. She cried and screamed, pulled her hair, and beat her chest. Her undershirt had fallen off, and her skin was red from the impact of her fists. It was as if she were trying to beat out the pain. I knew that this mourning ritual was part of Shia tradition, but I’d never seen it up close before. “That is Aquila’s mother,” a young woman told me. Then she asked who I was. “You can’t be here,” she said after I told her. “This is only for the family.” I apologized and left quickly.
As I climbed numbly into the car, it occurred to me that for the second time in Iraq, I’d come too late. When they’d taken the former diplomat al-Ani, I’d been convinced that someone wanted to stop me from getting the truth. I’d also felt responsible: maybe someone had been listening to our conversation, and that was why he’d disappeared. Either way, I’d never been able to write about what he told me. The people who wanted to silence him had won.
With al-Hashimi’s death, they had won again, but this time it felt even worse. As we drove back to the hotel, I began to tremble. I had a very bad feeling that we in the West were destroying the structure of a country that had not been a democracy but that had offered a place to a woman like al-Hashimi, a Shia, who was able to study and enter politics. Maybe it wasn’t a system we liked, but we, the decision makers, were now destroying it and destroying all those people, intelligent people like her who came from diverse backgrounds and who should have had a role in the future of their country. I felt that her killing was another step toward disaster.
I couldn’t get the image of al-Hashimi’s mother out of my head. She reminded me of my grandmother in Morocco. The noise of the beating, of the moment when her fists hit her chest, echoed in my head. I couldn’t feel her pain, but I could feel anger that we had let this happen. In the car, the sound of the beating stayed in my head, and the anger knotted my stomach. I leaned my head against the car window and cried.
4
A Call from Khaled el-Masri
Germany and Algeria, 2004–6
Iraq changed me. When I returned home to Frankfurt toward the end of 2003, I carried with me the sound of bombings, the smell of burned flesh, and the screaming of men and women looking for their relatives. On New Year’s Eve, I refused to join my family and visiting friends on the balcony to watch fireworks because the sound reminded me too much of exploding bombs.
I didn’t feel like celebrating what had happened the previous year or what lay ahead. The lines of hatred between Sunni and Shia were deepening, the war and the occupation of Iraq had become a great public relations opportunity for Al Qaeda, and the murderous behavior of some of the Shia militias in Iraq depressed me. Within a few months, the world would learn of U.S. soldiers torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere through a trove of terrifyingly casual snapshots captured by soldiers who seemed to think they were on vacation in an exotic land where morality and human decency didn’t exist. These scandals reinforced my sense that the West, particularly the United States, had ceded the moral high ground it had once so proudly occupied and was now operating with impunity in what its leaders called “the shadows.”
“People must know, they must understand, that the war in Iraq will result in more hatred, more threats against Americans and Europeans,” I told Lothar Brock, my international relations professor, during lunch at the university canteen.
“You must heal,” he said, with concern in his eyes. “Don’t go back to war zones. I’m sure there are enough stories to follow outside of Iraq.” He urged me to devote more time to my studies.
In 2004, I left the Washington Post to work for the New York Times’s investigative unit. Again, I was on contract, and I was also allowed to work for ZDF, a German public broadcaster that was one of the biggest TV channels in Europe. I was entering an important phase at the university, and my professors were putting extra emphasis on homework and finals. Soon I would begin work on my thesis, the final step before receiving my degree.
Brock, who was also my thesis adviser, insisted that I focus on a topic unrelated to terrorism. He wanted me to write about the water shortage in the Middle East. He suggested I focus on Jordan, where Prince Hassan bin Talal, the brother of the late King Hussein, was deeply involved in water security issues.
I tried to concentrate on my classes and research, but I was still closely following the news from Iraq and becoming increasingly interested in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and his network. Between reading chapters in my academic books, I monitored the news from the Middle East, switching among Al Jazeera, CNN, and the BBC.
One afternoon I received a call on my cell from a number I didn’t recognize. I picked up and heard a low, shaky voice speaking in Arabic: “Are you the journalist Souad Mekhennet?”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“My name is Khaled el-Masri, and I was kidnapped by the CIA.”
I moved the phone away from my ear and looked at the number again. It must be some crank, I thought. “Excuse me? I don’t understand. Who gave you my number?”
He named a source of mine in Germany, an older man who was under investigation for ties to terrorism. Then his story tumbled out, incoherently at first: “I was on my way to Macedonia. They arrested me. They took me on a flight to Afghanistan. I was tortured.”
“Don’t say these things on the phone,” I told him. “Listen, Mr. el-Masri, where are you? Can I call you back? I think it’s better if we meet in person.”
I told him to buy a new phone, along with a prepaid SIM card, and call me back so we could set an appointment. In those days, you could still buy a prepaid SIM card in Germany without having to register it under your name. “They” had taken everything he had, he said, but he would find a way to get a new phone and a prepaid card so that we could set an appointment. He began to cry. “My family’s gone,” he said between sobs. “Did they do something to my family?”
I had no idea if el-Masri was for real, but I wanted to meet with him in person. I called my editor in New York, Matthew Purdy. He was skeptical. “These are big accusations,” he said.
I agreed, but I convinced him to send me to Ulm, a city of about 120,000 in southern Germany, where el-Masri lived. Perhaps because I was still relatively new and untested at the Times, Matt sent another reporter along with me. We met el-Masri at a train station coffee shop. His dark shoulder-length hair was streaked with gray, and his hazel eyes were bloodshot and ringed with dark circles. We sat down and ordered coffee.
He asked if we would mind him smoking. “I’m a little nervous,” he said.